 Welcome today. I'm so glad to have you join us with Mackie Ripi, and I will introduce him here in just a moment. Just a little background, you can find me, the blogs, all the free resources at JillCarnahan.com, and feel free to pop on there anytime for free resources, blogs, et cetera. Dr. Jill Health is the retail store if you want to purchase any products. And then finally, the YouTube channel with 70 plus hours of interviews with experts like Mackie here today, and this episode will be live there as well. I encourage you to go there, feel free to peruse and browse them, and they're all free. And if you want to subscribe, that way you won't miss any episodes. Okay, so now I will introduce, instead of being silent, my guest, Mackie Ripi, the co-founder of Beyond Protocols, an educational and mentoring community for functional medicine practitioners. Its mission is to transform medicine from medicine 1.0 to 2.0, and love that because so often we talk about medicine in this box and with the functional medicine lens, we have a large toolbox. We have more that we can do and looking at root cause, and we're gonna talk about some of that today. He's been practicing acupuncture for more than 30 years and was one of the first acupuncturists in the country to earn a master's degree in acupuncture. And Mackie and I connected through the Nutrogenomic Research Institute where he has taught and presented, and he formulates consumer and professional products and additionally serves as a medical advisor for Zona Health. So welcome, Mackie, so glad to have you here. And how I love to start is just, tell us a little bit about your personal story, your journey of how you got into acupuncture and functional medicine. Well, acupuncture is a funny story because I got started more than 30 years ago and I was still in college. In fact, when I first applied to the school, they said, please come back when you're a little bit older because you're too young. And I was a senior in college at the time. And they explained it saying, you're gonna be talking to old ladies about their hemorrhoids and you look like you just got out of high school. So we just, you need to mature a little bit. So long story short, I come back the next year they say, oh, hello again, you're still on the young side but if you stay an extra year, we'll let you in. And I said, no problem because I was absolutely committed to acupuncture. I didn't get my finances quite together. So fast forward another year, the third year and now the admissions board is saying, oh, it's you again. And they said, you can come in now. And by that time actually, I'd gotten married early. So maybe that was a little proof that I was a little bit mature and I'm still married. So maybe that was a good thing after all. So that's how I got into acupuncture school. How I got into it itself was complete accident. My father was a patient, had some material lying around the house and started reading it and just decided one afternoon, this is for me, I have to go study this. Wow. And yeah, this is back when you would say acupuncture and half the people would say, what's that? If you remember. Yeah, well, I bet it was the time when, because I was back in the day too where alternative medicine was the only term that was used. I never liked that because it was like, well, what is alternative to what, right? And I hated that term. And I really, really fought against that. In fact, when I was at Loyola Medical School, I was the first, we created an integrated medical club. Like it was the first of its kind in the medical allopathic school. So I remember way back then and being like, no, this is an alternative. It's like both and, right? Yes, my, the faculty and the staff at the school attempted to get complimentary as the word being used. But yeah, definitely not. Alternative stuck though. So we're kind of stuck with it. And then so fast forward, I'm doing my own podcast, Lime Ninja Radio for people with Lyme disease. And I come across Bob Miller. Somebody said, you have to go interview Bob Miller. So I interviewed Bob Miller. And he was the first nutritionist that I heard that sounded somewhat like a Chinese medicine practitioner because he talked about systems and not take this supplement for this genetic variant or this supplement for this condition. But you have to take in a wider view and look at the systems that are going on. So I fell in love with Bob and he at least wasn't repulsed by me. He took me under his wing a little bit. And we've been friends since then and I've helped him with some research and some supplements and we keep in touch pretty regularly. Yeah, fantastic. I love that. I love Bob Miller. He's been a guest more than anyone else on my show because he really loves to, I love his background of the electrical engineer kind of person that takes the system pathways and now applies it. Cause I love to think of things that way too. They're so complex. And I feel like the more we can go into personalized approaches, the better we are because really every single human being is his own entity and has his own set of risk factors, genetics, et cetera. And that's really medicine 2.0, isn't it? Yes, yes, yes, yes. I love it. Yeah, so tell us more, let's talk about BPA. What is it? Feel free to share a slide if you'd like, I think that's what it said on that. Leah, so let me pull up my slides here and I actually have to talk my way through it cause otherwise Zoom doesn't work. Yeah. Unless you talk to it. Yes, I get it. Alrighty, so there we go. So I have a little confession to make. We live on a farm. I love it. This is blueberry, the calf, and mom's dolphinium. So this is our newest calf on the farm and these are American milking Devons. Oh, beautiful. I grew up in a farm in Illinois so we didn't have the cattle, but I love, love, love that. Where are you at in the world? You said easy. We are in central New York. Okay, wow. We have the notoriety of being the wettest place in the country, more so than even Washington state. Wow. Yes, anyway. So I like to begin by saying, quoting, you can't go wrong quoting Elon, right? Yeah. And he talks about, you know, historical and the dinosaurs but we have risks today that the dinosaurs never thought of and really even our parents never thought of. For example, every two point seconds a new chemical is formulated. So a brand new chemical that's never been on the planet ever before. And that means since human beings have been mucking around with chemistry, there are 50 million chemicals that aren't natural floating around our environment. So the EPA's in charge of keeping track of these things, right, and the toxicity and doing studies about that. And about seven years ago, they got really serious about catching up, clearing the backlog and figuring out what was going on. And if they keep on their current pace in 300 years they will have cleared the backlog. So the bottom line is there's a lot of stuff out there that we don't know what's going on, right? And in addition, here's some more fun facts. Every 40 seconds, somebody has a heart attack. Wow. It's a scary statistic. About 18.2 millions people have cardiovascular disease. So what exactly is cardiovascular disease? You know, it's stroke, arrhythmias, coronary artery disease, heart attacks, heart failure, high blood pressure. You know, it's linked to Alzheimer's, metabox, and just the list goes on and on and on, right? So our hearts are telling us something. Our hearts are trying to send us a message. And I found this book a few years ago and it's terrifying. It is called Heart and Toxins. And it's about 600 pages of all the terrible things that toxicity can do to us through our heart and cardiovascular disease. And interestingly, they brought us some categories that you don't normally think about, right? We think about air pollution, especially with all the wildfires these days out west and blowing this way and making it hard to breathe for some people or some mat cell people really reactivating them even. We think about pesticides. I know you're big on mold personally and out in the world, but industrial chemicals. But do we think about military chemicals that much? Not really. Do we think of medications as toxic and harming our heart? Not all the time. Of course, things like chemotherapy, smoking, the obvious. And one of those chemicals is BPA. Yeah. And Mackie, I want to just mention really quick. So I'm breast cancer survivor 20 years ago, three drug chemotherapy. And I had a particular drug, Doxy Rubison class that is cardiotoxic 100%. And I literally was calculated, what's the maximum dose we can give her and not let her heart stop? Wow. So literally I got the maximum lifetime dose. I can never get that drug again because they just wanted to reach that threshold of the maximum dose without causing my heart to stop beating, literally. So I'm very well aware about toxic and people don't think about that. Many women who've had breast cancer or other cancers have had calculated doses of these drugs that are incredibly cardiotoxic. So I have to ask, how good was their calculation? How's your heart? Well, again, I know the functional medicine principles. So I actually have excellent complete ejection infection that's normal, no cardiovascular disease, but I've done so much work around recovering. Like I never regret using that drug or choosing it because it might have saved my life, but I feel like I've done 20 years of restoring health because of those toxicities. That's an awesome story. I think that's an awesome message as well is, especially with muscles, we can repair muscles, right? They can heal up. So this is a study from NIH and they did a survey and they tested urine and 93% of people, I think it was like seven years and older. So they surveyed about 2,500 people. So 93% of people had BPA in their urine. Now my question about that is, is the other 7% unable to excrete BPA? Not that 7% of us don't have it. I imagine everybody has some, right? So BPA has been linked to behavioral changes. You know, think of all the anxiety around these days, depression, cancer, infertility, it's an epidemic. We know infertility is diabetes, another epidemic, hypertension, another epidemic, PCOS, right? Polycystic ovarian syndrome, liver function problems, and of course heart disease. So BPA is a serious toxin, it's no joke. So where is it found? Primarily these days, it's receipts and canned foods. I don't think too many of us chew on eyeglasses, but also food containers, some of the older water bottles, feminine hygiene products, some of the dental sealants. And I think it's kind of like the rocket fuel. It's like once it's in the waste stream, it's in our water now, it's in our air, it's just, it's all around us. I don't know if we can ever suck these things out of the air, be great if we could do like a giant charcoal filter for the world, right? And get some of these things out of the environment. So for example, with soup cans, right? You don't think about soup, but the lining that prevents the can from rusting, that's BPA. That's got BPA in it. So if you have just one serving of soup, now I know some of you out there are probably more controlled than I am, but I always eat the entire can of soup. So I don't know if that's two or three servings, but anyway, just one serving of soup for five days in a row and your BPA being excreted goes up 1,000%. Wow. So that just tells you the levels of consumption and how you have to be careful. And you know, we think of something like tuna fish, right? And oh, the mercury in the tuna, we gotta be worried about that. We don't think about the BPA in the can. And I, you know, all the paper cups that we have now from Dunkin Donuts and everywhere else that are earth-friendly, they're lined with BPA as well. Cause otherwise it would just seep through the sides. So it's everywhere. So let's pause BPA. So that's a pretty good helicopter view of BPA. I wanna talk about a molecule called nitric oxide. Now I know, Dr. Chilt, that you know what nitric oxide is. So let me just briefly go over what it does. It was, it won the Nobel Prize about 25, 30 years ago and it was discovered to be the mysterious endothelial relaxing factor, right? And it was a mystery. They did not think it could be a gas cause they knew nitric oxide from air pollution but to think that the body was making a gas and using it to signal. And then they started studying it as like, oh my goodness, it's doing all these other things. So nitric oxide is a signaling molecule and primarily what it's known for is signaling smooth muscles. So those are our arteries, right? Our veins to relax. And that's what modulates blood pressure to a great extent is how flexible these are. Now, they can become diseased and hardened and that's another story too, but nitric oxide is related to that. It's a big part of our immune system. There's a lot of research going on with nitric oxide and COVID inhaling it. It seems to kill the virus early on and also prevent it from entering the cells through the ACE, the spike protein and the ACE receptor. So it's also involved with memory formation, with sleep. It's just, it's everywhere you look. One of my favorite things to do cause since I love this molecule is when I'm at a conference, like when you were speaking, when we were speaking together, pumps conference, I'll sit there with my laptop and somebody will bring up an interesting topic and I'll type whatever they mentioned like mold and nitric oxide. And there'll be 50 articles that pop up. Oh, fascinating. It's just involved with anything, everything. So there, lots of different ways our body makes nitric oxide. So this is my fun little way of introducing people to nitric oxide and the team of synthases that make it and also a couple extra pathways. So I'm just gonna go over this really quickly. Basically, there are three enzymes that make it in the body, but your body can also make it through your digestive system. The acid in your stomach turns nitrite into nitric oxide that then gets transported. And that's kind of like, I view that as a rescue system. So if your body's struggling, that's another way you can get it. We also make it when we're out in the sunshine, UVA rays. So not the B, the UVA rays. So the ones that burn us unfortunately also make nitric oxide. So maybe that's one reason why when people go retire down south, they feel better. Their body's making more nitric oxide, helps control their blood pressure. So exercise, there's some breathing exercises you can do to increase the body's natural production. But we're gonna focus on endothelial nitric oxide. And that is the synthase that primarily resides in endothelium. And that's just a fancy way of saying these sensory cells that line the inside of vessels. So the inside the arteries, inside veins, inside of lymph. So anywhere you think of things being blocked, so I know I'm sure with the toxicity, you talk about dry brushing and other ways to move lymph. If you're lacking in nitric oxide, the lymph's gonna be a little bit sluggish cause those lymph vessels are contracted. So it's something to think about. Okay, so, and then let's look at the enzyme itself. This is super complicated. Don't worry, I'm not gonna get into it. This is for my technical people. But just basically, this is the enzyme, how it's structured. It takes L-arginine, which is an amino acid and turns it into nitric oxide. That's like an hour lecture right there, but we're gonna just pass right over it. Now there's something called NOS uncoupling. And we're particularly again interested in endothelial NOS uncoupling. So again, normally, arginine to nitric oxide, however, in the uncoupling, that doesn't happen and instead oxygen gets an extra electron and it turns into something called super oxide. Now super oxide, super important because think about what's happening. Your body needs to make this nitric oxide in order to relax blood vessels, to keep your blood pressure low, to allow oxygen to get to the tissues where it needs to go. So if your blood vessels are tight, your brain's not getting enough oxygen, your muscles aren't getting enough oxygen, et cetera. So it's super, super important. So instead of making a nitric oxide molecule that's gonna relax, it's gonna create super oxide, but it's a double whammy because super oxide has a love affair with nitric oxide. And if you'll see on the left here, I forgot to put my big cursor on, so sorry, I'll move it around a little bit. Here's your nitric oxide molecule and here's your super oxide molecule. And Dr. Gill, you'll understand it's a rate limited reaction. So that basically means as much nitric oxide is made and as much super oxide is made, they will combine every single time, nothing will out-compete them to create peroxy nitrite, which is a major oxidant force, even more so than nitric oxide and super oxide. So we lost the nitric oxide because the enzymes shifted from making nitric oxide to super oxide, and then we lost a second molecule because it combined the super oxide created, combined with a free nitric oxide, it scavenged the nitric oxide to create super oxide. And this is why NOS uncoupling is a big deal. And this next study, so I hope you follow that along, this next study connects this all together and they fed poor little mice, BPA, just a little bit in their water, and sure enough, the little mice developed high blood pressure. And the mechanism is from the uncoupling of NOS, which I just went over. So I thought I'd show you the mechanism and then tell you the study of how that's happening. Exactly, and I have to ask a question really quick here because I have to be one of those super producers, the upper-regulated NOS enzymes, which means I make too much nitric oxide, but it sounds like that whole peroxy nitrite pathway could be the problem end of this, right? Is I probably make a ton of free radicals. It's possible. Okay. Do you know which synthase is your upper-regulated one? Multiple, we can consult Bob on that one. Okay, so he's very interested in that right now. And the thing to, we're gonna digress here a little bit for you, the nitric oxide and ethyl nitric oxide and neuronal nitric oxide are dependent on calcium influx into the cell. Got it. So they're like just little, they send out little puffs of nitric oxide, poof, and they have to reset before they do another one. So they're making nanomolar amounts of nitric oxide, just teeny tiny amounts in a neighborhood. The inducible nitric oxide, the immune system nitric oxide, the innate immune system nitric oxide produces a thousand times as much. So it's making micromolar amounts. It's not calcium dependent. It's like once it switched on, it's just cranking it. So you need to really take a look at those two as two separate mechanisms. They're almost different conditions completely. You can't compare its apples and oranges. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. It's important to know. Now, they're interrelated, but let's move on. All right, so what this studies essentially say is you have BPA and that's a BPA molecule. BPA itself increases the expression of angiotensin-2. And we all know that angiotensin-2 is involved with high blood pressure because a lot of you out there, I'm sure, have know somebody or are on an ACE-2 inhibitor. So BPA by itself increases the amount of enzyme that is transcribed from the genes in our cells. So 1.7 increase being exposed to BPA through water, right? They're not injecting it. They're actually just letting the mice shrink it. So the normal way we'd be exposed to it. There's a two and a half times increase in calcium-calmodulin-kinase-2 alpha. Now, that's a mouthful. All you need to know is it's an intermediary between the angiotensin and the nitric oxide. It's a controlling enzyme. It helps coordinate what's going on in the cell. And under oxidative stress, it tells the cell to make more endothelial nitric oxide synthases, the enzymes themselves. And so as a result of both the angiotensin and this cam-2, cam-k-2 alpha, there's a 8.7 increase in enos. So if you already have an up-regulation in endothelial nitric oxide, you have that multiplied even more. Now, normally you say, yay, more endothelial nitric oxide synthase. I'm making more nitric oxide, except if it's uncoupled, right? And then you're making the superoxide and you're actually then decreasing the amount of nitric oxide that's available. Your blood vessels aren't able to expand when your heart pumps harder, when your muscles need more oxygen. They stay tight. It's not a good thing. So again, that's what this study showed. There's more uncoupling. And to sum it all up, BPA causes less uncoupling. It raises your blood pressure. And as we all know, that eventually is part of the system that starts breaking down and causes cardiovascular disease. So I can pause there or I have one more study. It's up to you. Yeah, go ahead and share. Okay. Good. Doctor after my own heart. All right, this next study is, it's all, it's a theoretical study cause what they've done is they take mice. You can't do these studies on human. We're thinking, oh, these poor mice. We can't do this on humans cause it's ethically, you can't do it. You can't take somebody and just take away some of their genes and say, gee, I wonder what's going to happen. We do this with mice to learn what the genes are doing. So it is the poor mice, but at the same time, this is what we need to do. They took out all three of the nitric oxide synthases in these mice. And what they did initially, so this is kind of a confusing graph. Well, what you need to know is this is the age of the mice at the bottom up to 10 months. And I looked it up 10 months is about the equivalent of about a 40 year old in human years. So 10 months, 40 years old in humans. So this is a healthy mouse at 10 months. There's almost 100% survival rate of just the healthy mice, right? When they take away one of the nitric oxide synthases, either the endothelial, either the neuronal or the inducible, they start dying from heart disease. And that's what we begin to see at 10 months out. So that's at 40 years out. So think about how many people you know at the age of 40 who've died of heart disease. Not very many. There's the odd person, right? So that's how important that nitric oxide synthase is. So then they were expecting actually a little bit more problem with it. They said, that's interesting. Let's take away two of the enzymes. So they did the combinations to take away two. And again, at 10 months out, instead of 85, 90% surviving, now only about 60, 65, 70% of the mice survived at 10 years old. And then this last red line is where they took out all three of the nitric oxide synthases. So essentially with no nitric oxide, which is a totally artificial, it's just not gonna happen in real life. But that just tells you how important nitric oxide is. So when they knocked out all three enzymes, less than 20%, it's like 17% survived out to 10 months. Essentially they all died of heart disease. And this is what they did a little mouse autopsy. And on the left, what you see is a healthy heart, healthy mouse heart. And this little cutout is a nice little artery that's feeding the heart. And you can see how pristine, how clear it is. And this is a normal healthy mouse at 10 months. This is a 40 year old equivalent mouse. This is how our heart should look. On the right, this is the mouse that had the heart attack. And what you can see, they look for equivalent size artery. And you can see at the bottom, the blue is actually fibrosis, standing for fibrosis. And inside the artery, you can see all the additional smooth muscle cells that have grown in response to the cardiovascular disease. And this tiny little slit in the middle there is what's left for the blood to flow through. And this is what happens to us when we don't have enough nitric oxide. Our vessels become diseased. The body tries to repair them the best that they can. And if this continues over time, the artery closes off, not because cholesterol is clogging it so to speak, although that's part of the equation. It's the body's desperate attempt to repair itself. That's the problem. So that's why it's so important to get the root cause. So if you've got BPA exposure, a lot of it, let's, for whatever reason, say you love tuna fish or soup, Procresso, lentil soup, whatever. And you're constantly ingesting this. And even if you take a cholesterol med and bring your cholesterol, you know, I don't know what your feelings are personally of cholesterol. I didn't know what it was. But I've had people come in and say, wow, my cholesterol is 150 and say, oh my God, are you sure you want to have it that low? Oh yeah, there's a spectrum. I mean, yeah, there's a high spectrum with inflammation, but it's inflammation that drives it, right? Yeah. And the LDL particle size. But then on the lower end, I often, especially young people, I'm like, you need this to make your brain and your hormones. And so yeah, there's a happy medium, right? So even if you get your cholesterol low, what's driving this whole phenomenon is the toxicity. If you don't get rid of the toxicity, you can bring your cholesterol down to zero, which probably isn't a good idea. And you're still gonna have heart disease. Cholesterol is not causing the heart disease. Right. And that's what, this is a flow chart from the same study. That's what they're showing here. So let's, if we can walk through this slowly, it really tied together a lot of interesting things, I think, for you. So first of all, let's defective NOS system, whatever that means. We're not producing nitric oxide at the levels that we should be. Maybe we're producing the super oxidant nitric, I'm sorry, peroxynitrate. Maybe something else is going on, but we're not the system, is it working as it should? So one of the first things that happens directly down underneath is the renin angiotensin system. The body detects stress, right? That's the stress system. So the body signals the kidneys, hey, hang on to salt, hang on to water, we might need those. And we all know that that leads to problems down the road. For temporary, that's okay. So the angiotensin one receptor is upregulated from the system. And let's follow the arrows. It begins to knock down What do I wanna say? An adipoconin, I don't think I'm gonna pronounce it right. So a messaging molecule from the fat cells. So you get hypoadiponectemia. So adiponectin is a funny messenger. It's related to leptin in some ways, has a lot to do with our ability to deal with blood sugar and insulin and satiety even. So that's why you see the connection here then to metabolic syndrome. Yes, adiponectin is the first marker that goes down in a diabetic. So if someone's headed towards diabetic, we'll see that very early on is lower adiponectin, which is part of this process. So I would also then encourage you to think back, follow this chart up. There's probably also a problem with nitric oxide. Yeah, that makes sense. And on those patients, right? So metabolic syndrome, we're all familiar with that. This regular blood sugar, maybe we're gaining weight, the fatigue, the beginning of heart disease, all those things that come along with metabolic syndrome. And here's also our LDL increasing, right? Again, not because we're eating steaks necessarily or something else, because our nitric oxide system isn't working. As part of the compensatory mechanism, the body makes more LDL, interesting, right? So I'm gonna skip mast cells for a second cause we wanna come all the way back over here. So just not having enough nitric oxide in itself, causes vascular dysfunction, causes the adiponectin to decrease, increases LDL all by itself, and then coronary mast cell infiltration. So this is the last phase, right? I believe, I don't have hard evidence for this, but I think the mast cells are trying to rescue the heart, right? They're trying to enter the tissue. They're trying to, because they're not enough nitric oxide, release some histamine, open the blood vessels, maybe some enzymes to break up some of that tissue that's being formed. But as you know, with mast cell activation, when you have too many mast cells, too much of this, this is where we get the coronary spasm. So this is the actual heart attack eventually, too many mast cells in the heart itself, and you actually have the heart attack. And so this is, they're calling it a spontaneous heart attack, but really it started all the way back up here and it took the mice 10 months to develop it. There's nothing really spontaneous about it. It's been building up for a very long time. So to sum up, BPA toxicity, nascent coupling, lots of inflammation, DNA damage, mast cell dysfunction, NAD, NADPH deficiency. So that's a electron donor that the body needs all over the place, gets worn out and cardiovascular disease. And then just in terms of genetic pathways, things to think about with nitric oxide problems. Of course, the NOS genes, the glutathione pathways and the recycling pathways as well. BH4, no BH4, no nitric oxide. BH4 is like a little rescue electron donor in the middle of the enzyme. Citrulline is critical to creating arginine as a base. So every time a nitric oxide molecule is made, it creates a molecule citrulline, which gets recycled by the urea cycle. It's a beautiful system, except if there's problems there. Of course, SOD and catalase to help clear out the extra superoxide when possible. NADPH, the nitric oxide synthase needs NADPH to donate electron to get things going. Of course, the super oxide pathways, if there are any other generations there, NOx is upregulated. So if some immune response or toxicity response, where the body's already creating a ton, whether it's EMF exposure, again, the BPA, I don't have a study here showing up, but that also increases the NOx and the superoxide being created by a different enzyme. And of course, heme pathways, no heme, no nitric oxide synthase and the detox pathways in general, which if blocked up, then you don't get, you don't get rid of the oxidants and a stressed nitric oxide synthase enzyme is not a happy nitric oxide synthase. So here's my NOx3 protocol, super simple. You need to really talk to somebody like Dr. Jill to get the details of it, but basically get the BPA, get the toxins. I don't know how you feel about it. My sense is that this nitric oxide, peroxynitrite is the bottom of the drain and there are lots of toxins, there are lots of that end up at the bottom of the drain causing this similar thing. And that's why heart disease is so prevalent. It's not everybody's just full of BPA, it's BPA and fill in the other 10,000, cause I fall into it. Totally agree, toxic load. I love talking about that, it really is a load thing. That's right, your bucket, you're the bucket. The bucket, yeah. But I also like, I love that, I mean, I wanna also say you BPA free, of course, but the new BPA alternatives, I think plastic is bad news, period. So don't think your BPA bottles are just as good or better than the, you know, I really, really advise avoiding plastics of all types. Someone just wrote in as we're talking is Tupperware safe. I would say, no, do not use plastics, even if they say BPA free, because the plasticizers, again, I think time will tell, but I think some of the BPA alternatives may be just as toxic. Undoubtedly, and often they end up being more toxic, right? So avoid plastics, especially if it's eating or cooling. Like if you're gonna freeze something or microwaves, absolutely, 100%, it's a very, one of the only things that you do is just replace the cookware and your storage ware with glass. That's a great way to start. I have to admit, I fight with my wife over storing things in the refrigerator because we have these lovely glass containers now. They do have plastic tops, but at least they're just on the top and not in contact. And if we do microwave, we take the top off, but she likes to put things in Ziploc bags and throw them in the refrigerator. And I beg her, it's like, please just put it in the glass. She says, but I don't wanna wash it. I said, I'll wash it. Yeah, totally agree. Takes a little extra work, but it's worth it for your body. Yes. So then activate alternative nitric oxide pathways. So that means eat foods with nitrates in them, which sounds funny. I'm not suggesting go out and eat a thousand hot dogs. If you can handle the oxalates, things like beets, spinach, but they're arugula, if you can handle the oxalates, arugula is super high in nitrates and doesn't have any oxalates in them. So arugula is like a super nitric oxide food. So make sure you get a little arugula in your salad mix. There are different things you can do to support the enzymes themselves. There are a million articles. I'm sure you have other experts who've talked about heart, healthy diets and supplements, garlic, vitamin C, apple polyphenols. I mean, the list just goes on and on and on. And then lastly, the less stress we're under, whether it's physical or emotional, the better off our body is. The nitric oxide synthase is start producing super oxide as one of the stress messengers in the body. When it's part of the, I'm convinced it's part of the cell danger response. Because once we lose our antioxidant capacity within the cell, one of the first things to flip over is the nitric oxide synthase starts making that super oxide. And I just showed one pathway, the arginine. There are other things that happen as well that switch it over to super oxide. The super oxide starts combining with the peroxy nitrate and the cell itself gets the message after that builds up to a certain level, the body can't get rid of, I'm sorry, the cell can't get rid of the peroxy nitrate within the cell. The cell recognizes that and says, wait a minute, let's pause. So the cell stops dividing and puts all this energy into repairing. And if it can't do that, then it raises its hand for autophagy and tells the neighboring tissues, the neighboring macrophages, it's like, we're, we've aged out, it's time for us to recycle. Let's do this in an orderly fashion. We'll take a number, wait in line. And that's just normal cell replacement cycle. So everything's still happy as can be. When this gets out of control, then we get this cytokine storm that we've heard so much in COVID. That's when we get sepsis. That's when we get inflammation that's out of control. If it's just locally, maybe it's rheumatoid arthritis or if it's systemic, then it is something like sepsis. And at this point, what your cells can't repair fast enough, the macrophages can't perform autophagy fast enough and we get necrosis. So the cell explodes and there's all kinds of stuff in a cell that makes the immune system crazy. ATP, other proteins in there, it just doesn't like them outside of a cell and just the, it starts sending up flares. It's like danger, danger, we're being invaded, we're about to die. It's like pull out all the stops. It's in the movies where the hero calls the bombs down on himself to save the world. That's essentially what these cells are doing. And it just, so much destruction happens. And then it's almost like your chemo. Can your body survive the immune system response? Right? Yeah, well, that was tremendous, Mackie. I know that our, first of all, our fans do like this high level stuff but I sure do. So it's been fantastic and just the understanding of how BPA can really affect the heart and really the toxic load, like you said, is even a bigger thing. So the moral of the story is whenever you do have a choice to avoid plastics, please don't use the BPA. Water bottles, like canned soups and even receipts, what I'll do is I'll have them sit it down, I'll take a photo of it. I never touch it. So then I can just email it to my accountant or whatever I need to do. Never having touched it, but I have a record of it. So if you don't touch receipts, that's great. Take a photo of them. Don't, you know, ask them not to print them at all would be even better. And all of these things do make a difference over time. All right, thank you so much. You have a hard stop. I think we're there. I think so. Thank you so, so much. This has been fantastic. Stay tuned for the next episode and we will let you know when this one is live. Thank you again.