My friends and I will be releasing a free E-book for you all within the next couple weeks on one of your most important tools in achieving and maintaining health. Here’s a short preview of what we’ll be talking about!
Why won’t the needle move!
After radically changing your diet and lifestyle, many of your longstanding health complaints have cleared up, but there are still a few issues that linger. You’ve tried harder with your diet. You’ve taken steps to maximize the quality of your sleep. You are not exercising too much nor too little. The supplements that fit your context are taken every day. You are fitting sunlight exposure into your calendar. You practice mindfulness on a daily basis. Your social game and your relationships are strong. You love your job and your everyday stresses seem to be managed.
And yet, things are just not budging! What gives? You’ve read all sorts of books and blogs. You may have even seen a battery of different clinicians but all to no avail.
There is one factor that may have been overlooked: your body’s burden of toxicants.
The overlooked thorn in your side.
Toxicants are man-made chemicals created in a lab, which allow us to be able to live the way we do. These toxicants have names and faces. Let us introduce you to a few here:
- Solvents you’re exposed to when you fill up your gas tank, when you’re working in a lab, or those off-gassing from the carpet in your home.
- Trichlorethylenes in your dry-cleaned clothes.
- Tanolide and galaxolides in your cosmetic and bathroom products.
- Dioxins and furans in your furniture and bed.
- Perchlorates that fill the air every time a jet takes off.
- Pesticides in our food. Yes, even organic varieties [1, 2].
I think you are starting to get the idea.
Many of these toxicants persist in the environment for years. Whether or not we have the more obvious sources of exposure, toxicants end up in the food, air and water that we interact with everyday. One of the things that makes us different from our predecessors is how commonly these toxicants are found in our fat tissue [3]. Unfortunately, they are also found in the cord blood of all infants that have been assessed [4].
The old-timer Paracelsus is famous for the quote “The dose makes the poison” and it’s true that experts ensure only “safe” levels of these toxicants are allowed in products for human use. Safe in this context means that signs of acute toxicity will likely not present at these low levels. However, studies have suggested that many of these toxicants are doing harm at levels below those considered “safe”.
In addition, there is a poorly recognized of nonmonotoxicity [5]. This is the idea that when the body is burdened by multiple toxicants at once the consequences can be more severe than the impact of each toxicant on its own.
It’s sort of like the dangers of distracted driving. You’ve got your kid yelling in the back. The sun is setting in a way that keeps your sunglasses from helping. You decide you’re hungry so you unwrap the rest of the food you were saving for later. Your significant other starts being a backseat driver. Suddenly, your phone vibrates in your pocket, and you realize it’s probably your boss. You start freaking out about a project you were supposed to have done this week. Then it happens, you drive into car in front of you. Fortunately, nobody got hurt!
Back to our distracted driving analogy, what does rear-ending that vehicle in front of you look like in terms of reaching the toxicant tipping point?
Here is a list of systems effected by the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry [6]:
- Asthma
- Shortness of breath
- Cough
- Skin pigment changes
- Hives
- Acne
- Cancer
- Bruising and bleeding
- Blood sugar issues
- Swelling
- Fatigue
- Hypertension
- Pain
- Jaundice
- Nausea
- Peripheral neuropathy
- Problems with balance
- Seizures
- Dementia
- Parkinson’s
- Miscarriages
- Fetal death
- Impaired fetal growth
- Infertility and subfertility
- Menstrual irregularities
- Hypogonadism
- Hyperthyroidism
- Hypothyroidism
- Cardiovascular and Hematologic
- Abnormal heart rate
- High or low blood pressure
- Heart failure
- Anemia
- Leukemia
This is not an exhaustive list. All organ systems are targets!
And so what’s the answer!?
Thank your skin, sometime
“Integument” is a fancy way of saying skin. Your skin is the largest organ of your body. Research has revealed some really neat findings about our skin in recent years. In addition to skin’s many different roles, it serves as a metabolizer and excretory organ for toxicants [7]. It’s been estimated that there are between three million sweat glands distributed across your body’s entire surface. That’s equal to the weight of one kidney and a whole lot of excretory power!
A review by Sears and friends suggests sweat is an exit route for heavy metals[8]. The BUS (Blood, Urine, Sweat) studies by Genuis and friends found that sweat is a route out for accumulated phthalates [9], toxic metals [10], pesticides [11], andpolychlorinated biphenyls [12]. What’s also advantageous about using the skin as an exit route is that some toxicants unable to be excreted in the urine or feces are excreted unmodified via sweat. In other words, when you’re out of resources that you acquire from nutrition required for removal, we still have a way out.
One example of harnessing the power of your skin.
You can take advantage of your extra kidney with sustained heat stress. There are many different strategies that allow you to do this, and one of the most effective ways through sauna use.
The clinical data we have on sauna use is numerous. But the quality of that data varies. We reviewed studies that looked at changes in symptoms and changes in body burden and came across three studies that fit our criteria.
The first is a case study of a 33-year-old female electrical worker[13]. Her primary exposure was the organochlorine compound called Aroclor.
This woman presented to her gastroenterologist with longstanding concerns of severe abdominal pain, headaches, swelling, joint pain, acne, liver abnormalities, menstrual irregularity and 50-200 milliliters of a blue-green nipple discharge daily. That’s almost a cup a day. Scary stuff!
She was treated with 23 days of intensive sauna use.
This woman had a dramatic improvement in symptoms that was associated with a decrease in her body burden of Aroclor. Her nipple discharge decreased and progressively changed from a blue-green to translucent color. The discharge ceased altogether 15 days into treatment. Her headaches, acne, joint pain, and swelling stopped occurring during the last week of the treatment. The abdominal pain was reduced greatly, but persisted. She returned for a six-month follow-up post-treatment and continued to do well.
Okay, cool! So how do I get this done?
More intensive sauna use could be your answer. However, it’s not something to be taken lightly. In the E Book, we’ll be laying this all out for you. Preparation, everything you need, who falls into what category for use, and what issues you should look out for!
Stay tuned!
Further Reading:
Organic meat still is a source of toxicants
[1] Hernández, Ángel Rodríguez, et al. “Consumption of organic meat does not diminish the carcinogenic potential associated with the intake of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).” Environmental Science and Pollution Research 24.5 (2017): 4261-4273 [1]
[2] Zohair, Azza, et al. “Residues of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and organochlorine pesticides in organically-farmed vegetables.” Chemosphere 63.4 (2006): 541-553
Your body’s means of addressing toxicant burden. We’re all carrying some load.
[3] Jackson, E., et al. “Adipose Tissue as a Site of Toxin Accumulation.” Comprehensive Physiology 7.4 (2017): 1085
Is there really any safe level? The concept of 1+1 =/= 2.
[5] Vandenberg, Laura N., et al. “Hormones and endocrine-disrupting chemicals: low-dose effects and nonmonotonic dose responses.” Endocrine reviews 33.3 (2012): 378-455
The way your body expresses toxicant burden
[6] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/csem.asp?csem=33&po=6
The skins role in detoxification
[7] Zhou, Shi-Sheng, et al. “The skin function: a factor of anti-metabolic syndrome.” Diabetology & metabolic syndrome 4.1 (2012): 15
Reading on perspiration as an exit route for toxicants
[8] Sears, Margaret E., Kathleen J. Kerr, and Riina I. Bray. “Arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury in sweat: a systematic review.” Journal of environmental and public health 2012 (2012)
[9] Genuis, Stephen J., et al. “Human elimination of phthalate compounds: blood, urine, and sweat (BUS) study.” The Scientific World Journal 2012 (2012)
[10] Genuis, Stephen J., et al. “Blood, urine, and sweat (BUS) study: monitoring and elimination of bioaccumulated toxic elements.” Archives of environmental contamination and toxicology 61.2 (2011): 344-357.
[11] Genuis, Stephen J., Kevin Lane, and Detlef Birkholz. “Human Elimination of Organochlorine Pesticides: Blood, Urine, and Sweat Study.” BioMed research international 2016 (2016
[12] Genuis, Stephen J., Sanjay Beesoon, and Detlef Birkholz. “Biomonitoring and elimination of perfluorinated compounds and polychlorinated biphenyls through perspiration: blood, urine, and sweat study.” ISRN toxicology 2013 (2013)
Case study of female capacitor worker treated with sustained heat stress.
[13] Tretjak, Ziga, Megan Shields, and Shelley L. Beckmann. “PCB reduction and clinical improvement by detoxification: an unexploited approach?.” Human & experimental toxicology 9.4 (1990): 235-244