 Welcome to Resiliency Radio with me, Dr. Jill, your host. This is your go-to podcast for the most cutting-edge insights and functional and integrative medicine. I'm your host and each episode we dive deep into the healing and personal transformation, especially as it has to do with complex chronic disease, environmental toxicity, and so many other issues that are becoming, unfortunately, more and more common. Join us as we connect with renowned experts, thought leaders, innovators who are at the forefront of medical research and practice. Today is no different. We have an episode with one of my favorite people in the world, friends, and just an incredible wealth of knowledge about environmental toxicity, Dr. Lynn Patrick. We're gonna talk about the surprising effects of pesticide on your health that you may not even be aware of. Dr. Lynn Patrick graduated from Bachelorette University in 1984 with a doctorate in naturopathic medicine and has been in private practice in Arizona and Colorado for 35 years. And now we're in the same state, Lynn. So exciting. She is a published author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed medical journals, a past contributing editor for alternative medicine review and recently authored a chapter in the newly released textbook of clinical environmental medicine released in 2019. She speaks all over internationally on environmental medicine, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, endocrine disruption, mental toxicology, sorry, metal, metal toxicology and other topics. And she's currently faculty for the Metabolic Medicine Institute Fellowship in collaboration with George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She also, we met, I think, originally with Environmental Health Symposium, which you've been doing for years and it's just among physicians. It's one of the best known, respected. And now you're in Southern Colorado in the same state as me. And you have some fun adventures with kayaking and what else, you hiking, kayaking, biking, all that fun stuff that we both enjoy. Yeah. So welcome, Lynn. It is so good to have you back. I miss you so much. I just have to say that it's so great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. And as always, we're gonna have a great conversation. Yes. Where should we start? Yeah, well, I was just thinking, you know, the last time we had you on, we were on a triad, three of us talking about after the wildfires. And my big aha there was I've seen the labs of patients that had been through the superior in Louisville, a huge wildfire in, let's see, 2000, maybe 22, 21, 21, it was two years ago. And just seeing the massive impact on the inflammation in the system, it was looking like mold related illness. So we dove deep into that, but you mentioned before we came on live that there's some new data. Let's talk about wildfires because it's a big deal. So just this month, March of 2024, I just finished my podcast and I reviewed a paper published in the medical scientific literature by some amazing researchers. I mean, Jill, I can't even believe I read this paper. Have you ever seen those papers where like half of them are mathematical equations? You're like, oh my God, I'll never understand this. So I just tore it apart and the entire paper just blew my mind. So these scientists built a house, had a wildfire that blew into the house, and then using extremely precise analytical techniques, they figured out where all the VOCs, volatile organic compounds from that fire ended up. And here is the shocking conclusion of the study. As soon as that fire was out, the main source of VOCs were the VOCs that had been adsorbed, so think Velcro, in the walls, the ceilings, and the floors of the house. And they off dusted for weeks and weeks. And they became the main source. We know those VOCs are not good for our nervous system, our lungs, our gut, none of us. They became that main source. But here's the shocking part. They looked at high-end HEPA filtration, right? So those air filters we all tell our patients to get that are so important, we have to clean our air, versus what I call the elbow grease application of washing and vacuuming the walls, the ceiling, and the floors. And guess which intervention was more significantly more effective at getting rid of those VOCs? I'm guessing the cleaning, right? Elbow grease, right? So remember, I hear this from our indoor air environmental professionals that, and I've heard you talk about this, that when you have a mold exposure event, that the nasty parts of the mold, the mycotoxins adhere to the walls, the ceilings, and the floors. It's no different with wildfire smoke. So they looked at the effectiveness of air filtration to mitigate, remediate that wildfire smoke exposure and it was virtually, once the smoke stopped, right? Once the fire was out and the smoke stopped, it was virtually ineffective at getting rid of those VOCs. The only thing that got rid of the VOCs was they literally went in there, the scientists and they vacuumed the walls, the ceilings, the floors, and they scrubbed them. And I was kind of sitting there with my mouth open reading this article going, oh boy, I actually decided to name the theme of the podcast, The Humble Pie podcast because that's what we do as scientists, as clinicians, as doctors, we learn and we change our behavior and we change what we tell our patients as a result of the science that comes out. And then that's what I love about you because you are always on the cutting edge. Now I have a story that's gonna bring that to light, so interesting. So my office was smack-deb in the middle of the superior fires. I was in Hawaii when it happened and I remember looking back on the maps, I was thousands of miles away and the fires were all over. I literally thought there is no way I'm gonna come home to an office. I knew it was gonna burn down. Well, the divine had protection over that office and it was okay, but it was massively smoke damaged. And again, we didn't understand and we came back in literally days after the fire. We all got so sick, nauseous headaches of course, right? It was loaded. We had no water, we had no heat and we were there trying to see how can we mobilize for the community? Like can we donations? And we did some really cool things with companies that were so generous to get stuff to the community, but we're sitting in there and we're all getting sick. And for the first several weeks, going back to work, we all had to take turns and shifts because we would all feel so poorly. No surprise, but get this. So I had an environmental inspector come in that was an expert in fire and smoke remediation. He looked at everything, gave us an estimate. He brought in hydroxyl machines, which I think are a little safer than ozone for a rehab of the air, but it still didn't help. So we're doing this air quality thing, like you're saying the machines and all that, but here's the deal. I just had this idea. I thought, well, you know, I know how to fix mold. What if we just, and he gave us a quote for some specialty company like 40 grand, which was more than my insurance policy covered, right? So here's what I did, Lynn, and it worked. I thought, well, I know how to remediate mold. Why don't I try a oil-based fog and then a deep, deep, deep clean and scrub? And guess what? It was the same thing I would have done if we had mold damage. It worked. It's exactly what you're saying. And I had no idea of this data, but it was like we all felt a million times better. And literally all we did, we did our own elbow grease. We fogged my staff literally fogged. And then we had not even an expert in environmental remediation, just a good cleaner come in and we said, we want everything wiped down, all the paper needs to be cleaned and everything. And it was, I would say 90 to 95% better with all of our symptoms. And that's exactly what we did. And all I took, my experience was like, well, mold kind of works like this and it's just those films and VOCs, right? Let's try this. So that's fascinating that now the data supports it because I still was like, did I do the right thing? But we all felt better, right? And the evidence was in the sequela that our health issues were improved after we cleaned. And of course we cleaned the HVAC and there was a lot more to it than just that. But the big mover was cleaning our office just simply. You just proved that same data that the scientists came up with, with their elegant, I mean, there were pages of mathematical equations for how they figured out the movement, the migration from the air to the surfaces. And I remember, I used to, in a former life, I used to work at a drug and alcohol treatment center treating nicotine addiction. And my job was to run the treatment program, but also to do the education. And I came across this data that showed that, and I might get this backwards, but you'll get the idea. Smoke, cigarette smoke particles are electrostatically charged the opposite of human skin and hair, right? So let's say they're positive and human skin is negative. So there is an electrostatic bond that happens from smoke to human skin. So it's not just that you're breathing this stuff in your lungs, it is literally coating your skin and your hair and your clothing and it stays there for a long, long time. So it's the same idea, right? It's just that this is the house and this is wildfire smoke instead of, somebody who's puffing on a cigarette. Hey everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, Unexpected, Finding Resilience Through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life-threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein Barr and mold and biotoxin-related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you wanna get your own copy, stop by readunexpected.com. There you can also collect your free bonuses. So grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through functional medicine in finding resilience. And you know that was my experience with patients in my community too, because I saw a lot of them that were in Louisville that had either their homes and some of them lost their homes, but a lot of them were still in a home that just was massively smoke damage and they would come in with migraines and headaches and rashes and really severe symptoms and the remediators and the people would put in those machines to clear the air, whether it was hydroxyl or just air purifiers. In the beginning, those hydroxyl ozone and just to be clear, those are supposed to be rent when you're not in the building, but it's supposed to remediate the air, but what you're saying is those things aren't even close to as effective. As a good old fashioned, let's get this, this. Yeah, we're learning. Yeah, exactly. I just want to mention literally this week, I just shared this with you. Neither one of us have read the full article, but just this week in JAMA as we are recording and I'll link this, it's an article in JAMA, which is a major medical journal called Wildfire Smoke and its Neurological Impact. So we'll have to have another part two on that specific topic. Okay, we'll have to do another one. Yeah. Go ahead, we're here to, do you want to talk about pesticides? Yes, yes, I want to dive in and everybody knows I grew up on a farm and I feel like unbeknownst to me, those pesticides, the atrazine and the glyphosate and all these things. And I wanted to broaden it, we're going to talk about glyphosate, maybe we start there, but I want to broaden it because there's other pesticides that are effective. I have just done two podcasts on breaking really crucial pesticide debacle. So we'll end there, but we'll start with glyphosate. Perfect. I did a podcast on all of the glyphosate data looking at this question, which I know you and I are really interested in. If you change your diet to 100% organic, does your urinary glyphosate, which is how we measured in the urine, does it go away? Sadly, no, it doesn't. Now, this was a study that came out done by one of my favorite researchers, Dr. Cynthia Curle in Idaho, who did the original data. Remember those studies that showed that when kids were taken off of conventional food and put on organic diets, their levels of two organophosphate, which are the ones that are most commonly used now, pesticides in their urine went down almost to non-detectable within 48 hours. I mean, it was immediate. And then they, of course, put those kids back on conventional diets and they measured those chlorpyrifos and malathion, the two that they measured, the levels came back up within 48 hours. So this was, she was the first person to do this research in the United States. We were all like, oh my gosh, this is great. Works. Okay. Just in 2023, she did a follow-up study on pregnant women looking at a change in their diet. So they gave them 100% organic food and then they switched them back to a conventional diet, but she did something different. She identified where they lived. Did they live within a third of a mile of an agricultural area? Now this was, I think, South, I hope I get this right, South Eastern Idaho versus Southwestern Idaho. And she does her research, so she plotted out exactly where they lived. And yes, there is glyphosate sprayed in that part of Idaho plus the drift from Eastern Washington comes right over the mountains there. So here's what they found. If they lived further away than a third of a mile, they had a significant drop in their urinary glyphosate levels. If those women lived within a third of a mile of an agricultural area, they did not have a drop in their glyphosate levels. Now I'm gonna lead into the conversation we both want to have. What do we do about that, right? And I live in a small town, 3,500 people down the alley from me is a huge alfalfa field. And as you know, roundup ready alfalfa is GMO alfalfa, right? It is alfalfa that you spray with roundup and then it kills all the weeds. It survives and everything else dies, right? So I measured my urinary glyphosate levels. I know you have, cause I've seen the results and we have, we've got it. So that led me to all the other studies that have been done in humans looking at glyphosate levels. And what all of that research in a group of menopausal women, in a group of postgraduate young students, all of that put together. What it shows us is that there are other sources of glyphosate besides organic versus non-organic food. Now, of course, the highest levels of glyphosate, the winner of all the food that's ever been tested, and I'm gonna include alcohol here, the highest level of glyphosate that's ever been documented in a food. Do you know what it is? What food I'm talking about? Whole foods, conventionally grown hummus. We're weighing in at 2,379 parts per billion of glyphosate. That's extremely high. Why is that? Because bear, the company that now makes glyphosate teaches farmers that if you don't want your grains or your legumes to go bad in the field once they've been harvested, you go through that field and you marinate them in glyphosate, right? So it's post-harvest, desiccation is what it's called. So unfortunately, those, for some reason, those beans, those garbanzo beans get marinated and they turn out to be the most highly contaminated. So that was a source. And to be clear, when this article came out, Cynthia Curle's article that shows that if you live within a third of a mile of a agricultural field, you can't get your glyphosate urinary levels down. They did go back and ask these women, were you 100% compliant? And the ones that said, well, my husband brought me some takeout or Middle Eastern food or something. When they took those women out of the study, there was a significant difference. So there was some contamination, right? It's hard when you've got people in a study and you don't request it in them off in a room to get them to just eat organic food. The other thing, and this came from the post-menopausal women's study, is that when they went back and they asked the women in whom they had measured urinary glyphosate, did you have any wine? The ones who said, oh, yeah, I did have wine. And they took those women out, then same thing, right? So we don't think about, and I know my patients don't think about that wine has glyphosate in it. And in fact, it has a lot of glyphosate. The winner for the glyphosate in wine contest according to Consumer Reports, so this is all published. Saying anything that isn't in the scientific literature was Sutter Home White Wine at 51 parts per billion of glyphosate. So that's a significant source of glyphosate, but so is back to nature, granola, quaker, oats, granola, oats are- I was gonna say when you first asked me, because I've heard the studies on the residue on oats and the conventionally grown oats, but I did not know that hummus, but makes sense. And some of these things I'm assuming as we, I mean we use some of these root vegetables to rehab soil, so it's probably, my thought is maybe the legumes kind of family is even more absorptive for soil. That's a really interesting point, right? Is do these plants sequester glyphosate from the soil? That's- I don't know, just curious. Dr. Huber, right? Yes, yes. I'm just gonna ask Dr. Huber for that. So this all, all of this led me to look at all the research about how do we get glyphosate out of our bodies? And I came across some very surprising information. In the kind of, the common vernacular, what we're told, what we read on the internet is that 20% of glyphosate is absorbable, right? So we eat something, 20% of it ends up in our bloodstream. But all of that came from animal research. And when you look at human research, which is there where they have humans, real life humans, and they give them, which it's legal to do, believe it or not, a certain amount of glyphosate, so they know how much they gave them, between one and 6% of that glyphosate ends up in their urine. So what happens to the rest of that glyphosate? Well, these are living humans. They can't take a little piece of liver tissue or kidney tissue, and surprisingly they didn't look in the stool, but we have to assume that the rest of it ends up in the stool. So it goes through the intestinal tract and ends up in the stool, ends up in the bowel movements of the humans. So what we know from some of the research that's been done on the microbiome is that glyphosate is significantly toxic to the microbiome. And scientists that have looked at the entire microbiome, and I'm talking about the microbiome of the armpit, the private parts, the mouth, the throat, the, you know, our microbiome varies so much from place to place. The skin that over half of that entire microbiome is potentially damaged by glyphosate because those bugs, those wonderful bacteria that help keep our skin in a certain pH and help keep our intestinal tract healthy are susceptible or killed by glyphosate. So this is a serious problem. But most of the... I'm so sorry to interrupt you. I was gonna say I remember being shocked by the research because what they did months into when they first came out, so let's check it in human cells. And they didn't see a significant issue, but what you're describing is the thing they ignored and they knew, and it's a massive bomb to the microbiome because it keelates the minerals that are essential for a healthy things like lactobacillus. Exactly, and bifidobacteria. Yes. Very bad for bifidobacteria. So we've got this serious toxin, and I do mean serious because at point one, do you remember your levels of glyphosate in your urine? Mine were point three parts per billion. Gosh, I might be able to pull that up while you're talking, but yeah, mine was really... The very first one I did was that first one that was no longer available, but it was comparing to farmers on application day. I was three times the level of farmers on application day. So whatever that would be, it was the shocking time. So were you aware of that? That level was with me 100% organic. So again, there was dogs that walked on lawns that slept in my bed. Like there was other factors, but I was one of those N of ones that literally was so the steadiest on my diet, and this was probably now eight or 10 years ago, but it proves your point that I was getting exposures that weren't probably for my diet. So I was point three parts per billion in my urine. So three times the level I'm referring to. Okay. So point one parts per billion, that's the level that Dr. Gilles-Larique Cerellini, the famous French scientist, found was toxic in his rat population. Remember he did that study where he looked at the entire lifespan of rats? Yes. The ones that he fed glyphosate from corn. All of the female rats got breast tumors and all of the male rats developed liver tumors. That was a point one parts per billion. Okay. Now we know that rural Americans in that study, their levels of glyphosate was high as 3.3 parts per billion. So 30 times that high, right? And in the, and Haines database, you know, the big pop 4,700 people that the CDC measures, the median was about one and a half to, it was about one and a half parts per billion. So that's what Americans are walking around with in their urine. So all of this got me really curious about what are we gonna do about this, right? If it's true that we're exposed to this and even you and I who are, you know, probably equally fastidious about being organic and I don't even drink. So I'm, you know, the water. That's the thing is no wine or beer in there either. No wine or beer. And definitely no whole foods hummus. Yeah. But I, you know, I lived down the alley from that, that roundup right off alpha field. I started really thinking about can we detoxify glyphosate? Is it possible? And I started getting messages in my inbox about, do you detoxify glyphosate now? So I looked at those and it was, you know, I just, I love science. I was trained by this guy named Jeffrey Bland before I ever went to medical school. I fell head over heels in love with science. And I'm afraid that that concept of critical thinking that we'd hear to so closely, we may have lost it because what these product manufacturers were saying is, look, we have six people. They had this level of glyphosate in their urine. We gave them this magic product and then we checked them again and they had no glyphosate in their urine. And I thought, shouldn't we have more? If you're trying to get the glyphosate out of their body, shouldn't their urine levels go up? Isn't that what you want? So I contacted them, you know, hi, just me checking in. I think what you're saying is you may have found a way to push glyphosate into, you know, further storage inside the body. I mean, what are you doing? I never went back for many of them. Obviously they weren't really interested in my comments. That's what I love about you, Lynn. Even in our role, so many things were on similar. I love, because you often see Lynn's Patrick's comments and they're always like, have we thought about this? And here's some evidence for this. And I just, I love and adore you for that because you really bring the science to that. Thank you. So what I realized from that study with the humans that show that only between 1% and 6% of the glyphosate comes out in the urine and then Dr. Zach Bush, I don't know if you know him, but kind of brainy guy, he did a study looking at the effect of glyphosate on the mucosal layer in the intestines. Showing that it does in fact destroy the mucous layer. And, you know, for those of you that aren't into the mucous layer of the intestines, I know it sounds gross, but it's critical because the majority of the microbiome lives there, right? We think that the microbiome's floating around in the intestinal tract, but no, it's not. It lives in this beautiful little layer on the, right on the kind of the border of the tissue, the mucosa of the intestines because there's so much good food for the microbiome there, right? And if you're eating a biocide that destroys that, that's really gonna wreak havoc with your intestines. So I thought, is there any evidence that having a good digestive tract functional rate of elimination decreases the toxicity of glyphosate or at least decreases the amount that's absorbed? And there is some data for people who eat six servings of veggies a day, they do have lower levels of glyphosate in their urine. So they're absorbing less. And I did talk to, do you know Dr. Russell Jaffe? Yeah, senior research fellow at NIH, right? Brilliant guy. And he said, absolutely, the bowel transit time. So that's the time from when you eat something, put it in your mouth until it comes out the other end. If we optimize that, so 14 to 18 hours is the optimal, right? The average in America, I think is, you're not gonna like what I'm about to say, but it's like 96 hours. Even if you have normal bowel movements, right? It's that long for food to get through your gut. And just to be clear, so people are listening, the reason is we absorb 95% of toxins and bile and things in the bowel and if the longer it's there, the more we just reabsorb this toxic load, right? Exactly. So we don't want things to go through too fast. We don't wanna get diarrhea, but 14 to 18 hours, normal stools, that's gonna decrease the time that glyphosate stays in the intestinal tract. And if it's true from the little research that we have, that 94 to 99% of the glyphosate we're exposed to comes out through our intestinal tract, that would be helpful. Yes. So the purveyors of specific types of fibers that are supposedly magic at detoxifying glyphosate really don't have anything over just fiber. Regular fiber that we get from whole food, vegetables and fruit. And so I would, I of course would love to have millions of dollars and do the research correctly. But so far I think that that appears to be from all the research I could find that was published, the best application to minimize the effect that glyphosate has on our bodies. Now, yeah, people forget about alcohol. People forget, I mean, wine is wine, right? So people forget that wine that's non-organic has glyphosate in it. And there's lots of studies, well, there's two good studies that I reviewed in the podcast, one from Europe, one from the United States that Consumer Reports did, showing significant amounts of glyphosate in wine. I have a friend who lives in a wine country and she goes, oh yeah, you know, all the conventional vineyards spray glyphosate because they don't want weeds growing, you know, between the grape plants. I don't know why. I mean, I think grapes would be fine, but that's kind of the standard for vina, what's it called, vina-culture, whatever, for growing grapes. And the other, of course, is water, drinking water. Some municipalities, I did a deep dive into this, some municipalities can get the glyphosate out of water and some can't. So there's documented evidence of contamination of drinking water with glyphosate. Environmental Working Group has taken that out of the EPA data and there's published studies in the scientific literature that shows, yes, considerable amounts. Now, the good news is it's easy-peasy to get glyphosate out of drinking water. You just need activated charcoal. So even those very, very economical pour-through filter systems will do it. You know, the little activated charcoal filters, you of course have to change them on a regular basis, but they will do it. Now, the one study I found that shows that you can actually bind something in the intestinal tract. I forgot to talk about this. So I'm kind of backtracking. Two glyphosate is clay. They actually did studies in- That's what I was gonna ask is charcoal and pectosol are such as- Mon-mortulite clay. Yeah, mon-mortulite clay. And they actually saw in vitro that the clay bound to the glyphosate and it was a significant binding, meaning it just wasn't momentary. It was a binding that then lasted for hours. But here's the thing. Best at a pH of two, very weak at a pH of seven. Now, we know that the only place there's a pH of two in the human body is in the stomach. Yes, right. So we can assume that if we took clay with our food, it would bind to the glyphosate. The downside of that is that clay also interferes with mineral absorption. So we don't wanna do that for a long period of time because that would not be good for our mineral, the mineral absorption for the minerals that we need. But at least, we know that clay does have the capacity to do that. Now, there was not any good research that I could find for activated charcoal in the intestinal tract, right, in a human or animal body. So maybe that would happen, but we don't have any evidence for that. So we have to do the very best that we can because glyphosate is very toxic to the human microbiome. And the study that I looked at, looked at every separate part of the microbiome and every single one, Jill, was at least 40% of that microbiome was susceptible to glyphosate. I mean, that's the best for microbiome. Okay. And think about the babies that are given formula. That's the not, I mean, to me, that's the bigger tragedy is these small, size relative to adults that are given formula that we know is the conventional soy or any thoughts on that. Or I mean, obviously mothers, they have a choice of organic formulas, but that's a big deal. I have to say, because I always have to say this because I talk about toxicants that are found in the breast milk, breast is always best. Yes. I don't even care if it's a situation like in the Arctic where, you know, toxins migrate northward towards the North Pole where Inuit women have very high levels of PCBs in the breast milk. I still think breast milk is good because it's got its own microbiome, right? You can't get it in anywhere else. It's not in formula. So yeah, breast is best. And then an organic, if you have to use a formula an USDA organic formula, even soy is gonna be much better than a conventional formula. Excellent. Yeah, and the simplest, most affordable for through picture filtration, you know, they're called pictures because they are literally, and they're now making glass ones, which I'm very happy to see. Me too, because otherwise there's a plastic ones that are a dime a dozen and it's nice to have the glass. The best question that you can come across a lot of companies that make humic and vulva gases are claiming that they detox the glyphosate. Any evidence on that or? So the one study I found was a study that Dr. Bush did, Zach Bush, but it was in an in vitro model. Now it was a brilliant in vitro model where they actually, so the in vitro just means it wasn't in a living being, right? It was in the laboratory. They tried to create kind of a synthetic intestinal lining, which I wish I had seen that, but I just had to read about it. This was actually a published study. And what they found was that the glyphosate actually did attack that mucin layer and that by using humate full vape, which is, you know, it's dirt. I mean, there are acids that are found in dirt. They were able to minimize that damage. But that I have to say that's in a plastic model, you know, in a non-living scenario, which is very different than in a living scenario where you're actually using an animal, you know, a rat or a mouse or something where you can actually look at what's going on biologically. I would love for them to do that in an animal so that we can see what it really looks like in an animal. So the best thing is trying to avoid, but we can't, like you said, with the spraying off. And I think I read a study, this has been a few years now that there were traces found in organic California wine. So again, that airflow, the breeze that takes it other places. Let's shift to pesticides in general because that is another huge, huge thing. And there's so many we could talk about. What are the top ones of your concern and what do we do about it? Okay. Boy. I know. Let's organize. Okay, I have to talk about the breaking news because this is so important. So we started in the 70s replacing the Rachel Carson organochlorine pesticides with organophosphate pesticides because they were supposedly safe and effective and harmless, right? Which we know now absolutely is not true. One of those pesticides is called chlorpyrifos. Of all of the organophosphate pesticides, let's just call chlorpyrifos the poster child because we have more evidence for neurological damage in both developing fetuses and in young children for chlorpyrifos than any other pesticide. 10 years ago, the EPA started trying to phase out chlorpyrifos. It took until 2021 for them to actually be able to take it off the market. Now I got something in 2023 across my inbox that said, chlorpyrifos is coming back. And I thought, oh no, what the pesticide companies are doing which is unfortunately the way the game is played is they're suing the EPA to get registration which is the legal thing you have to have for a pesticide to use it. You have to have legal registration to get that legal registration back. And in fact, they got so dirty, they actually sued the head of the EPA personally. Andrew Wheeler, they sued him for everything he owned. This is what actually happened. This is not a secret. It's everywhere. So this happened in 2023. And I don't know who got to the judge but the Eighth Circuit Court actually potentially reversed the ban. Now some things have to happen but if things proceed as they are scheduled chlorpyrifos will come back. It is absolutely the most neurologically damaging pesticide that's ever been proven to be neurologically damaging. And it is heavily used. Half of all the apples in the country that are conventionally grown have chlorpyrifos residue on them. So flip a coin whether your conventionally grown apple is gonna give you a little dose of chlorpyrifos when you eat it. Green vegetables like kale also. So it's used widely. It's used on grains. It's used on sugar beets. So it's in sugar and yes chlorpyrifos residues are measured in conventionally grown food. So we have to prevent that from happening. And so there is a way that citizens and consumers can actually directly work with either pesticide action network. My favorite organization or organic consumers. Another wonderful organization that is actively working to lobby the environmental protection agency and all of our Congress people not to let this happen. So that's chlorpyrifos. The only way to avoid chlorpyrifos is to eat USDA organic food. Now there's this thing called, I'm sure everybody here's aware of it. The dirty dozen and the clean 15 to environmental working group. That information is the FDA database for the most heavily contaminated fruits and vegetables. But what they do not test for and everybody needs to know this is they don't test dairy products or meat and they don't test many processed foods. They're only talking about fresh fruits and vegetables. They don't test one of the most highly contaminated with pesticides foods in America, which is wheat, wheat is highly contaminated by some of the most toxic pesticides. And Dr. Cynthia Curl who I mentioned before she actually did that research. She looked into the EPA database because there's a 6,000 fold difference in the toxicity of pesticides. And she looked at the most highly toxic ones. What foods are those pesticides used on? The dirty dozen and the clean 15 does not use that method, that methodology. What she found is wheat, brassica, and some other grains like corn are the most contaminated with the most contaminated pesticides, the most toxic pesticides, sorry. And so we have to really kind of create a hierarchy because it is as you know, it is challenging to eat 100% organic. Yeah, and you really can't eat out at all because there's no, I don't know if even in Boulder it's rare that you find an all organic restaurant that's just almost unheard of. It's just doing the oils and things that they use and the seeds and all that. So fascinating. One thought too, I've always wondered the fad of autoimmune paleo diets and paleo diets, they eliminate grains and legumes. And in my mind those are number one very highly contaminated with mycotoxins but also pesticides. And I always wonder if some of the improvement isn't just because eliminating some of the big sources of pesticides but also mycotoxins. I think about that all the time. And that's one of the problems with our way of our industrial agriculture. Is that it sterilizes the soil and makes it easier for molds and mycotoxins to actually grow into the plant. They don't just grab onto the root they actually are found in the plant. The grains that are conventionally grown are higher in mold residue and mycotoxins than grains that are organically grown. So I think that hierarchy that we're constructing right now is that if we wanna put stuff at the top the do not eat list, it's not just the dirty dozen and the clean 15. It's grains specifically wheat and that's from Dr. Curl's research. And I have to talk a little bit about conventionally grown brassica. So those are cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale, watercress, broccoli sprouts, broccoli all those wonderful foods that are so good for us. They also happen if they're conventionally grown to be contaminated with some of the more toxic pesticides. So for instance, if you go to whole foods and you get a smoothie, you're not gonna get any organic fruit and vegetables. And you're getting a high concentration. I've seen some of the most toxic thallium levels in the people who drink green drinks all the time, right? I just was gonna tell you about a case of a man who had significant neurologic problems, brain fog, fatigue, peristhesias. He had numbness and tingling. And his doctor thought mistakenly had metal poisoning went through a year of chelation therapy. He did not get better. And then he went to see my mentor, Dr. Walter Crinian who did a thorough intake on him and found out he would have been going to whole foods every morning to get a great big 32 ounce green smoothie and that his organophosphate pesticide urine levels were through the roof as a result. So we have to think about where is our food coming from and can we think that foods that are supposed to be good for us, like brassicas or smoothies, are they really good for us? Not if they're made from conventionally grown fruits and vegetables, right? One more thing after talking because I did my podcast on that this month. The environmental working group, God bless those people are just published two studies. One of them was that they looked in conventional cereals for a contaminant. It's called a pesticide, but it's really not called chloramaquat. So like chlorine, me, quat. Quat stands for quaternary ammonium compound, a toxic additive to personal care products. This is a growth regulator. It's not a pesticide and it's used extensively in Canada to grow oats and Quaker as in addition to other oat manufacturers uses oats from Canada. And so environmental working group looked in those Quaker products for levels of chloramaquat. Now, EWG did a lot of research looking at what's an acceptable level. And they figured out it was 30 parts per billion, you know, above that it's gonna do damage. And this is a endocrine disruptor par excellence, right? It's a growth regulator that alters plant hormones, right? Because if you have a beautiful, lustrous, great big stock of oats and it falls over, it's harder to harvest. So these growth regulators are used to create these all stumpy stocks of oats that are easier. They don't fall over, they're easier to harvest. So they found in Quaker oatmeal, 300 parts per billion of chloramaquat. The EPA doesn't regulate chloramaquat. I don't know why it's a problem, right? So then they looked in the urine of people in the United States of America. They actually got access to several different studies where they were collecting human urine. In 2017, about 65% of the urine of these patients had chloramaquat in it. It's up to over 90% now in 2023. They looked from 2017 to 2023 and they found not only more people, but the levels of chloramaquat in the urine were also going up. Now the problem with chloramaquat is that in the animal studies, you're looking at decreased levels of testosterone, altered thyroid hormone, deformities in the womb regarding the development of the skeleton. So skeletal deformities, lower birth weight, lower birth length. So babies are being born not only small for their gestational developmental age, but also shorter. None of that is good, that's all bad. Now remember, chloramaquat is outlawed in the United States so far. But in 2018 and just recently in 2020, the company that makes chloramaquat successfully lobbied the EPA for allowing higher levels of contamination for imported oats. And in, I think, 2021 or 2022, I can't remember, they formally asked the EPA for registration, meaning we wanna bring chloramaquat into the United States. So the EWG, doing a beautifully crafted strategic preemptive strike, published this data just last month. Okay. Both in the humans, and they did a little, which is on their website, ewg.org. They looked at about 14 different cereals. Now organic granola, the one they tested had no chloramaquat in it, no detectable chloramaquat. There was one commercial cereal that had no detectable chloramaquat, but the other 13 had significant levels of chloramaquat in the cereal box, right? So in the Quaker Oats box, good ol' Quaker Oats or the actual cereal, the granola, Quaker's granola. So that's the other one that I think has to be avoided because it's such an obviously strong endocrine disruptor. You know, we know there are endocrine disruptors in our environment, but this is an obvious one. This is a no brainer. And we'll be sure if you're listening to link up some of the places where you can be an advocate or a political voice, some of the websites you already gave us, Lynn, and I'll make sure and list all those wherever you're watching this. Cause if you have a voice and have a say, I think the more of all of us that can get together and really talk about the toxicity and why we don't want that and our food supply, the better. Yes, right now, Environmental Working Group, if you just go to their website and you type chlor-me-m-e-quat into the search engine, they've got a whole bunch of pages on chlor-me-quat and how to take action. They make it very easy. It will take you no more than a couple of minutes. I'll link to that for sure. So our last bit here, this is overwhelming and really, really important information. We're all swimming in toxic soup. What would be your takeaway for someone who's maybe just a mom trying to feed her kids or what would be a few very practical, maybe somewhat affordable things that we can do to actually decrease our toxic load? Well, I have a million, as you probably... Right, no, no. But I have to say, our dear friend and colleague, Dr. Michelle Perrow, who's a board-certified pediatrician, commissioned a study to look at the actual question. Is it more expensive to eat an organic diet? And she compared a standard American diet, the cost of going to the grocery store and buying standard American diet items versus a whole foods, meaning fruits, vegetables, fresh, you know, cooking up organic oatmeal, not having a lot of processed foods, organic diet and guess what? The same price. So no longer can you say, oh, I'm a single mom, I have four kids, I can't afford to do that, actually you can. And that, Dr. Perrow has an entire book of stories about what happened in her practice when her families, not just the kids, but her families went on an all organic diet, reversed kidney failure. I mean, I could go, Crohn's disease, I could go on and on, but it's worth it. The amount of money that we spend on our health failing is so much more than what, you know, we can invest in a whole foods organic diet. The other thing is, oh boy, my favorite sweating. Yes. It's a very effective way to get out a lot of toxins, including organic chlorine pesticide which we once held in our tissues, we kind of hang on to those in our fat. And you don't even, you know, I've helped folks who didn't even have money to buy a sauna or to get a pass to the gym to go to the sauna, sweat. You go in your bathroom, you put a towel under the door, you turn the heater on, voila, instant sauna, you can sweat. So sweating for 20 minutes a day, followed by a really good soapy shower to get all of those fat soluble toxins off your skin is wonderful. I am lucky enough to have a sauna in my house and I also have a cold plunge and going from that 150 degree heat to that 40 degree cold, it's absolutely life changing, I have to say. The other thing is the simple, inexpensive, life-saving nutrients that we can take that cost pennies a day like enocidal cysteine, pretty much everybody unless you have an active peptic ulcer, you can take it, is there are right now, I think about 30,000 articles in PubMed on enocidal cysteine and both animals and humans. It's unbelievable the ability of enocidal cysteine to help the body detoxify. Vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium, all of those basic nutrients are so crucial in helping basically create an optimal situation in terms of liver function and kidney function. And that's where we detoxify. And then bowel function, making sure you're getting that fiber as we started out just practically from food if possible or you can add psyllium or chia or flax or something that's wonderful. Line them up, put them on your cereal, cost pennies a day. Do you remember they did this wonderful study in Scandinavian, one of the Scandinavian countries where they divided, it was a prospective study where the divided group of women in half gave half of them the equivalent of two tablespoons of ground flax seed a day. They followed them for six months, then they said, okay, stop. Then they followed them for several years. The group that took the flax seed had half the incidence of breast cancer. Just that simple intervention of fiber, flax fiber, right? But fiber. And simple, like you said, so much of what you shared is very practical. It doesn't have to be extremely expensive and it's approachable to pretty much anyone even with a family or a smaller budget. Oh, Lynn, we could go on and on and on. This has been so chock full of great information, practical information, and I know people are going to appreciate this. Where can they find you more about you? You've got a training coming up, I think. Sure, so what I do, I used to be a clinician, had a practice for many, many years. Now I spend every waking moment of my life doing podcasts and also training physicians in environmental medicine. So I have a training platform called EMEI. It stands for Environmental Medicine Education International and we'll put the link to the website and show notes, emei.org. We did, Dr. Gill have to tell you this, we did do a course after East Palestine, I got so angry about the lack of any public health help for those people that we did a whole course that we're rewriting now and that will be for the public on how the basics for self-care, water, air filtration and supplements and what to do if you have a chemical disaster like East Palestine, just basic public health information that should have been available to those folks that was not made available to them. Awesome, thank you for your amazing work in the world. We will link to the website and all the notes that we talked about today. Lynn, you are a treasure. Thank you again for all that you do for all. Dr. C. Well, that's a wrap with Dr. Lynn Patrick and everything you wanted to know about pesticide exposure and how to decrease your risk. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of Resiliency Radio. You know, you can find all episodes on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. Won't you please stop by and leave a review so we can reach more people. Be sure and tune in as I put out a new episode every week and if you want to look at transcripts or any more information, you can go to my website, jillcarnhan.com where you'll find all the transcripts and all of the episodes that have been produced. Be sure and like, subscribe and hit the bell so you can be notified of the next subscription. Thanks so much and have a great evening.