#019 Dr Jenny Goodman - The Invisible Toxins That Are Killing Us
Jenny Goodman is a medical doctor, author, lecturer and broadcaster. She qualified at Leeds University Medical School in 1982. Disillusioned with conventional medicine’s inability to heal sick people, and its failure to enquire about the causes of illness or to do preventive healthcare, she left after a short time in practice. She then lectured extensively, both on medical sciences to practitioners of alternative medicine and on topics such as women’s health and the politics of health to the general public in adult education classes. She completed a Master’s degree in psychotherapy and counselling, and worked as a therapist at the Hammersmith Hospital, thinking her days as a medic were finally over.
However: in the 1990s she was lucky enough to discover the British Society for Ecological Medicine, a group of doctors and other practitioners who practise nutritional and environmental medicine. They were asking the same questions that had gone unanswered for her throughout medical school. And they were finding answers, helping their patients to attain dramatically better health through changes in diet and nutrition, and through detoxification.
Having studied the environmental history of hundreds of patients, she is now deeply committed to explaining the bigger picture – that what we are doing on our farms and elsewhere on our planet profoundly affects the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, and therefore affects the health of our bodies and minds.
Jenny is the author of two books:
· “Staying Alive in Toxic Times: A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health”, published in Jan 2020 and “Getting Healthy in Toxic Times: An Ecological Doctor’s Prescription for Healing Your Body and the Planet”. Published in July 2024.
> During our discussion, you’ll discover:
(00:04:28) One everyday product people should get rid of
(00:05:54) The biggest source of toxins that nobody knows about
(00:12:24) Are saunas effective for detox
(00:19:38) Environmental toxins, and our role in causing them
(00:27:30) How Dr Goodman wrote her books
(00:33:12) WiFi, and other non-native EMFs
(00:37:58) How important is it to eat organic foods
(00:41:10) How should doctors educate their patients
(00:43:58) Cotton clothing vs synthetics
(00:50:58) Flouride in the water
(00:57:24) Is excessive iodine intake a concern
(01:02:02) Mould, and why it’s an issue
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Transcript
Welcome to the VP Life Podcast, the show where we bring you actual
Rob:health advice from leading minds.
Rob:I'm your host, Rob.
Rob:My guest today is Dr. Jenny Goodman, a medical doctor at Ecological
Rob:Medicine practitioner who has made it her mission to educate the world
Rob:on the harmful effects that modern day toxicants have in our bodies.
Rob:Expect to learn how the detox systems in our body really work, why fluoride
Rob:is an issue for our health, and Jenny's top tips on how we can survive and
Rob:thrive in today's toxic landscape.
Rob:Now onto the conversation with Dr. Jenny Goodman.
Rob:Good morning, Dr. Goodman.
Rob:Thank you for joining us on the podcast today.
Rob:I say this often, but I know through my own experiences in working with
Rob:others that environmental toxins are often the reason why most
Rob:people actually struggle to heal.
Rob:So I'm excited to have this conversation with you.
Rob:Before we dive into today's podcast, uh, would you mind introducing yourself
Rob:for those in the audience who may be not so familiar with you and your work?
Dr Goodman:Hi.
Dr Goodman:Well, thank you very much, Rob.
Dr Goodman:Thank you for having me.
Dr Goodman:So, yes, I'm, um, a medical doctor qualified a very long time ago, 1982.
Dr Goodman:Mm-hmm.
Dr Goodman:Um, and I'd spent six years in medical school not learning of any of what I
Dr Goodman:thought I was going there to learn.
Dr Goodman:Um, I thought I was gonna learn how to heal the sick, why people got
Dr Goodman:sick in the first place, and how to prevent illness, and they don't
Dr Goodman:teach that stuff in medical school.
Dr Goodman:So, long story short, I had to find my own way through the
Dr Goodman:morass of mechanistic medicine.
Dr Goodman:To something that was truly holistic.
Dr Goodman:It took me an inordinate amount of time.
Dr Goodman:Um, and I was very lucky to eventually discover the British Society for
Dr Goodman:Ecological Medicine, which is essentially a bunch of wonderful doctors who,
Dr Goodman:like me, were very disillusioned with dishing out the anti-drugs, antibiotics,
Dr Goodman:antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, anti-epileptics, everything's anti, and
Dr Goodman:they were finding ways to get alongside the body as an ally, work with nature,
Dr Goodman:not against her, and heal people using nutrients and detoxification.
Dr Goodman:I know we're gonna talk about detoxification, but essentially they
Dr Goodman:were asking about causes and they were finding that those causes were to put it
Dr Goodman:at its simplest, the good stuff that's missing, that's nutrition and the bad
Dr Goodman:stuff that has no place in the human body, and that is environmental pollution.
Dr Goodman:That's been getting into our air, our water.
Dr Goodman:Our soil and therefore our food since the industrial revolution.
Dr Goodman:So by dealing with those issues head on, you can not only heal the sick,
Dr Goodman:but you can also keep people well.
Dr Goodman:Um, so I'm very lucky that I found ecological medicine.
Dr Goodman:I started practicing it myself in the year 2000.
Dr Goodman:That's 18 years after I qualified.
Dr Goodman:That was quite a long time in the wilderness, although I was using that
Dr Goodman:time teaching anatomy, physiology and so on to practitioners who were
Dr Goodman:training to do alternative medicine.
Dr Goodman:So I had a lot of contact with herbalist, homeopaths, osteopaths, naturopaths,
Dr Goodman:acupuncturists and so on, who are all doing wonderful work as well.
Rob:Yeah, I think when you start to look at it from that perspective and
Rob:you take an orthomolecular uh, approach to medicine, you really can start to
Rob:dig through a lot of what mainstream medicine does miss for the most part.
Rob:Dr. Woodman, I'd like to try something new today and ask you
Rob:a few rapid fire questions right off the bat, if that's okay.
Rob:Okay.
Rob:Uh, I, I would like to claim that the idea is my own, however, I lifted
Rob:it from, uh, Greg Ra, former podcast guest of ours, who also owns, hosts
Rob:his own show, um, which is very insightful called Reason and Wellbeing.
Rob:Um, I know that asking an academic to answer a question quickly is
Rob:no small matter, so don't worry if the answers do carry on a bit.
Dr Goodman:Well, that's all right.
Dr Goodman:But let me pause you there and say, I'm a clinician and a writer, but I
Dr Goodman:don't think of myself as an academic.
Dr Goodman:The whole point of my work is to make what's in the obscure scientific
Dr Goodman:journals accessible, easily accessible in plain English to the general public.
Dr Goodman:Uh, and I'm not part of a university, so I'm not sure that I'm an academic.
Dr Goodman:But I'll do my best anyway.
Dr Goodman:Go ahead.
Rob:Okay, perfect.
Rob:Thank you for that.
Rob:Okay, so start off with what's the one everyday product, uh, that people have
Rob:in their lives and homes that they should get rid of asap, in your opinion?
Dr Goodman:Oh, air fresheners.
Dr Goodman:Absolutely.
Dr Goodman:Because you are, you are spraying a mixture of petrochemical
Dr Goodman:plastics and goodness knows what toxins into the atmosphere it's
Dr Goodman:going in through your lungs.
Dr Goodman:It's probably also going in through your skin and it's giving
Dr Goodman:your kids respiratory problems.
Dr Goodman:It's certainly giving you migraines.
Dr Goodman:I had one patient with migraines who I cured by simply getting her
Dr Goodman:to stop using the air freshener.
Dr Goodman:Uh, ecological medicine is not usually that simple in clinical practice, but
Dr Goodman:I would also say if you are spraying air freshener, ask yourself why the air
Dr Goodman:in your house needs freshening in the first place, and you might wanna try.
Dr Goodman:Emptying the bins, opening the windows.
Dr Goodman:And if you still want to add a really nice smell, then get some
Dr Goodman:natural organic essential oils like essential oil of lavender,
Dr Goodman:geranium, orange flour, lemongrass.
Dr Goodman:There are hundreds of these wonderful smells, and these are watch perfume
Dr Goodman:used to be until the 19th century.
Dr Goodman:And you get a little ceramic oil burner, uh, and you put some water
Dr Goodman:on the top, a few drops of the oil in it underneath a tea light, but make
Dr Goodman:it a beeswax tea, light candle, so you're not burning petrochemicals.
Rob:That's a perfect start.
Rob:Thank you.
Rob:Okay, next one.
Rob:What's the most surprising source of toxins that most people don't think about?
Dr Goodman:Um, probably, okay, let me think about this.
Dr Goodman:It's not air pollution because we know about that.
Dr Goodman:Um, I think it's probably, again, in the home.
Dr Goodman:Having said that, most people don't think about the poison
Dr Goodman:that's coming out of their tap.
Dr Goodman:They think it's pure water.
Dr Goodman:And hopefully we'll go into that in more detail.
Dr Goodman:And most people think that, you know, if they're eating broccoli,
Dr Goodman:that's not poisoning them.
Dr Goodman:But it depends whether it was sprayed with glyphosate, whether it was sprayed
Dr Goodman:with synthetic pesticides and insecticides and so on, in which case, even the
Dr Goodman:best kind of food is poisoning you.
Dr Goodman:But I think people are getting the hang about that.
Dr Goodman:Now, I think it's mattresses, right?
Dr Goodman:It's many things in the home, but we don't tend to think
Dr Goodman:about what we're sleeping on.
Dr Goodman:And if we are sleeping on a synthetic mattress that's only a year or two
Dr Goodman:old, it is still outgassing the surprising number of toxic chemicals
Dr Goodman:that it's made of or impregnated with.
Dr Goodman:And one of those is fire retardants.
Dr Goodman:Now you have to have flame retardants in any synthetic.
Dr Goodman:Soft furnishing because synthetics, which are essentially petrochemicals like nylon
Dr Goodman:and polyester and so on, are flammable.
Dr Goodman:So by law you have to add an anti fire device, um, a flame retard, and these are
Dr Goodman:polybrominated by phenyls.
Dr Goodman:Now here the word bromine in polybrominated, it means lots
Dr Goodman:of bromine in these fennels.
Dr Goodman:And for the first year or two, your mattress and also your sofa
Dr Goodman:and synthetic carpets, curtains, cushions on are outgassing.
Dr Goodman:Those chemicals are coming out.
Dr Goodman:Now, please don't worry if said furnishings are more than a couple of
Dr Goodman:years old, they've stopped out gassing.
Dr Goodman:But if you are buying a new mattress, please try and get an organic one.
Dr Goodman:And in fact, this is so important that I've given the information about how to
Dr Goodman:find organic mattresses in both my books.
Dr Goodman:Uh, staying alive in toxic times, the first one, and getting healthy
Dr Goodman:in toxic times was the publisher's choice to make the titles so
Dr Goodman:confusingly similar, not mine.
Dr Goodman:Um, and that is Abba Cupp Organics in Wales, or the Natural Mat
Dr Goodman:down in Devon, but they have a showroom in Chisik in West London.
Dr Goodman:And it is so important to get an organic mattress.
Dr Goodman:'cause you know, your skin is on it all night long.
Dr Goodman:You're inhaling whatever's in it all night long.
Dr Goodman:And I have certainly had cases of people getting desperately
Dr Goodman:sick, even to the point of kidney failure from a new mattress.
Dr Goodman:But I have also had that same person have their partner sleeping next
Dr Goodman:to them be utterly unaffected and not even being able to smell it.
Dr Goodman:And this is because we have genetic differences, inherent
Dr Goodman:constitutional differences in our capacity to detox these things.
Dr Goodman:If you can't detox it, you'll smell it and it'll make you ill.
Dr Goodman:If you can detox it, you may get away with it for a number of years,
Dr Goodman:although probably not forever.
Dr Goodman:And those genetic differences in detox capacity would have made no
Dr Goodman:difference to our health whatsoever before the Industrial Revolution.
Dr Goodman:It's only now that we are surrounded by industrial poisonings that those
Dr Goodman:genetic differences become the difference between who gets sick and who doesn't.
Dr Goodman:But again, to make it crystal clear, it's not your genes that are
Dr Goodman:making you sick, it's environmental pollution and the nutritional
Dr Goodman:deficiencies that go along with them.
Rob:Yeah, no, I, again, I couldn't agree more.
Rob:I'm trying to veer away from the desire to start talking to you
Rob:about bromine and thyroid disorders.
Rob:Do you think that, uh, very quickly there's an issue there with, uh oh
Rob:yeah, there absolutely is an issue.
Dr Goodman:If you go back to school chemistry, the periodic table of the
Dr Goodman:elements, and think about group seven.
Dr Goodman:You've got fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine.
Dr Goodman:Now, iodine is essential for health and in its, um, form where it's
Dr Goodman:gained an electron, it's iodide.
Dr Goodman:It's a hali rather than halogen.
Dr Goodman:That's essential for your thyroid.
Dr Goodman:With iodine is essential for the health of the breast and the prostate.
Dr Goodman:All the organs of the body need iodine and or iodide, but the body is not expecting.
Dr Goodman:Similarly looking, but toxic halogen.
Dr Goodman:So chlorine from your tap water displaces iodine impacts the thyroid,
Dr Goodman:bromine from your soft furnishings, displaces iodine impacts the
Dr Goodman:thyroid and all the other organs.
Dr Goodman:And of course, fluoride, which the Boris Johnson government resolved to add to
Dr Goodman:the tap water all over Britain just been added after a long fight that's
Dr Goodman:been lost in the northeast of England.
Dr Goodman:It's been in the tap water in the Republic of Ireland and Birmingham
Dr Goodman:and the West Midland since 1964.
Dr Goodman:Those are areas from which I see children with damaged brains and
Dr Goodman:damaged bones and damaged thyroid from the very high fluoride that
Dr Goodman:you can measure in their urine.
Dr Goodman:And guess what?
Dr Goodman:When you measure their iodine, it's vanishingly low, so low that with some of
Dr Goodman:these kids from Ireland and Birmingham, I've had the lab come back to me and
Dr Goodman:say, can you send another sample?
Dr Goodman:'cause we couldn't measure the iodine level, we couldn't find any.
Dr Goodman:And they think it's a error at their end and it isn't.
Dr Goodman:And you send the sample.
Dr Goodman:Again, high fluoride, no iodine, and um, we can come back to that topic
Dr Goodman:later, but I think in certain parts of the country it's a huge hazard.
Dr Goodman:But anywhere in the country, you've also got chlorine.
Dr Goodman:And the residues of pesticides, the residues of the drugs and hormones
Dr Goodman:that your neighbors are taking that get peed out into the water table.
Dr Goodman:Uh, heavy metals, the water companies don't remove any of these and they try to
Dr Goodman:remove some of them, but it's ineffective.
Dr Goodman:And so you're drinking all that if you've not installed a water filter.
Dr Goodman:And I think most people would be very surprised by that as well.
Rob:Yeah, I think what everyone misses it is that these chemicals bind to tissues,
Rob:they bind to receptors and then they start to cause this dysfunction of the cellular
Rob:and a hormonal level, which ends up, yeah.
Rob:Making us at a high level, just very unwell.
Rob:Um, we're going to go on tangents very quickly, so I'll
Rob:just bring us back to center.
Rob:Last, uh, rapid fire question.
Rob:Um, do you think saunas are effective for detox or are they overrated?
Dr Goodman:Well, they are very good if you do them in the correct way.
Dr Goodman:So here's the correct way, which I describe in some detail in my first book.
Dr Goodman:Um, but there as now I'll give credit to where we learned this from.
Dr Goodman:We all learned this from Dr. Sarah Myel, the correct way to do the saunas.
Dr Goodman:First of all, it does need to be a sauna, not a Turkish bath, right?
Dr Goodman:You don't want steam, you don't want humidity, you want dry heat.
Rob:May I, I was just gonna interrupt you quickly.
Rob:I, uh, I think.
Rob:What scares me most about Turkish bars or steam rooms is the fact that they
Rob:are to just, uh, carry on for, we were just talking about, um, full of mold.
Rob:They, well, not only full of mold, but they're also, uh, utilizing the very same
Rob:water that we're drinking that's just aerosolizing, those same chemicals, which
Rob:is one of the biggest, my biggest issues with them, especially in sort of your
Rob:public gyms and those, and those areas.
Rob:Um, and then the person, the person who spin in
Dr Goodman:before you was, was using synthetic perfumes,
Dr Goodman:and it's a whole issue.
Dr Goodman:But the thing about a dry sauna is firstly, you don't do it for too long.
Dr Goodman:No point.
Dr Goodman:Staying in there for half an hour once you start sweating five
Dr Goodman:or 10 minutes is all you need.
Dr Goodman:Why?
Dr Goodman:Because the toxins we are trying to get rid of by sauna, and it is valuable
Dr Goodman:because they're lipophilic, right?
Dr Goodman:Pesticides, plastics, plasticizer, chemicals.
Dr Goodman:All of these things that we're exposed to.
Dr Goodman:Now they are lipophilic, which means they dissolve in fat.
Dr Goodman:They're attracted to fat, they're not hydrophilic, you can't pee them out.
Dr Goodman:And although we've got loads of fabulous supplements and nutrient
Dr Goodman:combinations for detoxing, eg.
Dr Goodman:Heavy metals for petrochemicals like pesticides, we've got very few things you
Dr Goodman:can actually take that help get them out.
Dr Goodman:But saunas do.
Dr Goodman:Now what's happening is that the thin layer of fat under your skin, well,
Dr Goodman:it's not a thin layer in everybody's case, but the layer of fat under the
Dr Goodman:skin, it's really near the surface.
Dr Goodman:And after five or 10 minutes in the sauna, the toxins in there start
Dr Goodman:coming out along with the sweat.
Dr Goodman:But from an evolutionary point of view, the body evolved sweating to cool us down.
Dr Goodman:Not for detox and therefore the body doesn't know that you are detoxing.
Dr Goodman:So whatever comes out on the skin is instantly reabsorbed by the skin, right?
Dr Goodman:This is why you have to do the sauna correctly because you could cycle
Dr Goodman:from London to brighten 'em back and be sweating buckets and you won't
Dr Goodman:detox because you reabsorb the sweat and all the toxins in it immediately.
Dr Goodman:Therefore, the way to do the sauna correctly is to go in with a clean,
Dr Goodman:dry towel, and the minute you break a sweat, start toweling off, you towel
Dr Goodman:off the sweat as soon as it appears, and you keep doing that for 10 minutes.
Dr Goodman:That's all you need.
Dr Goodman:'cause after that, you just start losing the good minerals.
Dr Goodman:Drop that towel in the dirty laundry, have a shower, and do
Dr Goodman:the same again a few days later.
Dr Goodman:So it's little and often and it's drying off the sweat as it appears.
Dr Goodman:Um, don't do it for too long.
Dr Goodman:And that is absolutely key for it to be effective.
Dr Goodman:Otherwise, you may feel virtuous and you'll get dehydrated and
Dr Goodman:you won't detox, or you'll detox, but you'll reabsorb it instantly.
Rob:Yeah, that's, that's a good point 'cause I've always, uh, sort of followed
Rob:the mainstream sort of narrative there.
Rob:That being that if you are going to sauna, that you merely just need to shower sort
Rob:of as quickly as you can afterwards.
Rob:Uh, preferably with a, uh, a soap such as a Castile soap.
Rob:It's obviously low in, uh, pollutants just to sort of get that sweat off.
Rob:But you're saying that you do
Dr Goodman:all that, but you also keep telling it off while you are sweating.
Rob:Oh, that's an interesting thought.
Rob:Yeah, no, I never thought about it from that perspective as well.
Rob:It makes total sense.
Rob:Anyway.
Rob:Okay, perfect.
Rob:Well, let's move on.
Dr Goodman:Well, I just wanted to come back to something you said earlier,
Dr Goodman:Rob, because you talked about these substances binding to cell surfaces.
Dr Goodman:And that's incredibly important because in the case, particularly of
Dr Goodman:pesticides and heavy metals and plastics, they all act as estrogen mimics.
Dr Goodman:So the receptors on cell surfaces that they bind to are the estrogen receptors.
Dr Goodman:And all of us men and women alike have estrogen receptors
Dr Goodman:on all the cells of our bodies.
Dr Goodman:Estrogen's an incredibly important hormone, and you've got all these toxins
Dr Goodman:like pesticides, plastics, and oddly heavy metals have the same effect,
Dr Goodman:although you wouldn't expect them to.
Dr Goodman:Um, they all bind to estrogen receptors, so they all are endocrine disruptors as
Dr Goodman:well as being neurotoxic and implicated in our vast epidemic of neurodegenerative
Dr Goodman:diseases, as well as being carcinogenic and implicated in cancer.
Dr Goodman:They are endocrine disruptors.
Dr Goodman:They mess with our hormones by sitting on the estrogen receptor, which blocks
Dr Goodman:the real estrogen from sitting on it.
Dr Goodman:And creates estrogenic effects.
Dr Goodman:Breast cancer, possibly prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer.
Dr Goodman:Those have other causes as well.
Dr Goodman:But this is an important contributory factor, um, which is why we've gotta stop
Dr Goodman:drinking water out of plastic bottles.
Dr Goodman:'cause you're drinking a hundred thousand microplastic particles when you do that,
Dr Goodman:especially if it's been in the warm.
Dr Goodman:And we've gotta stop wrapping food in Kling film, which is the softest
Dr Goodman:plastic, and therefore the one that gets into the food most, you know,
Dr Goodman:hard Tupperware type box in a fridge.
Dr Goodman:I'm much less concerned about.
Dr Goodman:Um, but yeah, plastic bottles and kling film are bad news.
Dr Goodman:Baking a
Rob:tinfoil.
Rob:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:Well, tinfoil is a problem in another respect because
Dr Goodman:it's actually aluminum foil.
Dr Goodman:And if you were to just rush, you know, wrap your sandwiches in it.
Dr Goodman:Or boil an egg in an aluminum saucepan, it's not a problem, but
Dr Goodman:acid will leach it out into the food.
Dr Goodman:So if you're cooking some fe fish or meat in the oven and you've
Dr Goodman:squeezed lemon juice on it, then you wrap it in aluminum foil, then
Dr Goodman:you are leaching out the aluminum.
Dr Goodman:Yes.
Dr Goodman:Similarly, if you cook rhubarb in an aluminum pot, you are
Dr Goodman:leaching out the aluminum.
Rob:Yeah, no, I just, I, I, I drink completely.
Rob:I chuckled earlier when you mentioned sort of, uh, plastic water bottles.
Rob:'cause we just had our discussion about sauna and every time I do
Rob:go into the local, into my local sauna at the local gym, you Yeah.
Dr Goodman:They're all drinking plastic water.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Just guys walking in the, with their plastic water bottles are my, yeah.
Rob:I, I just, I just feel my testosterone dropping, looking at them.
Dr Goodman:Absolutely.
Dr Goodman:And honestly, you know, this is where government action
Dr Goodman:could make such a difference.
Dr Goodman:You know, they more or less banned plastic bags if they banned plastic water bottles.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:And put water fountains everywhere.
Dr Goodman:Okay.
Dr Goodman:We know the water would be crap quality, but it still would be
Dr Goodman:better than drinking plastic.
Dr Goodman:And people would learn to carry water bottles with them.
Dr Goodman:And even those ones that filter the water, you know, there should be water
Dr Goodman:fountains everywhere and the sale of water in plastic should be banned.
Rob:No, I, I couldn't agree more anyway.
Rob:You are the author of two very well received books, uh, staying
Rob:Alive in Toxic Times, A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health, which
Rob:was published in 2020, I believe.
Rob:And then more recent it was, yeah.
Rob:And then more recently, last year, getting Healthy in Toxic Times.
Rob:Mm-hmm.
Rob:Um, that's this one as, that's, yeah.
Rob:Can I tell,
Dr Goodman:can I tell your audience what my chosen title for the second book was?
Dr Goodman:I wanted to call it, of what got into you how pollution is damaging our
Dr Goodman:health and what we can do about it.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Why didn't that stick?
Rob:What was the, uh, the publishers?
Rob:Oh,
Dr Goodman:the head of the publishing company said she didn't like puns,
Dr Goodman:and it's a pun what's got into you.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:Nevermind.
Dr Goodman:Yeah, they're a wonderful publishing company in every other respect.
Dr Goodman:I'm very happy to be with them.
Dr Goodman:Um, and so far I think people can tell one book from the other.
Dr Goodman:Gimme one second.
Dr Goodman:I'll just, um.
Dr Goodman:Show you the front cover of the first book
Dr Goodman:and and I wrote that in response to patients saying to me,
Dr Goodman:essentially after four or five consultations, and they were better.
Dr Goodman:Most people got better within four or five consultations.
Dr Goodman:It is just common sense actually.
Dr Goodman:People would say to me, why doesn't my GP know all this?
Dr Goodman:Why?
Dr Goodman:And can you please write it down?
Dr Goodman:Because everyone needs to know about this.
Dr Goodman:It isn't actually rocket science.
Dr Goodman:It's first year biochemistry applied to the hormones and
Dr Goodman:enzymes and nutrients in our body.
Dr Goodman:That's all it is.
Dr Goodman:That's why I wrote the first book, and it's mostly about eating and
Dr Goodman:living according to the seasons of the year, to be closer to nature, more
Dr Goodman:in touch with our natural rhythms.
Dr Goodman:Um.
Dr Goodman:And it does discuss hazards like mold, which is primarily a hazard
Dr Goodman:in the autumn, although it's also all year round, and how to deal with
Dr Goodman:that whole debate about sunshine.
Dr Goodman:And does the sun give you skin cancer?
Dr Goodman:Well, no.
Dr Goodman:We evolved under the sun for millions of years.
Dr Goodman:That's in the summer chapter.
Dr Goodman:And so on the spring chapter I discussed hay fever and the winter chapter, all
Dr Goodman:the nutrients that you need and how you need to live differently in winter and
Dr Goodman:summer, so you don't go down with millions of viral infections in the winter.
Dr Goodman:But the chapter that spot the most interest was the final
Dr Goodman:chapter, which I called tox detox.
Dr Goodman:You can't poison the planet without poisoning the people,
Dr Goodman:and that's the one that makes the links between our environmental
Dr Goodman:crisis and our health crisis.
Dr Goodman:I think everyone knows we have an environmental crisis.
Dr Goodman:Not everybody knows we have a health crisis.
Dr Goodman:Because what is familiar, what becomes familiar becomes normalized.
Dr Goodman:So everybody knows someone with cancer, but a hundred years ago,
Dr Goodman:nobody knew anyone with cancer.
Dr Goodman:So these diseases like cancer, diabetes, dementia, heart disease, autoimmunity,
Dr Goodman:neurodegenerative diseases like autism in kids, that's a neurodevelopmental
Dr Goodman:disorder, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis.
Dr Goodman:All of these have become hugely common and people just don't know
Dr Goodman:because they can't remember what life was like a hundred years ago.
Dr Goodman:None of us can, and we are repeatedly told it's because we have an aging population.
Dr Goodman:This is not the case.
Dr Goodman:It's not the case, and it's not the reason.
Dr Goodman:Um, there's an arithmetical error that's so important.
Dr Goodman:I have to mention it, that we are told, look, you go back to the mid 19th
Dr Goodman:century, the average age of death was 45.
Dr Goodman:Now it's about 85.
Dr Goodman:Well, the average age of death.
Dr Goodman:Back in Charles Dickens time was indeed 45, but that's
Dr Goodman:because the average
Dr Goodman:included the quarter of the population.
Dr Goodman:The 25% of people who died before the age of five, massive child mortality
Dr Goodman:because of appalling over crowding and terrible malnutrition and very, very
Dr Goodman:moldy, dangerous, crowded living spaces.
Dr Goodman:Complete lack of hygiene, you know, drinking water with cholera
Dr Goodman:in it, working down the mind.
Dr Goodman:If you take those kids outta the equation, their average age of death goes right
Dr Goodman:up to more or less what ours is now.
Dr Goodman:The difference, however, is that they lived until they died, and now
Dr Goodman:we tend to spend our last decade in this ghastly twilight of suffering
Dr Goodman:and disability warehoused in institutions, however caring they are.
Dr Goodman:Care home is an institution.
Dr Goodman:Um, because we become decrepit, so we are not actually living
Dr Goodman:longer, we are just living sicker.
Dr Goodman:And the point is that this health crisis, which people can't see is
Dr Goodman:inextricably linked to the environmental crisis that most of us can see.
Dr Goodman:If we walk around our local park and we see some of the trees are dying and we
Dr Goodman:know that the fish in the ocean are being choked by plastic, but we don't know that
Dr Goodman:it's giving us cancer, and we know that, you know, forest fires are destroying
Dr Goodman:the rainforest and that that's increasing the CO2, which is causing climate change,
Dr Goodman:we don't know that it's also causing lung cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
Dr Goodman:So because that was what garnered the most interest and was also what
Dr Goodman:I began to feel most passionate about, that's why the second book
Dr Goodman:is focused entirely on the planetary connections and why the subtitle is.
Dr Goodman:An ecological doctor's prescription for healing your body and the planet.
Dr Goodman:We cannot separate them.
Dr Goodman:And I wish the environmentalists, the environmental activists, knew that
Dr Goodman:they're fighting for human health as well.
Dr Goodman:And I wish the integrative and holistic physicians and practitioners knew that
Dr Goodman:they need to be environmentalists as well.
Dr Goodman:So I want to join these dots.
Rob:Yeah, no.
Rob:Well, number one, thank you for answering my question.
Rob:That was perfect.
Rob:Number two.
Rob:Um, yeah, no, I, I couldn't agree more.
Rob:And it is, it is just so insidious, this whole sort of, um, the,
Rob:this toxic environmental load sort of, sort of driving this
Rob:dysfunction at, at a health level.
Rob:And I think it's, it's because it's sort of s very slowly impacted society.
Rob:Um, I. A again, I'd sort of, I, I did sort of want to chuckle when you, uh,
Rob:sort of talked about environmentalists.
Rob:I often think, yeah, that they've got it the wrong way around
Rob:because ultimately I think the planet will probably be, be fine.
Rob:It's us, uh, human beings who are gonna finish themselves off, give
Rob:it, uh, I know 10, 20,000 years, whatever that figure may or may not be.
Rob:And the earth will regain its own homeostasis.
Rob:However, we will be long gone.
Rob:So, um, I'm not personally worried about the earth.
Rob:I'm worried about mankind or humankind, but I think that's, it's interesting,
Dr Goodman:isn't it?
Dr Goodman:There's a campaign to save the bees and save the badgers and say, save the beavers
Dr Goodman:and all these other, which is quite right.
Dr Goodman:I agree with all these, of course, but there isn't a campaign to save the
Dr Goodman:humans because we assume medicine will do that, especially the mh s God bless.
Dr Goodman:But all they can do is pick up the pieces.
Dr Goodman:They are not addressing the causes.
Dr Goodman:However, the good news is.
Dr Goodman:The good news is that if you understand all this and you know where the
Dr Goodman:pollution is coming from in your own environment and how it's getting into
Dr Goodman:you, through your lungs, through your mouth, through your skin, then there's
Dr Goodman:loads you can do about it loads.
Dr Goodman:And that's why I wrote the book, you know, you can protect yourself from
Dr Goodman:at least 90% of this pollution and we should talk about how you can do that.
Dr Goodman:Before we talk about actually detoxing.
Rob:Oh yeah, yeah.
Rob:No, I, I agree fully.
Rob:Um, just with regards to your book, uh, quickly, um, it's got a sort
Rob:of a very, sort of oriental feel to it in the sense that you've broken
Rob:down the chapters into earth, uh, water, air, fire, and then I think
Rob:indoor pollution is, is the last one.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:Tax
Rob:one.
Rob:Um, yeah.
Rob:While that, yeah, while that last one doesn't quite fit in my analogy, I'm sort
Rob:of interested in thought process there.
Rob:So would you mind just break, uh, explaining why you, you
Rob:chose tho those chapter titles?
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:Um, it's a really interesting question because I wanted to
Dr Goodman:write this for a long time.
Dr Goodman:Um, but the information was overwhelming.
Dr Goodman:It overwhelmed me, and I was committed to presenting it in a way that wouldn't
Dr Goodman:be too overwhelming for the reader.
Dr Goodman:Okay.
Dr Goodman:So you're finding out about all this pollution and what it's doing to us.
Dr Goodman:And one way to cope with overwhelm is to categorize, okay, so how am
Dr Goodman:I gonna categorize, there's like a hundred thousand synthetic chemical
Dr Goodman:pollutants in our environment.
Dr Goodman:Now how am I gonna categorize them?
Dr Goodman:Obviously, I'm not gonna do it according to chemical type, um, because you'd need a
Dr Goodman:degree in chemistry to make sense of that.
Dr Goodman:And I sat with this for a full year, Rob, before I was able to start writing.
Dr Goodman:It was a year that I thought it was intellectual paralysis, but in fact,
Dr Goodman:I now know that the, the book was cooking under the surface because
Dr Goodman:the minute I broke through that, the writing just started to flow.
Dr Goodman:But the way I broke through it was as follows, that I was in a
Dr Goodman:cottage in July or August in s Snowdonia wanting to go hiking.
Dr Goodman:It was pouring with rain and after a week sitting there with a blank
Dr Goodman:piece of paper and a pen staring outta the window at the rain.
Dr Goodman:It suddenly came to me fully formed that the way to divide up this otherwise
Dr Goodman:unmanageable topic is according to the four elements, because earth,
Dr Goodman:water, air, and fire, as I say in the introduction to the book, are fundamental
Dr Goodman:categories of human experience.
Dr Goodman:I mean, their fundamental categories in physics like the three states of matter,
Dr Goodman:solid liquid, gas, and then energy, which of course is fire, but they're
Dr Goodman:also part of folklore, myth mysticism.
Dr Goodman:I think you said Oriental, but no, this is, this is Western Celtic tradition,
Dr Goodman:European and Native American tradition.
Dr Goodman:We all think in terms of the four elements.
Dr Goodman:In China, they have five elements, which is a different system.
Dr Goodman:Okay?
Dr Goodman:But even in India, I think they have the four elements.
Dr Goodman:And basically where do we encounter these toxins?
Dr Goodman:We encounter them in the earth.
Dr Goodman:The pesticides and the heavy metals from mining are in the earth.
Dr Goodman:Therefore, in our food, therefore in our bodies, we encounter them in the
Dr Goodman:water that's coming out of our tap.
Dr Goodman:We encounter them in the air that we are breathing.
Dr Goodman:And the fire chapter, I'm using fire in a semi metaphorical sense
Dr Goodman:because the pollution that we are encountering and that's damaging us is
Dr Goodman:physical as well as chemical, right?
Dr Goodman:So air, water, air, water and earth is chemical pollution, but
Dr Goodman:there is electromagnetic pollution as well, and nuclear pollution.
Dr Goodman:And this is about energy, not actually molecules of stuff.
Dr Goodman:Energy in the sense that your physics teacher meant it not in the way a Tai
Dr Goodman:chi teacher or homeopath might mean it, although ultimately they're the same.
Dr Goodman:I'm just trying to say this is science.
Dr Goodman:This is not wiffy mysticism.
Dr Goodman:But we've got an electromagnetic spectrum that we've evolved with
Dr Goodman:the middle bit of it, right?
Dr Goodman:The rainbow colored light, visible light ultraviolet and infrared from the sun.
Dr Goodman:That's what we've evolved with.
Dr Goodman:But since World War ii, we've also been exposed to much, much, much at
Dr Goodman:shorter wavelength, higher frequency, which is X-rays, gamma rays in nuclear
Dr Goodman:fallout, and the opposite extreme end of the electromagnetic spectrum,
Dr Goodman:which is very long wavelengths, but very high, uh, very low frequencies.
Dr Goodman:That's the electromagnetic radiation, which is coming out of your mobile
Dr Goodman:phone, your wifi router, and the mobile phone mask or cell phone
Dr Goodman:tower, as they call it in America.
Dr Goodman:Mm-hmm.
Dr Goodman:Um, and I discovered when writing chapter six of the new book, there's thousands
Dr Goodman:of published papers showing that this electromagnetic radiation that our kids
Dr Goodman:are now exposed to in school from wifi.
Dr Goodman:It is linked with neurodevelopmental disorders.
Dr Goodman:It's linked with brain tumors.
Dr Goodman:It's linked with the extreme restlessness we call A DHD.
Dr Goodman:And we are making these kids worse by putting them in school with wifi.
Dr Goodman:Uh, it's linked to cancers of all kind, unfortunately, including leukemia.
Dr Goodman:And that there's a solid body of research on this.
Dr Goodman:It's been known for many decades, and of course it's all getting more
Dr Goodman:intense with 5G on its way and so on.
Dr Goodman:And when I first started writing that chapter, actually as with the first
Dr Goodman:chapter about pesticides, I already knew this from my own clinical experience
Dr Goodman:and that of my colleagues, but I was worried will I be able to find
Dr Goodman:the academic papers to back it up?
Dr Goodman:I wanted half a dozen papers.
Dr Goodman:And actually what I found on all these topics was thousands of
Dr Goodman:published papers, proper Parker respectable peer reviewed journals.
Dr Goodman:And the problem was not, can I find the evidence, but which of the evidence
Dr Goodman:shall I put in the book as a reference?
Dr Goodman:Because.
Dr Goodman:It is over.
Dr Goodman:And what is mind blowing really is that all this information is
Dr Goodman:out there in the public domain.
Dr Goodman:Research has been done, the papers have been published, but nobody knows.
Dr Goodman:It's not just that the general public doesn't know, doctors don't know, doctors
Dr Goodman:don't know about the research that's been done showing what's actually happening,
Dr Goodman:that's making their patients ill.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:No, again, I, I, I couldn't agree more on, it's something I'd like
Rob:to come back to in a minute.
Rob:Oh, actually we're on wifi.
Rob:We might as well talk.
Rob:Well, one non native EMS, we might as well talk about it, I suppose.
Rob:Um, yeah.
Rob:It's something near and dear to my heart and I've, I've definitely taken a, a
Rob:fairly deep dive into maybe the, the, the, the, the, the biochemistry there and
Rob:how these non-native EMS potentially sort of disrupt, uh, calcium gated channels.
Rob:Those all stated
Dr Goodman:calcium channels Yeah.
Dr Goodman:Channels.
Dr Goodman:Yep.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:And all of that.
Rob:Um, do you think that.
Rob:Uh, on, on a list of thi on a priority based list of things, say one to 10, do
Rob:you think EMFs and non-native EMS and things like dirty electricity rarely are
Rob:as harmful as say something like fluoride, fluoride and drinking water or, yeah, I, I
Dr Goodman:think they're actually in my top three.
Dr Goodman:Okay.
Dr Goodman:So when people say, what are your three absolute key tips,
Dr Goodman:one is regulate your EMFs.
Dr Goodman:Now, it doesn't mean get rid of your mobile phone.
Dr Goodman:It means learn to use it safely.
Dr Goodman:And that's what the last part of chapter six is about.
Dr Goodman:In the new book is how you can use this technology in a
Dr Goodman:much, much safer way, right?
Dr Goodman:Instead of wifi, you can have ethernet cables, you can have
Dr Goodman:hardwired access to the in.
Dr Goodman:I'm talking to you now.
Dr Goodman:I have full broadband, full access to the internet with zero wifi.
Dr Goodman:It's actually not rocket science.
Dr Goodman:Again, you can get ethernet cables, you can get it set up for you if you are using
Dr Goodman:your mobile phone text rather than speak.
Dr Goodman:If you've got to speak, use speaker phone.
Dr Goodman:Do not carry it on your person when it's on.
Dr Goodman:Even putting it an inch or two away from your head vastly reduces
Dr Goodman:the danger of brain tumors.
Dr Goodman:Vastly.
Dr Goodman:The people who get the brain tumors are the people who've had the
Dr Goodman:mobile phone touching their ear.
Dr Goodman:And so there are loads of ways you can use the technology differently
Dr Goodman:to make it completely safe.
Dr Goodman:Um, so I would have, yeah, three top tips.
Dr Goodman:One is use your, your electromagnet, your electronic devices far more safely.
Dr Goodman:Second, filter your water.
Dr Goodman:'cause if you get a good wilt water filter, you are getting rid
Dr Goodman:of the chlorine, the fluoride, the pesticide residues, the drug residues,
Dr Goodman:the heavy metals, all in one go.
Dr Goodman:And thirdly, really, really crucial is to eat organic.
Dr Goodman:Because if you're not eating a hundred percent Soil Association,
Dr Goodman:certified organic food, whether it's vegetables, meat, eggs, whatever
Dr Goodman:you are eating, pesticides, and we need to say what the pesticides are.
Dr Goodman:They were developed as weapons of war for both the two world wars.
Dr Goodman:They are neurotoxic agents and therefore it's not surprising that they're
Dr Goodman:contributing hugely to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's,
Dr Goodman:MS motor, neuro disease, and so on.
Dr Goodman:Um, and when the Second World War ended, the companies still
Dr Goodman:wanted to sell their products.
Dr Goodman:So they literally repurposed them for killing insects, killing
Dr Goodman:fungi, filling, killing bugs.
Dr Goodman:Now, why are those pests a problem on the fields in the first place?
Dr Goodman:Primarily because of monocrop farming, right?
Dr Goodman:Chemical agriculture where you've got a vast field of only one crop.
Dr Goodman:It is like an invitation to whichever pest likes to eat that crop, to
Dr Goodman:eat it up, to reproduce wildly, to invite all their friends in
Dr Goodman:relations, then you need a pesticide.
Dr Goodman:But the way organic and regenerative farming is happening these days, which is
Dr Goodman:very, very exciting, and it's equivalent to integrative medicine actually, because
Dr Goodman:agriculture, like medicine, has been in the grip of the chemical industry and
Dr Goodman:many people are trying to get out of it.
Dr Goodman:Farm with nature, not against nature.
Dr Goodman:And if what they do is they have diversity, so they have animals roaming
Dr Goodman:the fields, fertilizing them naturally, they have flowers and vegetables and
Dr Goodman:lots of different crops growing together, which means you don't get many weeds.
Dr Goodman:So you don't need the herbicides and you don't get pests.
Dr Goodman:'cause pests always have a favorite plant.
Dr Goodman:And if their favorite plant is one among 20 growing in that little
Dr Goodman:plot, they're not gonna take over.
Dr Goodman:And these farmers never leave the earth bare.
Dr Goodman:So it doesn't get eroded by fertilizers.
Dr Goodman:You don't get.
Dr Goodman:The effects of drought and rainfall, you don't get floods.
Dr Goodman:I mean, it's good for the earth and it's good for us.
Dr Goodman:So if we're eating strictly organic food, we are supporting the farmers
Dr Goodman:who are eventually gonna make the pesticide companies redundant.
Dr Goodman:They'll have to take their bat home because if we all eat organic and farmers
Dr Goodman:are able to stop using these hideous chemicals will be eating healthily
Dr Goodman:and big pharma will go outta business.
Rob:Yeah, and I agree completely.
Rob:Do you think eating organic, uh, I'm just thinking the average consumer is
Rob:again, particularly high up on the list of things that people should prioritize.
Rob:Yep.
Rob:I think especially your
Dr Goodman:average day, eat organic, filter your water and vastly reduce and
Dr Goodman:moderate your use of the mobile phone.
Dr Goodman:Um, and I have had plenty of people sit in my consultation, say, look,
Dr Goodman:I can't afford to eat organic.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:And then they say to me, oh, can we reschedule the next appointment?
Dr Goodman:'cause I'm gonna be on holiday in Barbados.
Dr Goodman:Fair enough.
Dr Goodman:Well,
Dr Goodman:priorities, that's a very nice
Dr Goodman:way to get your vitamin D, although it's not great for the planet.
Dr Goodman:But hey, uh, look, there is a real issue here, and that's what I list
Dr Goodman:at the end of chapter one of the new book, all the wonderful charitable
Dr Goodman:organizations that are working to make organic produce fresh, local, locally
Dr Goodman:grown, organic produce available to the poorest people in our societies.
Dr Goodman:Because ultimately, if you say, oh, organic is a middle class
Dr Goodman:privilege, then you are saying to paraphrase Murray Antoinette, let
Dr Goodman:the poor junk, let them eat junk.
Dr Goodman:And of course, what's given to food banks, tins and packets.
Dr Goodman:No.
Dr Goodman:Everyone has the right to access to decent food.
Dr Goodman:And as I say, there are plenty of organizations trying to make organically
Dr Goodman:farmed produce available to people who are struggling to eat at all.
Dr Goodman:And it is a scandal in our society that people are struggling to have
Dr Goodman:enough money to eat anything at all.
Dr Goodman:Ultimately chemical infested food and monocultural agriculture is, is not
Dr Goodman:affordable because we are all paying the price in an NHS waiting list
Dr Goodman:that's got 7 million people on it.
Dr Goodman:We've got something like 2 million people out of work because they're off sick
Dr Goodman:and they're eating processed junk food.
Dr Goodman:They're not eating anything organic or fresh or local.
Dr Goodman:And that's what needs to change.
Dr Goodman:And it takes government action at the highest level.
Dr Goodman:But there are only about 3 million people out of 70 million in
Dr Goodman:Britain who absolutely are too poor to afford to eat organic.
Dr Goodman:And what I'm saying to the other 67 million is vote with your wallet.
Dr Goodman:Right?
Dr Goodman:Prioritize it.
Dr Goodman:Do you know what proportion of our income we spend on food now?
Dr Goodman:It's about 8% and it used to be in the 1960s.
Dr Goodman:33%, one third.
Dr Goodman:So we totally need to reprioritize it and we need to think of eating organic and
Dr Goodman:filtering our water as health insurance.
Dr Goodman:You know, it's a bit expensive, but it's not as expensive
Dr Goodman:as actual health insurance.
Dr Goodman:And also it depends how much, sorry.
Rob:No, I was gonna say always being sick, to be honest,
Rob:that that's far more cost.
Rob:But being sick is incredibly
Dr Goodman:expensive.
Dr Goodman:If you have cancer, you can't work.
Dr Goodman:So what I would say is if you've been eating battery, farmed chicken, you know,
Dr Goodman:reared with antibiotics and hormones and immense cruelty three times a week,
Dr Goodman:cut that out and start eating a free range happy organic chicken once a week.
Dr Goodman:That's all you need.
Dr Goodman:You don't need loads of meat, then you're spending less money and you're
Dr Goodman:making yourself a whole lot healthier.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Uh, it's definitely sort of a, an an institutional, um.
Rob:Not argument but debate, isn't it?
Rob:Because I think ultimately that has to be, the society has
Rob:to be reeducated, don't they?
Rob:There's no point in sort of, uh, blaming the food companies because I
Rob:mean, if, if you believe in this sort of, this capitalist approach to, to
Rob:the world, which I, I suppose, which makes sense then fair enough, but okay.
Rob:Um, but ultimately we've somehow got to convince the government to sort of
Rob:start, uh, educating, well, I dunno if it's, it's on us, uh, as listeners
Rob:or how do you think about that?
Rob:Uh, that particular question?
Rob:Sorry, I'm, uh, sort of trying to Yeah.
Rob:The government won't do it.
Dr Goodman:The government won't do it because they get lots of nice
Dr Goodman:tax revenue from the food companies.
Dr Goodman:Um, if they really cared about the NHS, they would put vast taxes
Dr Goodman:on the junk food companies and make junk food really expensive.
Dr Goodman:And they would subsidize the organic farms.
Dr Goodman:And they would also subsidize local farmer's markets so that all the farmers
Dr Goodman:could sell their produce at the farm gate.
Dr Goodman:Special arrangements can be made for a huge city like London, which is
Dr Goodman:far away from any farms, although actually there are urban farms.
Dr Goodman:That's a whole nother exciting development.
Dr Goodman:But if you subsidize the organic farmers and stop, stop subsidizing the massive
Dr Goodman:agrichemical industrial farms that are mostly supplying wheat and oil seed
Dr Goodman:rate for the junk food industry, um, then your people will get healthier and
Dr Goodman:your NHS waiting list will get shorter.
Dr Goodman:I think it needs to be tackled at all levels.
Dr Goodman:Yes.
Dr Goodman:Grassroots education campaign, you know, but the mums that are passing the Turkey
Dr Goodman:twizzlerss through the bars of the school, the school railings, um, are not gonna
Dr Goodman:have the wherewithal to pay attention.
Dr Goodman:They need a decent place to live.
Dr Goodman:They need a decent income.
Dr Goodman:Um, before they can reasonably be expected to give their attention
Dr Goodman:to what, to feed their family within their very limited means.
Dr Goodman:And that's why some of it, some of it's education, but some of
Dr Goodman:it has gotta be political change.
Dr Goodman:And that's what I'm saying.
Dr Goodman:Those of us who can afford to vote with our wallets need to boycott the
Dr Goodman:junk food industry and the non-organic fruit and veg and meat as well.
Dr Goodman:And as, um, as William Lana of Green Fibers, an organic cotton clothing
Dr Goodman:company in Totnes said, what we buy will be produced and what we don't won't,
Dr Goodman:and boycotts are incredibly effective.
Dr Goodman:And if we boycott the poisonous stuff, we are making ourselves healthy.
Dr Goodman:And eventually those who are pedalling, the poisons will go outta business.
Dr Goodman:So I think it's from the top and from the bottom.
Rob:Yeah, no, it's definitely something that's important.
Rob:I. You've just mentioned cotton clothing, which is something that
Rob:I, I know you've spoken about before and I, I have a feeling it's in
Rob:your, it's in your book as well.
Rob:It's, it's in chapter three.
Rob:How important is, is clothing speci, uh, specifically sort of
Rob:not utilizing synthetic clothing.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Uh, he said wearing a synthetic hoodie, ironically enough.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:But, um, so this
Dr Goodman:is a, this was a revelation to me because I've been
Dr Goodman:focused on, you know, what we eat, what we drink, what we inhale.
Dr Goodman:Um, but as I was writing this new book, I was invited to speak at Sustainable
Dr Goodman:Fashion Week, so that was September, 2022.
Dr Goodman:So I went into a bit of a panic, 'cause I know absolutely nothing about fashion
Dr Goodman:or clothing, but I did some research for that and discovered the huge amount of
Dr Goodman:pesticides that go into cotton clothing if it's not a hundred percent organic.
Dr Goodman:And the effects of synthetic clothing, which is made of fabrics
Dr Goodman:like polyester, nylon, rayon, and that those are petrochemicals.
Dr Goodman:They are essentially plastic.
Dr Goodman:Now, of course, I knew about the dangers of synthetic cosmetics, right?
Dr Goodman:Because I know the skin is the largest organ of the body.
Dr Goodman:It's a highly absorptive surface.
Dr Goodman:And if you are rubbing moisturizer into yourself, if
Dr Goodman:it's coconut oil, that's fine.
Dr Goodman:If it's one of the wonderful, completely organic products that are mentioned
Dr Goodman:on the Soil Association's health and beauty pages, then it's fine.
Dr Goodman:But if it's some nasty thing from the chemist or the supermarket,
Dr Goodman:you are rubbing plastic petrochemicals into your skin.
Dr Goodman:And just like the lipophilic chemicals can come out in the sauna, they will go in.
Dr Goodman:So I knew that we absorbed toxins through our skin.
Dr Goodman:You know, aluminum and parabens from underarm deodorants.
Dr Goodman:Um, you know, all, all these, all these nasty things that we put on
Dr Goodman:our skin, every single one of which has a safe herbal alternative, right?
Dr Goodman:You can get safe herbal alternatives to all of them.
Dr Goodman:And I describe how to make sure they really are organic in
Dr Goodman:chapter seven of the new book.
Dr Goodman:Okay?
Dr Goodman:But I hadn't really thought about clothing, which is touching our skin,
Dr Goodman:and particularly nightwear pajamas, whatever you're wearing at night,
Dr Goodman:like your bedding and your mattress is touching your skin for eight hours a day.
Dr Goodman:When I began to look into it, I discovered that, yeah, most,
Dr Goodman:most clothing now is synthetic.
Dr Goodman:So you're wearing plastic next to your skin.
Dr Goodman:Not only is that probably harmful to you, but every time you wash those
Dr Goodman:clothes, millions of plastic microfibers are released into the environment
Dr Goodman:and when they are finally recycled, I don't believe they ever are recycled.
Dr Goodman:They end up in rubbish dumps.
Dr Goodman:And those are some of the plastics that are going into the oceans and poisoning
Dr Goodman:the birds and the fish and what have you, and coming back to bite us in the end.
Dr Goodman:So that was really shocking.
Dr Goodman:So I thought, well, you know, natural fibers, cotton, 95% of
Dr Goodman:cotton is drenched in insecticide.
Dr Goodman:And what I learned in my conversations with Pesticide Action Network, wonderful,
Dr Goodman:wonderful organization, pan UK, do look them up, is not only is it probably
Dr Goodman:harmful for us, that's not their main concern, but the farmers in Africa and
Dr Goodman:India who grow this non-organic cotton, not only does it consume vast amounts of
Dr Goodman:water, whereas organic cotton isn't quite so thirsty, but those farmers get sick.
Dr Goodman:They get very sick from working with a pesticide infested cotton and
Dr Goodman:the, and those people who spray the insecticides get incredibly sick.
Dr Goodman:And this is now well documented.
Dr Goodman:And the children of the farmers and the sprayers.
Dr Goodman:Guess what?
Dr Goodman:Behavioral and neuropsychiatric disorders, because these are neurotoxins,
Dr Goodman:so what's left that we can wear?
Dr Goodman:And the answer is a hundred percent organic cotton.
Dr Goodman:And you have to be really careful and check the labels because yeah, you can
Dr Goodman:go to, uh, popular clothing manufacturer say, and it says made with organic
Dr Goodman:cotton with, right, it's a bit of a con.
Dr Goodman:It means there's some organic cotton in it, but made with
Dr Goodman:organic cotton is not enough.
Dr Goodman:It has to say a hundred percent organic cotton.
Dr Goodman:And there are several places you can get this fabric and these clothes now
Dr Goodman:including green fibers in to nest.
Dr Goodman:And you know what?
Dr Goodman:It's expensive.
Dr Goodman:So you don't need 20 t-shirts, you maybe need half a dozen and you can get lovely
Dr Goodman:non-toxic laundry liquid from green scent.
Dr Goodman:That's sense as in perfume, A-C-E-N-T-S Green Sense.
Dr Goodman:Who make fabulous laundry, liquid and even fabric condition, it's totally non-toxic
Dr Goodman:and your clothes will feel better on you and you make your half a dozen t-shirts,
Dr Goodman:which are expensive last, as opposed to having 20 pathetic ones that are damaging
Dr Goodman:you, but also damaging the environment.
Dr Goodman:Because if you use organic cotton or any other natural material like linen,
Dr Goodman:which is from a plant flags or hemp, which does grow in this country, and
Dr Goodman:cotton doesn't, so that's another thing for linen and hemp and even silk, right?
Dr Goodman:And even nettles, you can make fabric out of stinging nettles and it's really shiny
Dr Goodman:and silky and it doesn't sting, right?
Dr Goodman:So when those clothes reach the end of their life and are
Dr Goodman:disposed of, they are compostable.
Dr Goodman:They just go back into the earth.
Dr Goodman:So you are doing no harm to yourself and you are doing no harm to landfill.
Dr Goodman:So, yeah, I get very enthusiastic about natural clothing in, uh,
Dr Goodman:the middle of chapter three.
Dr Goodman:And the reason it's in chapter three, which is the water chapter, is because
Dr Goodman:this is to do what happened with what happens when you put them in the washing
Dr Goodman:machine as well as everything else.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:No, I think it just comes down to a sense of priorities.
Rob:Uh, doesn't it?
Rob:At the end of the day, uh, we sort of somehow got to convince people
Rob:that their health should come above and before their desire to wear, uh,
Rob:our, our butcher it, 'cause I don't know any clothing brand names, but
Rob:Chanel is, is that a perfect brand?
Rob:Just don't mention any brand names.
Rob:We
Dr Goodman:get the idea.
Dr Goodman:But also, sorry, just to go back, the reason that the clothing issue is in
Dr Goodman:the water chapter is also because what goes around comes around and all those
Dr Goodman:plastic fibers from those thrown away synthetic clothes are coming back in
Dr Goodman:our taps unless we filter them out.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:It is hard for people to prioritize this stuff and unfortunately what it
Dr Goodman:usually takes is getting ill, well, actually it takes two stage process.
Dr Goodman:It takes getting ill and then discovering that conventional medicine
Dr Goodman:can't really do anything for you.
Rob:No, the there are amazing, uh, there are amazing triage services and
Rob:as I'm sure you've, uh, discussed on many other podcasts, broken leg and
Rob:all of that, I'm going straight to a knee, but if I got type two diabetes,
Rob:I am not going to my local gp seeing as we're talking about we're in the
Rob:water chapter, we might as well go back to the discussion, uh, on water and,
Rob:and maybe tie that up, uh, for folks.
Rob:Um.
Rob:You mentioned fluoride earlier, and I think that's something that is what it is.
Rob:I don't think it is a contentious topic.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Um, and uh, obviously as you mentioned it, it's, it's derived from fluorine.
Rob:Um, and it was originally introduced, I think around about 60
Rob:years in the AGO in the UK and 64
Dr Goodman:in Birmingham and, and the Republic of Ireland, much later in other
Dr Goodman:parts of the uk, but a long time ago in America and nowhere in mainland Europe.
Dr Goodman:'cause they're not doffed.
Rob:Definitely not.
Rob:Uh, and I believe it was introduced predominantly with the idea
Rob:of improving a tooth quality.
Rob:Now I have a feeling, uh, that it does actually make up, uh, to teeth harder.
Rob:Mm-hmm.
Rob:But it oftentimes makes them more brittle as well.
Rob:Yep.
Rob:Which is sort of what people don't tell you.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:Now, fluoride is also a, as you mentioned earlier, a a neurotoxin.
Rob:It's a mitochondrial toxin.
Rob:Mm-hmm.
Rob:Would you sort of mind running us through the fluoride story and
Rob:why is potentially so dangerous?
Dr Goodman:So, when something is incredibly controversial, you have to
Dr Goodman:follow the money if you want the clues.
Dr Goodman:So let's go back, let's rewind.
Dr Goodman:They're telling us that it's good for children's teeth and it certainly has an
Dr Goodman:effect on the teeth, and it has exactly the same effect on the bones with bones.
Dr Goodman:Also, it makes them harder, but more brittle.
Dr Goodman:So, you know, it's gonna make osteoporosis slightly worse because although
Dr Goodman:it makes the bones harder and more dense, it increases the fracture rate.
Dr Goodman:And I found studies, which I quote in chapter three that show that
Dr Goodman:particularly in postmenopausal women who are very liable to fracture of
Dr Goodman:the hip, which can be fatal and almost always disabling, um, that risk is
Dr Goodman:much greater if they live in an area where there's fluoride in the water.
Dr Goodman:And you also find an increased risk of osteosarcoma, which is a rare and
Dr Goodman:usually fatal primary tumor of the bone in young people, especially young men,
Dr Goodman:where there's fluoride in the water.
Dr Goodman:So it distorts the architecture of bone.
Dr Goodman:It lowers children's iq.
Dr Goodman:Again, there are, this is so astonishing.
Dr Goodman:There are studies going back to the 1930s showing that where
Dr Goodman:there's more fluoride in the water or the soil, there is a lower iq.
Dr Goodman:And we know that putting fluoride in the water or in the salt as they do in Mexico.
Dr Goodman:Um, affects children in the womb and it affects babies and
Dr Goodman:toddlers, and it lowers their iq.
Dr Goodman:And it scares me that we're for that and for other reasons.
Dr Goodman:Raising a generation of kids who are damaged, you know, their
Dr Goodman:brains are not as sharp as their great-grandfather's brains were.
Dr Goodman:So what is fluoride?
Dr Goodman:And the most important thing to say about it is it's not a nutrient.
Dr Goodman:It has no role in human metabolism.
Dr Goodman:No role whatsoever.
Dr Goodman:It's one of the toxic hagens that pushes out iodine or iodide.
Dr Goodman:Okay?
Dr Goodman:It damages the kidneys, it damages the ovaries.
Dr Goodman:Um, and obviously it damages the thyroid for reasons that we've already explained.
Dr Goodman:So, what's it doing in our water?
Dr Goodman:Well, they're saying it's for children's teeth, but you know, the best way to
Dr Goodman:conserve children's teeth is twofold.
Dr Goodman:One is keep them off the sugar, and number two is brush their teeth.
Dr Goodman:And if you look at the graphs of how dental decay has been decreasing since
Dr Goodman:the late 1960s across Europe and Britain and America, you find that the rate
Dr Goodman:of decline in tooth decay in kids goes down steadily and identically in the
Dr Goodman:countries where there's no fluoride in the water and the countries where
Dr Goodman:there is fluoride in the water, right, it has made no def difference to
Dr Goodman:the rate of decline in tooth decay.
Dr Goodman:And tooth decay is declining because dental hygiene is improving.
Dr Goodman:Now, you know, things may be going the other way because there are
Dr Goodman:no NHS dentists anymore and you know, there's an awful lot of
Dr Goodman:junk food and sweets being sold.
Dr Goodman:And maybe if you are a very distracted mom and you are living 10 floors up in a
Dr Goodman:tower block, and you're gonna give your kids something sweet to shut them up, and
Dr Goodman:you are gonna forget to brush their teeth.
Dr Goodman:So it may be going backwards, but fluoridation has made no.
Dr Goodman:Improvement to dental health on a population level, but it
Dr Goodman:has damaged bone and brain.
Dr Goodman:And again, there is a case history in chapter three, one of many that I could
Dr Goodman:have included of a child from Birmingham with incredibly damaged bone and brain
Dr Goodman:and very high levels of fluoride in the urine and vanishingly low levels of ide.
Dr Goodman:Now, can you treat this?
Dr Goodman:Yes, you can.
Dr Goodman:And what?
Dr Goodman:What we do is firstly plead with the parents to install a water
Dr Goodman:filter, a whole house water filter.
Dr Goodman:Yes, it costs money, but it means the child is no longer
Dr Goodman:drinking the toxic fluoride.
Dr Goodman:Second, you do all the general detox measures, you know, from
Dr Goodman:vitamin C to vegetable juicing, to sauna to everything else.
Dr Goodman:But third and most important, you give iodine.
Dr Goodman:You give the child some iodine drops to get the fluoride outta
Dr Goodman:the body because just like fluoride pushes out iodine, iodine pushes
Dr Goodman:back and it pushes out fluoride.
Dr Goodman:I'll tell you something else.
Dr Goodman:Iodine protects against it protects against radioactive iodine, which
Dr Goodman:is the first thing to be released when there's a disaster like churn
Dr Goodman:Bill or Fukushima, or wind scale, which is now called Celler Field.
Dr Goodman:And those nuclear power plants, even though it's meant to be a reprocessing
Dr Goodman:plant now, they are still legally allowed to release radioactive waste into the sea,
Dr Goodman:and therefore it blows back on the land.
Dr Goodman:It's in the air.
Dr Goodman:That's the subject of chapter five.
Dr Goodman:But in the first few days and weeks after any kind of nuclear disaster,
Dr Goodman:whether it's covered up or whether we read about it in the press, iodine
Dr Goodman:being topped up with good iodine, natural iodine in your thyroid
Dr Goodman:gland and other organs will mean the radioactive iodine can't get a foothold.
Dr Goodman:So iodine is hugely protective against radioactive iodine as well as against
Dr Goodman:fluoride, chlorine, and bromine.
Rob:Do you worry about excessive iodine intake and things like any
Rob:form of sort of thyroid toxicosis or excessive thyroid function?
Rob:And when you talk about iodine supplementation, yeah, it's,
Dr Goodman:it's, um, it's a complicated one, which is why I'll never answer
Dr Goodman:the question about what dose do you give, because it depends on the person.
Dr Goodman:And if you are doing iodine, you have to be, you have to be working
Dr Goodman:with an experienced practitioner.
Dr Goodman:If somebody's got hyperthyroidism, like thyroid, toxicosis, you have
Dr Goodman:to be extremely careful with iodine and not just give it willy-nilly.
Dr Goodman:But the first thing to do is measure the iodine.
Dr Goodman:And actually, even in some people with overactive thyroid, you find vanishingly
Dr Goodman:low levels of iodine and maybe a thyroid is, you know, trying to make more thyroid.
Dr Goodman:Precisely because it's trying to find the iodine.
Dr Goodman:We don't know this almost always with underactive thyroid iodine is
Dr Goodman:useful, but you see, this is where medicine has gone astray because.
Dr Goodman:70 years ago, if you went to the doctor with a goiter, right?
Dr Goodman:An enlarged thyroid.
Dr Goodman:And the classic symptoms of low thyroid is your pale, cold, puffy,
Dr Goodman:constipated, sluggish brain.
Dr Goodman:They wouldn't give you thyroid hormone.
Dr Goodman:They'd, first of all, give you some iodine.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:And 99% of the time, that would enable your thyroid gland to
Dr Goodman:make its own thyroid hormone.
Dr Goodman:Right.
Dr Goodman:And we are seeing an absolute epidemic of low thyroid, and it's both
Dr Goodman:untreated, undiagnosed, and overtreated.
Dr Goodman:Right.
Dr Goodman:That's a whole nother complicated story.
Rob:And No, it is, and uh, it's something again near and dear to my heart, but
Rob:I think, uh, sort of to prove your point, the point of this conversation,
Rob:I think the, the reason that things like Id no longer work is because the,
Rob:the huge amount of contaminants that, that, that are in the thyroid and
Rob:either sort of endocrine or uh, uh, active, active tissues in the body.
Rob:And then you, you throw all these, uh, these medicines at it and you create
Rob:this sort of environment where there's this, this polypharmacy going on.
Rob:There's this huge amount of medications being used and what should have just
Rob:been a simple nutrient deficiency is now, and a body saturated with toxins.
Rob:Too many drugs.
Rob:That's all true.
Dr Goodman:That is all true.
Dr Goodman:But there's another factor that has complicated it, which was meant to help.
Dr Goodman:And that is testing, laboratory testing of thyroid hormones has caused immense
Dr Goodman:confusion because firstly, they've created a so-called normal range, but that's
Dr Goodman:just based on a population average.
Dr Goodman:With half the population being deficient and takes no account of the fact that
Dr Goodman:the amount of thyroxine I might need in my system is not the amount of
Dr Goodman:thyroxine you might need in your system.
Dr Goodman:So I've seen some people are only, well, when their thyroxine level is at the top
Dr Goodman:of the so-called normal range, and many people who have the symptoms of thyroid
Dr Goodman:deficiency when it's actually in the middle of the so-called normal range.
Dr Goodman:And this normal range issue is a problem with vitamin D as well.
Dr Goodman:You know, the NHS have a normal range that's way too low.
Dr Goodman:Most of us need higher levels than that, and it's a question of confusing
Dr Goodman:what's average in a fairly sick and sickening population with what's healthy?
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:Or what's natural.
Dr Goodman:You don't necessarily want to be in the middle of the range.
Dr Goodman:And of course with thyroxine, they're not even measuring T four now, still less T
Dr Goodman:three, which is actually the active form of the molecule they should be measuring.
Dr Goodman:They're just measuring thyroid stimulating hormone.
Dr Goodman:TSH.
Dr Goodman:And your pituitary may be under or overproducing that
Dr Goodman:for any number of reasons.
Dr Goodman:Um, so again, this is about money saving and they ought to
Dr Goodman:be testing far more thoroughly.
Dr Goodman:But overall you should be treating the person, not the test results.
Dr Goodman:And if all the symptoms and the clinical picture indicate underactive
Dr Goodman:thyroid, then that's what they need.
Dr Goodman:Although I would always start with natural glandular thyroid rather than
Dr Goodman:going straight for the synthetic version.
Dr Goodman:And even before that, check the ID level.
Dr Goodman:Yeah, because the natural glandulars have got a balance of T three and T four.
Dr Goodman:T four.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:I mean there are people who've been on T four for decades and they keep going back
Dr Goodman:to their GP and saying, I'm still tired.
Dr Goodman:So the GP and those T three goes up?
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:And they end up with palpitations and sweats and all the symptoms of overactive
Dr Goodman:thyroid still exhausted because what they needed is a little bit of T three,
Dr Goodman:which isn't in the standard prescription.
Rob:No, it's, uh, it is an issue and something we should, we'll have
Rob:to have another discussion about.
Rob:It's something again that I'm, I'm quite passionate about, so, but yeah.
Rob:Um, let, let's go back to, I suppose, um, air and air pollution.
Rob:I'd love to sort of, I know we're starting to run off on time, so I would
Rob:love to sort of just have the more discussion and then maybe look at,
Rob:at, at some, at some detox physiology.
Rob:'cause I think that's where most people sort of miss out is on how
Rob:the body's actually supposed to get rid of these, uh, toxins that
Rob:we're sort of steadily hoarding.
Rob:So, yeah, the mold piece, uh, it's obviously an, uh, issue predominantly
Rob:that has to do with this idea of sick building syndrome that was sort of trapped
Rob:inside, uh, mold, so than we should be.
Rob:Nobody opens the windows, um, et cetera.
Rob:And that just leads to the accumulation of a large amount of,
Rob:of moisture developing in houses.
Rob:Um, would you sort of mind just elaborating on that story there and,
Rob:and why mold is just such an issue?
Dr Goodman:I, I talk about this at length in the first book in chapter
Dr Goodman:three, which is the autumn chapter.
Dr Goodman:Uh, we have an endemic problem of mold in this country because it's
Dr Goodman:damp, it's cold, and it's damp, and people keep their windows shut.
Dr Goodman:And when your windows are shut, and of course your house is nicely
Dr Goodman:insulated to conserve energy, there's no ventilation anymore.
Dr Goodman:We do three things, right?
Dr Goodman:We bath and shower, we exhale with breathing out water vapor, and we cook.
Dr Goodman:So of course there's loads of moisture inside the home and it goes up to where
Dr Goodman:the walls meet the ceiling, the cornices, and even if you can't see black mold, it's
Dr Goodman:there unless you basically try and mimic the climate of the, of the Mediterranean
Dr Goodman:of Southern Europe where it's hot and dry.
Dr Goodman:And the dry bit is crucial, right?
Dr Goodman:It's not hot in Switzerland upper a mountain, but it is fairly dry.
Dr Goodman:You have to have the windows open and you have to, I should be shot down in flames
Dr Goodman:for saying this, but if it's winter and you've got the windows open, you have to
Dr Goodman:have the heating on and your visitors will be scandalized and they will say, but the
Dr Goodman:heat's going out the window to which you reply, yes, but so are the mold spores
Dr Goodman:and so are the toxic flame retardants.
Dr Goodman:Outgassing from all the soft furnishings that I bought before I
Dr Goodman:knew about all this stuff, right?
Dr Goodman:So yeah, you've got to have air circulation.
Dr Goodman:Gotta be warm, it's gotta be dry.
Dr Goodman:And you've gotta open the windows, and if you have got mold, you
Dr Goodman:can clean it off with borax.
Dr Goodman:Now, borax is not, borax is not a synthetic fungicide is natural
Dr Goodman:material that's been used for ages.
Dr Goodman:It's incredibly cheap.
Dr Goodman:That's why it's really hard to find.
Dr Goodman:And I can tell you that, um, there's a chemist near Elephant and Castle
Dr Goodman:Baldwins chemist that still sells Borax.
Dr Goodman:It's ridiculously cheap.
Dr Goodman:You can use it to clean off the mold, but you can also coat it on those surfaces
Dr Goodman:to prevent the mold accumulating.
Dr Goodman:Other than that, if you can't move to Cyprus, you've just gotta keep
Dr Goodman:your house warm and the windows open all the time, especially at night.
Dr Goodman:The other thing is about bedding, right?
Dr Goodman:So we sweat at night, so what we need to do in the morning is pull the duvet right
Dr Goodman:back, open the bed so it can air, because otherwise you've got mold accumulating.
Dr Goodman:And guess what?
Dr Goodman:The house dust mite loves the mold.
Dr Goodman:Right They are, um, yeah, they go together.
Dr Goodman:Um, so the house dust might actually feeds on the mold or is it the other way around?
Dr Goodman:No, the house dust might feeds on the mold.
Dr Goodman:On the other hand, if you're allergic to house dust mite, you
Dr Goodman:don't want your bed to get dusty.
Dr Goodman:So the compromise is you open the duvet and let the bed air with the window open,
Dr Goodman:reasonably warm room for at least an hour.
Dr Goodman:And then an hour after you've got up, you go back and you put the duvet over and you
Dr Goodman:cover the whole thing with the bedspread.
Dr Goodman:'cause you don't want the dust getting in there.
Dr Goodman:But if you leave the bed covered up after you've been sleeping in
Dr Goodman:it, you will have both moles and house dust might accumulating.
Dr Goodman:Um, it's not a perfect climate.
Dr Goodman:That's the best we can do.
Dr Goodman:But there are other sources of air pollution that we've talked about,
Dr Goodman:like air fresheners, like those ghastly scented candles, um, and so on.
Dr Goodman:But 90% of our time, unfortunately, is lived indoors.
Dr Goodman:And so if you can get rid of the air pollution inside your home.
Dr Goodman:You are getting rid of 90% of that which you are exposed to.
Dr Goodman:Um, and that's, that's what I recommend in detail how to do it
Dr Goodman:in chapter seven of the new book.
Dr Goodman:Air Pollution from Car Fumes is a more difficult one, and I think it really can
Dr Goodman:only be addressed by government policies, um, by us getting out of our cars.
Dr Goodman:And we won't do that until we have decent public transport system.
Dr Goodman:What we need is what they have in Finland, which is a really good public
Dr Goodman:transport systems, affordable to everyone.
Dr Goodman:Clean, green, efficient, pleasant, spacious.
Dr Goodman:I mean, if you go by train in Finland, I'm reliably informed
Dr Goodman:there's one whole carriage, which is a crash for the kids to play in.
Dr Goodman:You know, it's an appealing option.
Dr Goodman:And you know, the fact is at the moment, if I want to go from London to Glasgow, I
Dr Goodman:will go by train, but it will be cheaper to fly, which is a complete scandal.
Dr Goodman:So again, government action has got to make the train cheaper than the plane.
Dr Goodman:And I know a lot of people in the health world don't agree with me on this, but I
Dr Goodman:think we do have to get out of our cars.
Dr Goodman:And I don't think electric vehicles are the answer either, because although
Dr Goodman:they're relatively non-polluting in the place where they are, what has
Dr Goodman:to be dug up out of the earth, um, to provide the rare earth minerals
Dr Goodman:that they need, you know what I mean?
Dr Goodman:That, you know, there are tribes being thrown off their land in Indonesia
Dr Goodman:to get at the nickel, and there are kids down the mines in Congo.
Dr Goodman:This is child slave labor.
Dr Goodman:In order to get the materials for the batteries, for us to put in our electric
Dr Goodman:vehicles and then feel virtuous, you know, it doesn't make any sense.
Dr Goodman:We need properly funded pleasant green, cheap public transport so that it
Dr Goodman:actually is convenient, more convenient and cheaper to use the Boston train
Dr Goodman:and tram than it is to use our cars.
Rob:Yeah, sadly.
Rob:I think it's a case of outta sight outta mind If you don't have to sort
Rob:of witness the, the ahor conditions that people are sort of have to go
Rob:through to actually provide us with these, uh, with the nickel for the
Rob:batteries, then it, it, it's easily sort of swept under the rug, isn't it?
Rob:It it, it becomes less of an issue.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:Which is why we need more education and um, yeah.
Dr Goodman:In my chapter about air pollution, I referenced a wonderful organization called
Dr Goodman:Survival International for Tribal peoples, and they are fighting for the rights of
Dr Goodman:these beautiful, ancient tribal peoples in Indonesia have been living in the jungle
Dr Goodman:on their islands for tens of thousands of years, doing no harm to anyone acting
Dr Goodman:as natural stewards of the forest.
Dr Goodman:And their government is trying to throw them off to make way for nickel mining
Dr Goodman:so we can drive electric vehicles.
Dr Goodman:It's insane.
Rob:Yeah, as an everyday person, this, it can definitely seem overwhelming, I think.
Rob:However, I think, and this is where your book comes into it, um, if you just make
Rob:these sort of individual, uh, choices as a consumer, you are supporting the
Rob:system, be it directly or indirectly.
Rob:So I think that's important to realize and that you can actually, yeah,
Dr Goodman:you are making a huge difference.
Dr Goodman:You change your choices, but you also tell all your friends about why you
Dr Goodman:are doing so and spread the word.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Rob:Vote with your pounds and your dollars opposed
Rob:to, yeah, it, it's important
Dr Goodman:and we need to talk about detox and how it works in the body.
Rob:I think.
Rob:So I think that's definitely something, uh, that's, uh, quite relevant as I think,
Rob:well, as I know a lot of people's, it just provides an underpinning as to why
Rob:you should be doing this, doesn't it?
Rob:It provides you just with a, that little bit of extra sort of.
Rob:Understanding.
Rob:So yeah, if you could just run us through, um, the basic
Rob:detoxification systems of the body.
Rob:We don't need to go as in depth as Gluc ation and all of that obviously,
Rob:but uh, just how those systems work.
Dr Goodman:Okay.
Dr Goodman:So we detox through sweating.
Dr Goodman:We detox through breathing out.
Dr Goodman:Um, we detox through excretion through urine and feces, but most of all
Dr Goodman:it's the liver, which is our primary detoxification organ and the liver.
Dr Goodman:And to some extent, the small intestine produce enzymes.
Dr Goodman:An enzyme is a substance that changes one substance into another in the body.
Dr Goodman:It's a long, complex protein molecule, and its job essentially is to change
Dr Goodman:X into Y. Now the detox enzymes are evolved to change something
Dr Goodman:toxic into something non-toxic.
Dr Goodman:So first we need to rewind a moment and ask why the body would have
Dr Goodman:detox systems in the first place.
Dr Goodman:From an evolutionary perspective, why do we make detox enzymes?
Dr Goodman:Because we weren't encountering, you know, petrochemicals and plastics
Dr Goodman:and heavy metals and all that until a couple of hundred years ago.
Dr Goodman:The answer is that these systems are primarily evolved to detoxify
Dr Goodman:our own hormones and our own natural substances that we produce that
Dr Goodman:are not inherently toxic, but would be if they accumulated too much.
Dr Goodman:So the way the body works is if you need estrogen or cortisone or
Dr Goodman:testosterone, the body makes it for when it's needed or thyroid hormone.
Dr Goodman:And then when it's done its job, it has to be deconstructed back
Dr Goodman:down into its component molecules and those have to be excreted.
Dr Goodman:So that's what our detox systems have primarily evolved for, for
Dr Goodman:breaking down our own hormones.
Dr Goodman:And our own natural substances.
Dr Goodman:And also, you know, to cope with the occasional natural poison
Dr Goodman:from stinging nettles, poison ivy, a spider bite, snake venom,
Dr Goodman:scorpion poison, that kind of thing.
Dr Goodman:And by chance, some of those enzymes in some of the human population can also
Dr Goodman:deal with organophosphate insecticides and, and that sort of thing, but at
Dr Goodman:least in a third of us, they can't.
Dr Goodman:So how does it work?
Dr Goodman:There are two main phases.
Dr Goodman:Two detoxification in the liver.
Dr Goodman:Phase one is carried out by a group of enzymes called the P four 50 cytochrome.
Dr Goodman:And so cytochrome just means they look colored under the microscope
Dr Goodman:when they were first spotted.
Dr Goodman:Um, and their job is to carry out a simple biochemical reaction like
Dr Goodman:oxidation reduction or hydrolysis.
Dr Goodman:Which activates the substance.
Dr Goodman:It doesn't initially make it safer, it actually makes it more toxic.
Dr Goodman:But those toxic intermediary metabolites are only supposed to last
Dr Goodman:for a fraction of a millisecond in the body before phase two kicks in.
Dr Goodman:Now the phase two detox enzymes do something called conjugation.
Dr Goodman:That means they add or conjugate in a way means to marry, so
Dr Goodman:they join another molecule onto the activated toxic molecule.
Dr Goodman:And what they join on will be something that's water soluble.
Dr Goodman:So it could be sulfate, it could be glucuronide, um, it could be one of about
Dr Goodman:half a dozen water soluble molecules or groups that when added to the activated
Dr Goodman:toxic molecule, makes it water soluble.
Dr Goodman:And that means you can excrete it in the bile.
Dr Goodman:Through the feces or in the urine via the kidneys.
Dr Goodman:Okay?
Dr Goodman:Now the problem we've got is if phase one is doing its job well, but phase
Dr Goodman:two isn't, you are gonna get sick.
Dr Goodman:And I would say almost everyone I've seen with chronic fatigue syndrome or multiple
Dr Goodman:chemical sensitivity and many other illnesses, they've got an upregulated
Dr Goodman:phase one and a downregulated phase two.
Dr Goodman:So yes, they immediately convert any toxin into its ac, into its activated
Dr Goodman:version, but the phase two processes are not so good, and so they get very toxic.
Dr Goodman:Now the thing about these enzymes that we can do something about is this,
Dr Goodman:both phase one and especially phase two enzymes work with co-factors.
Dr Goodman:Now, we did learn this in medical school and we learned that the
Dr Goodman:co-factors for these detox enzymes.
Dr Goodman:Are vitamins, mostly the B vitamins, B2B three, B six, B nine, which is
Dr Goodman:folate, and B12, and the minerals, you know, zinc, copper, selenium,
Dr Goodman:magnesium, all of these minerals and vitamins are crucial cofactors,
Dr Goodman:without which the enzymes can't work.
Dr Goodman:But the way I was taught it at medical school was it was totally assumed that
Dr Goodman:those vitamins and minerals just are there and the enzymes can make use to them.
Dr Goodman:But the fact is we are mostly deficient in those crucial nutrients without
Dr Goodman:which the detox enzymes or phase two cannot do their job and keep us safe.
Dr Goodman:Now we have a vicious circle here.
Dr Goodman:We're nutritionally deficient because the use of synthetic fertilizers has
Dr Goodman:drained all the nutrients outta the soil, and therefore, out of the plants we're
Dr Goodman:eating, if we're not eating organic.
Dr Goodman:Um, and therefore we've got less nutrients.
Dr Goodman:But also we are exposed to all these environmental toxins and
Dr Goodman:alcohol and cigarettes and drugs like paracetamol, which all require
Dr Goodman:intensive detox from the liver enzymes.
Dr Goodman:Therefore, we're using up those nutrient cofactors more quickly
Dr Goodman:and not taking them insufficiently.
Dr Goodman:That's one of the many reasons why the government's recommended daily
Dr Goodman:amounts of vitamin and mineral intake are complete nonsense.
Dr Goodman:You know, they might be true if you were living 300 years ago on a little
Dr Goodman:local organic peasant farm and eating everything that you had picked the same
Dr Goodman:day and not exposed to any toxins at all.
Dr Goodman:Um, but the way we are living now, we need vastly more nutrients.
Dr Goodman:So even if you are genetically predisposed to be a poor detoxifier,
Dr Goodman:really good nutrition can make a big difference combined with knowing the
Dr Goodman:source of the toxins and avoiding them.
Dr Goodman:And that goes back to eating organic.
Dr Goodman:Filtering your water and being very careful with your
Dr Goodman:electromagnetic exposure.
Dr Goodman:So it is perfectly possible to live much more safely than we are doing
Dr Goodman:even in a polluted world, but we need to know how, and we need to support
Dr Goodman:our liver in every way possible.
Dr Goodman:That starts with supporting the gut microbiome.
Dr Goodman:So eating lots and lots of fresh vegetables.
Dr Goodman:Notice I said vegetables rather than fruit and vegetables.
Dr Goodman:Um, you know, a bit of fruit from time to time is fine, but not
Dr Goodman:fruit juice and not dried fruit, because that concentrates the sugar.
Dr Goodman:We need to look after our microbiome and we need to take probiotics
Dr Goodman:if it's not in good condition.
Dr Goodman:There are loads of herbs that support the liver, and really good
Dr Goodman:herbalists know about this, but the one that everyone knows about
Dr Goodman:is silly Marin or milk thistle.
Dr Goodman:Milk thistle is like a brilliant tonic for the liver.
Dr Goodman:You know, so vegetable juicing, organic vegetable juicing gives
Dr Goodman:you the antioxidants that are an essential part of detox.
Dr Goodman:Why?
Dr Goodman:Because that phase one releases lots of free radicals and they are
Dr Goodman:oxidizing agents, which are toxic.
Dr Goodman:And the way to deal with oxidizing agents is by having antioxidants in your system.
Dr Goodman:You can do that by eating a salad.
Dr Goodman:And if you are poorly and a salad is not enough, then you juice your
Dr Goodman:vegetables and drink your salad.
Dr Goodman:Um, and yeah, of course there are lots of nutritional supplements, but
Dr Goodman:basically raw vegetables is our best source of antioxidants, and that's why
Dr Goodman:organic vegetable juicing is crucial.
Dr Goodman:It's not actually doing the detoxifying, but it's preventing the natural detox
Dr Goodman:process from poisoning you with the oxidative products of that process.
Dr Goodman:And lastly, I said before that we are genetically different.
Dr Goodman:Some of us naturally have liver enzyme detox systems that work
Dr Goodman:brilliantly and some of us don't.
Dr Goodman:And what that means is that the kind of detox protocols, people like me,
Dr Goodman:are always going on about like saunas, like um, vegetable juicing, like Epsom
Dr Goodman:salts, bath, like colonic, hydrotherapy.
Dr Goodman:All of those things, while they're good for everyone, are crucial
Dr Goodman:for some people's actual survival.
Dr Goodman:So you can get genetic testing to see exactly what your detox
Dr Goodman:systems can and cannot do.
Dr Goodman:My favorite company for this is called Life Code gx, capital G,
Dr Goodman:small X run by brilliant nutritional therapist, Emma Beek, who knows
Dr Goodman:more biochemistry than I do.
Dr Goodman:I mean, she is brilliant and you get a really clear report with
Dr Goodman:this that you probably need a practitioner to interpret for you.
Dr Goodman:But again, they can recommend.
Dr Goodman:Practitioners.
Dr Goodman:Indeed, I recommend practitioners on my own website because I've retired from
Dr Goodman:the fray to concentrate on writing.
Dr Goodman:But the point is that if your genetic detox profile shows that you are okay
Dr Goodman:with this form of detox, but you're really not very good at enzyme such
Dr Goodman:and such doesn't work well, well, what co-factors does enzyme X require?
Dr Goodman:And if it requires, let's say B12 and folate, that means you need loads
Dr Goodman:more of that than the next person.
Dr Goodman:Not that you can transform your genetic propensity, but you can at
Dr Goodman:least enable your not so perfect detox enzyme to be the best it can,
Dr Goodman:to do the best that it's capable of.
Dr Goodman:And beyond that, it's avoiding the source of toxins.
Dr Goodman:You know, the two most extreme multiple chemical sensitivity people
Dr Goodman:I've had, one had to go live in the desert and one had to go living.
Dr Goodman:And live in the middle of a very remote forest because they had to be
Dr Goodman:away from all sources of pollution.
Dr Goodman:But the vast majority of people, by sorting out their nutrition
Dr Goodman:and avoiding the toxins, can do fine even in the middle of a city.
Rob:Yeah, and I think that's important to point out is that you'll always
Rob:have outliers and people who have very compromised immune systems.
Rob:Um, but for the most part, you rarely can get away with these, uh, issues by simply
Rob:just focusing on getting the basics right.
Rob:Uh, and by util and by.
Rob:Lowering the toxic burden and by improving your diet and just taking care
Rob:of yourself as nature intended you to.
Rob:Uh, and I think for most people, that then does away with the need
Rob:for a lot of these expensive tests, a lot of these confusing tests.
Rob:And when you sort of got that dialed in and, and if you, there are still
Rob:issues, then you can work with a practitioner to maybe fine tune some
Rob:of these, the finer points of your biology, uh, that may be dysfunctional.
Rob:And I think that's just something that's quite important to, to end off with, is
Rob:that it is, it's not a death sentence and it's, it is not as scary as it sounds.
Rob:It, it, you just need to follow a, a. A guy, which is where, again, your
Rob:book is just so well laid out and so supportive, uh, for the everyday person.
Rob:And no, it really is, it's, it's an amazing read, so I highly suggest that.
Dr Goodman:I think it's, mm-hmm.
Dr Goodman:Sorry, I, I just think a couple of things important to emphasize.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Dr Goodman:One is that it is very clear that the chronic degenerative illnesses that so
Dr Goodman:many people are suffering from today, are suffering from today are primarily
Dr Goodman:not genetic, because if they were genetic in origin, they would stay at the same
Dr Goodman:level through the changing generations.
Dr Goodman:And the very fact that they've increased exponentially over two or three
Dr Goodman:generations tells us that we are dealing with an environmental factor, not a
Dr Goodman:genetic factor, but it's the impact of those environmental factors, nutrition
Dr Goodman:and toxicity on our gene expression.
Dr Goodman:And just to clarify, one of the thing you mentioned about people
Dr Goodman:supporting their immune systems, that's absolutely important.
Dr Goodman:What we've been talking about though, is supporting the detox systems.
Dr Goodman:Which is not exactly the same, although it's crucial for the immune system because
Dr Goodman:toxins impact on the immune system.
Dr Goodman:But just to say, you know, our immune system's been doing a brilliant
Dr Goodman:job for billions of years, but it does need the tools to do the job.
Dr Goodman:And those tools for the immune cells directly are vitamin C, vitamin vitamin
Dr Goodman:D, vitamin, zinc, selenium, sunshine, fresh air, uh, love and happiness,
Rob:sunshine.
Rob:Yeah.
Rob:No, and, and the stress component cannot be, uh, overstated.
Rob:I think everybody just sort of looks at stress as the last thing to, to deal
Rob:with, where, in my opinion anyway, it should probably be one of the first, um,
Rob:the moment you have a stressed uh, body, you you're going to have overactivation
Rob:of that immune system constantly.
Rob:So yeah, it's,
Dr Goodman:I think that's true, but I worry about people getting
Dr Goodman:into a destructive loop of.
Dr Goodman:Feeling stressed about the fact that they can't eliminate their stress, you
Dr Goodman:know, and we can't eliminate our stress.
Dr Goodman:We can reduce it.
Dr Goodman:Um, we can do what we can, but we are living in a stress genic universe.
Rob:Yeah, no, I, I think,
Dr Goodman:and we shouldn't beat ourselves up about the fact that we
Dr Goodman:can't be totally relaxed all the time.
Dr Goodman:Oh
Rob:yeah, no, definitely.
Rob:And I mean, uh, I think that could very quickly get us into a conversation
Rob:about the cell danger response, which is another, uh, love of mine.
Rob:But, um, I, I, I, yeah.
Rob:Uh, it's, it's, I think it's making the best of a bad situation and, and just
Rob:working again within the means that you have to make the best decisions
Rob:that you can and then to sort of try and forget it as much as you can and
Rob:just sort of move forward as life.
Dr Goodman:I think that's right.
Dr Goodman:And what I say in the book is you don't need to make all the changes at once.
Dr Goodman:You know, everything you do will make a difference, you know, one change per week.
Rob:Oh yeah.
Rob:No, definitely.
Rob:It, it all adds up, doesn't it?
Rob:It does.
Rob:And it's just about the plugging those holes one at a time and Exactly.
Rob:Uh, and the bucket will slowly start to fill.
Dr Goodman:Exactly.
Rob:Dr. Goodman, you have been an absolute star.
Rob:Thank you so much.
Rob:Um, you've mentioned once or twice now that, uh, you, you are,
Rob:you've re uh, moved outta clinical practice to focus on writing.
Rob:Uh, what's next in the pipeline for you?
Rob:In terms in terms of books?
Dr Goodman:I am working on a third book, but I'm not going to say too much about
Dr Goodman:it at the moment because it's embryonic and an embryo is a delicate thing, uh,
Dr Goodman:it doesn't want to be talked about.
Dr Goodman:Fair
Rob:enough.
Rob:Okay.
Rob:Well, I wait for bated breath to, to have, uh, to receive it.
Dr Goodman:It'll be a couple of years.
Dr Goodman:It takes a long time to give birth to a book.
Dr Goodman:That's
Rob:all right.
Rob:I, uh, your books are definitely worth waiting for, so there's,
Rob:uh, there are no issues there.
Rob:Thank you,
Dr Goodman:RO uh, thank you so much.
Dr Goodman:It's a pleasure.
Rob:Where can people find you?
Dr Goodman:Oh, you mean the, the world of social media and all that?
Dr Goodman:Yes.
Rob:Where's the best place for people connect to connect
Rob:and all of that good stuff.
Rob:Okay.
Dr Goodman:So start with the website, because on the website are all for, I
Dr Goodman:think they're called social media handles.
Dr Goodman:So I am on, I'm still astonished about this myself, but I have got
Dr Goodman:someone helping me with the tech side 'cause I don't possess a smartphone.
Dr Goodman:I am on Instagram, LinkedIn, uh, Facebook, and a little bit on
Dr Goodman:Twitter, which is now called X.
Dr Goodman:Um, but all those, you can access all the social media through the
Dr Goodman:website, which is dr jenny goodman.com.
Dr Goodman:It's just dr jenny goodman.com.
Dr Goodman:And if you go to the resources section.
Dr Goodman:You'll see lots of podcasts that I've done.
Dr Goodman:This one hopefully will eventually be on there.
Dr Goodman:But you will also, um, see my list of colleagues, recommended
Dr Goodman:practitioners who do this same kind of medicine that I was doing.
Dr Goodman:Um, some of whom have sat in with me, many of whom have sat in with
Dr Goodman:me actually in my consultations.
Dr Goodman:Yeah.
Rob:And we, we'll be sure to, to link to, to all of those
Rob:links in the show notes as well.
Rob:Great.
Rob:And, uh, as well as the BSEM, uh, yeah, your, your colleagues, Dr. Hil, uh,
Rob:included are, are amazing physicians in their own rights and absolutely brilliant.
Rob:I mean,
Dr Goodman:I've learned everything I know from the British Society for
Dr Goodman:Ecological Medicine, and I would say, you just mentioned that you're very
Dr Goodman:interested in the cell danger response.
Dr Goodman:The person in the BSEM who is an absolute expert on that is Jillian Kraver.
Dr Goodman:Do you know Gillian Kraver?
Rob:No, not at all.
Rob:Um, okay.
Rob:So email me, Dr. Michael, Dr. Dr. Downing.
Rob:Yeah, yeah,
Dr Goodman:yeah.
Dr Goodman:She's, she's a colleague of mine and Sarah, my Hills and Damian Downings.
Dr Goodman:Okay,
Rob:perfect.
Dr Goodman:Um, Jillian with one L, Jillian Kraver, she's given some
Dr Goodman:brilliant lectures about the cell danger response, so you wanna interview her?
Rob:Definitely.
Rob:Well, Dr. Goodman, thank you so much for your time and, uh, we'll definitely
Rob:have to have you on again soon to talk about just everything else.
Rob:All right.
Rob:So that would be awesome.
Rob:The gaps you'll
Dr Goodman:find as you go through this, you'll find what
Dr Goodman:we didn't remember to talk about.
Dr Goodman:We'll talk about those things next time.
Rob:Perfect.
Rob:Thank you.
Dr Goodman:All right.
Dr Goodman:Lovely to talk with you, Rob.
Dr Goodman:Take care.
