Dr. Aly Cohen: EPISODSE LINK
Dr. Aly Cohen: BOOK
TRANSCRIPT:
Colleen: Welcome back to Hot Flashes and Cool Topics. Get ready today, guys. We have an interesting
conversation with Dr. Ailee Cohen. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Cohen: Thank you for having me ladies.
Colleen: Well, we want to start by saying congratulations. Your book launched
yesterday – Detoxify: The Everyday Toxins Harming Your Immune System and How to Defend
Against Them. So congratulations.
Dr. Cohen: Thank you. It’s like giving birth all over again.
It’s less anesthesia and you know, not a lot of pain. So we’re good.
Colleen: Well,
this book truly is just full of information that,
you know, I actually had to read it over a period of a couple of days because I
was trying to absorb as I went through because it’s wonderful but it’s very
informative and a lot of things will apply to the people who are reading it and
they have to go “okay let me absorb that”. So I thought we’d start at the beginning
with the four sections when you talk about assessing before you avoid, avoiding what
before you add and adding before you allow and that helps kind of dissect the book
into, you know, edible bites, so to speak. So I thought we’d start at the very
beginning with a access. And the book, you know, I always kid because Bridgett makes
our guests cry a lot of the time with her questions, but you actually made me cry
at the beginning of the book when you talk about your dog. Yeah. Why did you, you
know, that is, that was such a sad story, but can you start talking about how your
dog getting sick kind of led you into this whole area of practice?
Dr. Cohen: – Yeah,
I’ll start by saying that I would never be doing or sitting here doing this work.
If my golden retriever had actually lived to a normal healthy life of 10, 11,
12, if you’re lucky, right, with the golden. And so I start by saying that because
I’m just so shocked and life takes many turns right, you get, you know good things,
bad things this was sort of a hit to my heart and I think that’s why I sort of
set out you know created a mission, so long story short, when I was a young mom
this was 15 years ago my oldest is 17 now, 18 oh geez he just I’m aging quickly,
anyway when I had two little kids I would they were two and six months or
or two and a half and six months. And we had a gold retriever was our first
child. And, you know, it was sort of like the practice baby. And so he was about
four and a half years of age when I was a young mom. And, you know, he got sick,
you know, like Goldens, we thought, like, he swallowed a sock or ate something, and
it would just come right out the other end and we like, okay, let’s keep going.
But he wasn’t getting better. And we just couldn’t understand why he was panting and
all these other things. So we ended up going to a couple of different vets to get
opinions. And long story short, he was diagnosed with something that’s so unusual for
dogs, but particularly even gold retrievers, called autoimmune hepatitis,
which is something you might have heard of in humans, right? It’s an autoimmune
disease where the body’s immune system basically doesn’t recognize its liver,
in this case, and the immune system sort of attacks the liver, not knowing its own
liver. And so it’s an autoimmune disease of a liver. And when we diagnosed him,
he had a liver the size of a golf ball. I mean, it was just unsustainable. And so
it had been chronic. And, you know, what was so shocking, ’cause this is like,
what? Is that, you know, when I started to really, you know, I was heartbroken, I
started to look at what he was eating, what he was drinking, did he have
contaminated, you know, food, dog food? At that time, they had some melamine in dog
food at the time, you know, it was a big scare on the news. We thought about his
drinking water. We live in New Jersey with, you know, all farmland. So I thought,
okay, maybe there’s like a crack in the pipe and we’re all gonna be, you know, in
trouble. Long story, shorter again, we, the more I looked into his life,
the more I looked into things that were affecting his body, flea and tick collars,
you know, the toy he sucked on, that’s plastic, I was essentially doing an
environmental health survey now that I look back, which I now have in the book. But
at that time, I was doing it just to learn how I could fix this dog and maybe
protect our family. And so the more I understood what was not regulated in the pet
world, the more I was blown away to find what was not regulated and human consumer
products in the United States. And it was such an awakening, and I had to keep on
learning, keep on learning. At one point I was gonna do a local lecture ’cause I
just wanted to educate people what I was learning. And I reached out to the
environmental working group, ewg.org, you probably have heard of them, they do the
dirty dozen clean 15. And at that time, that was one of my main sources of
understanding of anything. and then I started working with them. And so it took on
a life of its own, just out of sheer sadness and curiosity. And quite frankly,
I was very angry because I was a practicing physician, I had a fellowship for
rheumatology, dealing with autoimmune diseases in humans. And I had never heard how
much of our environment affects human health. So, you know, it was really quite a
journey for the last 15 years or so.
Bridgett: – Yeah, that was so shocking in there when
you shared how things just aren’t, they’re let go.
Like certain things with the EPA, it’s just let go. Like, well, these were
grandfathered in, or these, can you share a little bit about how that was really
shocking?
Dr. Cohen: – Yeah, I mean, we’ve had over the years since 1938 was really when the
first law came into effect about, you know, with cosmetics, for instance and personal
care products because a group of women who had started using a company for their
mascara called Lash Lore and it’s really an interesting story became blind because of
the you know very long name of this dye that we actually still use in a lot in
our cosmetics by the way, but it was close to the eyes and apparently created
infection and some blindness and so In 1938, there was a law that was passed, but
it really was so weak that it didn’t do much. Then, fast forward, in 1958 was
another set of laws that were sort of coming down the pike to really look at food
and to see whether or not, generally regarded as safe or generally recognized as
safe, which is kind of like the grass, they call it GRAS, recognition, whether or
not that would help with the the food industry even, what could be allowed in food?
Started off with just GRAS things were like vinegar and salt and sugar.
But eventually, when we started creating more synthetic compounds that go into all of
our products and our food, the regulation wasn’t covering those newly designed
compounds. And so here we are now in 2025, we have over, I want to say,
1 ,300 food additives that are allowable that have never been really studied for
safety. We have, I think, 11 ,000 pesticides that go through very limited testing
before they go into our surroundings in terms of farming, for proprietary blends,
active versions of ingredients that don’t have to be disclosed and you know we have
cosmetics, personal care, all these products, nothing in the United States under
legislation requires testing by manufacturers for those ingredients before they’re put
into products that go onto shelves. And that is really unique to our country. I
mean in other parts of the world we have a little EU and European Union does a
lot better job of this. They’re not perfect, but they do a lot better job. Canada
does a very good job. And of course, California and our country leads the way with
Prop 65. But it’s really a very difficult situation to get your head around when
you think about it.
Colleen: Now, you mentioned in the book that there’s over 95 ,000
chemicals that are currently used in U .S. products.
And what I found shocking was when it comes to chronic health condition or
autoimmune conditions, the majority of the autoimmune patients are women. What do you
attribute that to?
Dr. Cohen: Yeah. It’s interesting because at this point when we say majority,
that’s a fact for sure. Women tend to get, and that has a lot to do, and I talk
about it in the book, our estrogen receptors and having a newly found exist and
that was just discovered for lupus patients. So we’re still learning more about why,
in general, women have more risk of autoimmune diseases, but there are many of
autoimmune diseases that are equal men and women. So type one diabetes, Crohn’s and
ulcerative colitis, and then there are some that are male dominant, which is like
ankylosing spondylitis, for instance, psoriatic arthritis. So I wanna make sure people
realize that this is affecting all genders in our population and because that’s so
important because we have such a high number. So between 7 and 14 % is estimated
now as the number of US citizens that have at least one autoimmune disease.
And that comes out to about 24 million people, 24 to 26 million. So the idea that
we have such a large proportion of autoimmune disease patients, actually worldwide,
but in general,
It’s an epidemic, it’s actually growing over time. So the argument has been made,
oh, we’re just getting better at diagnosing it. And that actually has flatly not
been found to be true. In fact, if you think about the healthcare system and I’m
in it, I’m still seeing patients, but I left conventional medicine 15, 20 years of
conventional practice where you have 15 minutes a patient, 30 minutes for a follow
- You see 50 patients a day. It’s like, you know, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup. The
odds of getting the right history, the amount of history we actually need to get
really savvy at diagnosing, or at least, you know, staying the same as we’ve always
been is never going to, you know, it doesn’t correlate with the numbers that we’re
seeing in terms of actual cases, new incidence cases. So, you know,
it’s just one of those things where we have to really look and see what are we
surrounded by? What are we eating? What are we absorbing through our skin, our
personal care products, our feminine care products with young women? We often kind of
write that off as no biggie, but it is a biggie. And then kind of think how it
correlates with the rise in the number of synthetic compounds. Primarily from World
War II is where we had this huge, huge load of synthetic chemicals that really came
out. We think of Monsanto, but there were hundreds of other companies that were
coming out with compounds for pesticides and rayon, Naugahide, for,
you know, formica, I mean, you know, we all recognize this from childhood, right?
But we still have plexiglass as, you know, for fighter pilots,
you know, these are things that made aircraft lighter, we had pesticides to fight
overseas, to not get sick. So, again, there was a lot of design that was made at
that time that now plays into what we’re exposed to and can’t get the genie back
in the bottle.
Bridgett: Right. And you also talk about different testing that when you,
the urine test and what people have in them, can you address like the testing we
need and what they’re finding in most people’s urine test?
Dr. Cohen: Yeah. So,
the way some of these chemicals are tested, and by the way, 95 ,000 is just a kind
of a ballpark. I mean, obviously no one’s going to hang their hat on that, but we
now know just from registries of different groups of industries and what they list
as their compounds within, you know, so, but it’s a lot. And mind you,
we haven’t had this exposure to this many chemicals in our whole existence. If you
think about evolution, it’s been more or less four or five million years. This has
all been the last 75 years. So it’s a very short period of time to have this much
exposure over time. And it does make its way into our body. So some of these
chemicals are tested through blood. Some of them are tested best through urine. Some
are even tested as we know through breast milk, spinal fluid. I mean,
we’ve had ways to look at all of these fluids. And the idea,
obviously urine is least invasive, it’s usually the best way to test children, it’s
usually the best way to test large populations because you don’t need phlebotomy and
all that, but it’s the idea that we are all pretty much filled with chemicals of
one degree or another, you know, one type or another, and at any given time it
could vary because some of these chemicals break down relatively fast, like bisphenol
A, you know, We’ve heard of BPA in baby bottles being removed in 2012. Well,
that’s wonderful. That was a huge win. But if BPA was bad enough to take out a
plastic baby bottles for babies because of its endocrine disrupting capability, its
ability to affect hormones, we’re still not where we need to be, where we remove it
from other sources like canned foods. So there’s a little hypocrisy here and there’s
also substitutions that that have came into play. But, look, I am not a huge fan
having been doing this a very long time. Having been scared out of my mind in the
beginning, like anyone else would be. And working my way through real life scenarios
of life, of motherhood, of busy working life, my kids play sports on synthetic turf,
which I could just spend an hour on. Life is life. And so when it comes to
testing and being very cost -conscious, which I think is important to think about
with patients, I don’t think testing is always the best choice because you can just
assume you’ve got chemicals. The question is, well, what do you do about it anyway?
Put money into the solution. So that’s where a lot of my work comes from is just
more solution -based than anything else.
Colleen: Before we get to the solutions, we’re
definitely going to talk about those, could you explain the difference or the
application for endocrine disrupting chemicals and immune disrupting chemicals?
Dr. Cohen: Great
question. So, what’s so interesting is that a very brave group of researchers,
academic researchers, about 25, 30 years ago, discovered that many chemicals,
at least at the time they were looking at Bisphenol A, okay? So my co -author for
two previous books were published, actually I have one here, were published by,
and Fred Vom Sall is the world -renowned guy on BPA, and he and I partnered up,
which was a great story in and of itself. But needless to say, we worked on a
textbook where he pulled in all of his best research colleagues from around the
world to create a textbook, and then this was a consumer book through Oxford, and
then, you know, the idea is that back in that 25 -year period, a very interesting
experiment turned out that, and I’m going to simplify it, but it was a mouse study
that one of the researchers discovered came out incorrectly, and the reason it came
out incorrectly was because the mice were drinking water from a plastic water bottle.
So, it threw off the results to the point where they had to keep repeating it and
figuring out why. And they traced this anomaly in the results to the fact that the
chemicals perhaps in the plastic where the mice were drinking from was affecting the
results, and they didn’t know why. So, they did a deep dive and discovered that the
plastic contaminant that they were looking at bisphenol A was in fact able to screw
up the results and was repeatable. And they also came up with the findings that at
very low dose exposures, the lowest dose that you could even imagine, parts per
million, parts per trillion, they were actually able to show that you could have
physiologic changes in these mice similar to what you might see at larger dose
exposures. So the classic toxicology paradigm that the dose makes the poison, where
it’s like linear, the more you get exposed, the more you have a physiologic change.
I always think of my 21st birthday. But you know what I’m saying. Basically, the
more you drink, the more sick you get, the more whatever. This threw that on its
head. And it turned out it was like a U -curve or a curve like this.
It’s called non -monotonic or this. And what that means on a graph for many people
who might be challenged like myself is basically that you have these low doses that
have the same effect and are missed because people are only researching the higher
doses. And so when they discovered this, it was such an eye -opening phenomenon and
it’s similar to the way hormones work. So hormones, and this is why it’s called
endocrine disrupting chemicals before I get into immune disrupting, is hormones work
very similarly. Over evolution hormones are the signalers. So the things that get
done, you know what I mean? They basically make you grow. They make you have
fertility, you know, capability. They make brains develop into even male and female.
They make body organs in utero go into male or female, they strengthen bone,
right? I’m a rheumatologist, they strengthen bone, they build bone. So all of these
hormones, insulin is a hormone, right? That makes us utilize sugar properly. Thyroid
hormone, that makes our metabolism work properly, right? So all of these hormones
that are so critical to human physiology only require a teeny tiny amount to do
their job. And that’s what we call conservation of energy through evolution so that
we don’t need to expand a lot of energy to get done, right? What was discovered
about VPA was that it worked similar to low, low dose estrogen. That was their
first finding that it mimics estrogen and it can affect the receptors similar to
estrogen. So it could basically like fight out real estrogen by being a fake,
and make changes physiologically. And what’s so brilliant, because I interviewed Pete
Meyers, who was one of the forefathers of this area. I said, it was so brilliant
that you said the word disruption, because disruption opened up 20 years of research
that could be characterized as disruption, not elevation, decrease. It was just such
an open -minded way to describe what they were finding, because they knew it was a
disruption, but they didn’t know which way to go. Was it inflammation or anti
-inflammation? Was it higher or low? And since that time, there’s now been so many
more studies, I mean, robust studies from around the world. The Endocrine Society
supports this research. The American College of Reproductive Medicine, ACOG, American
College of Obstetricians Gynecologists All have positioned statements on how these
environmental chemicals, of course, they’re all very different in the way they have
effects on human health and reproduction and puberty and all of these things that
affect what we’re seeing clinically. So essentially, that was where endocrine
disrupting chemicals came about. And since 25 years ago, there’s now 1 ,000 formally
diagnosed or discovered to be endocrine disrupting chemicals, EDCs.
What was found along the way was also immune system effects. So no one’s ever
called them immune disrupting chemicals. But I said to Fred, who’s my co -author
said, I don’t understand why we’re not framing this to correlate with the association
of an autoimmune phenomenon when we see so much data. He goes, not only is this
true and not only should it be written and talked about and framed and acronym
given, but you should do it. And if he had not said that, I would not be doing
this, but he was the one who said because of your background in rheumatology and
what you’re seeing clinically. So I’ve just been calling immune disrupting chemicals,
but we describe them, they’re described in the literature, but not so much with the
acronym per se. It’s just more of a way for people who are affected by these
conditions to really grab hold of the idea.
Bridgett: You also address times in people’s lives
when these can really make a difference. Can you talk about those times in people’s
lives when this really can be a problem?
Dr. Cohen: Yeah, and it’s not to scare your audience. I
mean, I’m really trying to, you know, give the good information on the why you
should care without overdoing it so that you get restrictive and you say,
forget it, throw up your hands. But I want to give just enough to say why so that
you can do the what. That’s really the goal. The vulnerable periods of human
development is what you’re alluding to, which I love. So these have been discovered
by many of these same researchers that study teenagers and children and in utero
exposures, pregnant women, and even menopausal women, that these are the periods
during human development where hormones are increasing and decreasing.
They’re building up, like my teenagers, God help us all, and broke down, right?
And we think of menopause as where we just shut off our hormones. That’s not true.
They’re very active, actually. They’re just reorganizing. And so one of the things
that’s really interesting is that when we talk about exposures to chemicals, I speak
to high school students, I teach. I’m working to get this into high schools
nationally as a part of their health and their health curriculum. It’s a heavy lift,
but I’m working on it still. The idea is that there are different periods of
development where, because hormones are so volatile, that these exposures may have more
of a physiologic effect, may have effect on gene expression, may have an effect on
disease development or not. And so that’s kind of the call out as to,
not only is this a problem, but maybe we should be paying a little bit more
attention to certain times during development. And I agree, but I don’t want people
to think like regret or oh my God, and this is about moving forward.
Bridgett: – Right, you
make that clear in the book too, that like here I am 50, how old am I, 57? And
I’m like, well, okay, it doesn’t mean I’m just gonna give up. I’m gonna try to
implement some things that’ll make things safer.
Colleen: – And I think that’s really clear in
your second section. I just wanna follow up on that. I think that’s really clear in
your section on avoidance because you start with what’s in your water, what’s in
your food and process foods. And those are kind of the touchstones where people are
go, “This is too much. I can’t absorb all this information.” But you make it very
clear in what you’re saying about you don’t need to avoid everything,
but there are resources out there, like the dirty dozen and things like that.
So can you talk about that section and why it was important for you to not go,
“Okay, just throw everything out and start again.”
Dr. Cohen: Yeah, because I was going back to
sort of health coaching 101 where, you know, you have to meet your audience where
they are, whether it’s a patient, whether it’s your teenager, wherever. You know, my
teenagers don’t listen to me half the time or more. You have to meet them where
they’re at so that you can get into their heart and soul to make change. Change is
not easy for anybody. I thought about the forays and to simplify how I
teach, I mean, I’m teaching doctors now and none of them, a lot of them don’t
know, at least in the program that I’m teaching in that, you know, this is not
still in our curriculum or high school or seventh graders. It’s all the same sort
of learning process. The assess is really important because you want to know what
you’re up against. You kind of want to know where sources are. You kind of want to
know, okay, that makes sense. Now I know where things are coming from potentially.
Let me start with that piece of data. The second section avoid, and I say avoid
kind of and swap, because I don’t want people to think it’s all or nothing. It’s
black and white. Okay, you can’t wear mascara because there’s two chemicals in there
that are supposed to be harmful. No, there’s companies that do better. And you can,
and I give resources for those that do better. Or if you want to make your
personal care products we have do it yourself, make your own, very simple, or
you could look up the proper or the
useful apps and websites that kind of do this work for you. So the idea is
avoiding is really where you’re starting to take action, where you’re starting to
remove the triggers from your body’s exposure, and that if you choose to swap,
you can do that too. I often think about cleaning products, for instance, when it
comes to avoid, I’m like, why do we have 20 different cleaners for a kitchen?
Like why do we have like a sink cleaner, an oven cleaner, a surface cleaner,
a window cleaner, a carpet cleaner? It just, it’s all marketing. It’s all been
keeping up with the Joneses. It’s this huge marketing chemical machine when in fact
they all really could be handled with one cleaner like white vinegar and a little
castile soap or, you know, lemon juice that’s real or sea salt for scrubbing.
And I put that on the book with these recipes. The idea is that we don’t need to,
you know, throw a, you know, a hurricane towards something that’s just a windstorm.
It just makes no sense to me.
Bridgett: – Yeah, and also there was something in there I’d never heard before that you
included in the book and I may not be pronouncing it, it looks, it’s a boy. It
looks like the word obese, but
Dr. Cohen: — – Obesogens.
Bridgett: – Obesogens, yes.
Dr. Cohen: – Yes,
very sexy word. I’m sure we’re all excited to hear about that, obesogens. So,
obesogens were actually really interesting. They were discovered by the same, within
the same group of really brilliant researchers. Actually, Bruce Blumberg got a leg up
on this as well. He’s out of University of California. I’m not sure which one, but
he even wrote a book about it. But the idea is that obesogens are basically
endocrine disrupting chemicals. So within that class, but they had a particularly cool
function of affecting fat cells and not in a good way. So, what obesogens were
characterized as being able to sort of bind to receptors that make fat cells called
adipocytes bigger, also able to take stem cells that is kind of like in the bone
marrow or whatever you want to call it in our bones, right? That’s where
we make cells to begin with, making those stem cells into fat cells,
as opposed to say other more useful cells. So there was a lot of different
mechanisms by which some of these chemicals,
atrazine was one, I mean, that’s a pesticide. Tribute tilton is another that cleans
the bottom of ships to get off all the things that stick to the bottom of ships.
There’s a lot of them. But the idea was that when they looked at them in animal
studies, they could see that exposure, even successive generations,
multiple generations later, had some of the gene changes from those original
exposures. And so that’s one of the concerns we see now with these chemicals with
humans, unfortunately.
Bridgett: – Yeah, and you know, when you were talking about, you see it
generations. And I’m looking at my notes right now thinking there were forever
chemicals or forever things. And then there were some that go through generational.
Can you talk about that?
Dr. Cohen: – Yeah, you know, there’s different ways to classify
chemicals. Again, this is a big lift. So I wanted people to know that there are
chemicals that we now know, you know, take longer to break down. Forever chemicals,
the perfluoro alcohols. We know that there’s ones that are designated by how they
work. Are they stain guard or they nonstick chemicals? Then there’s chemicals that
are, you know, labeled by what they hurt, right? toxin, liver toxin. So there’s lots
of different ways to categorize different chemicals. But I think what you’re also
talking about, not just the chemical itself, but also how some of them can affect
your exposure at this moment in terms of methylation is a process by which it
affects the proteins that sit on our genes. So our genes– let’s step back a
second, genes don’t typically just change, right? Genes are like, you know, a
blueprint to our bodies. We get them from our parents and then we have our genes.
What was so interesting is that we have these proteins that sit within our genes.
That’s called our epigenome, think above, right? And our epigenome is actually
modifiable, not just by chemicals in a bad way, but by lifestyle and nutrition and
lots of things that no one ever thought we had control over, you’re also affecting
those proteins, those proteins are allowing those genes that could be good or bad to
express or not. So we have this sort of control over gene expression, not whether
or not we change our genes per se, but whether we express those genes or not,
that’s our epigenome. And that is remarkably important because it allows the number A
to add. That’s the 3A, the third A, right? We have assess, we have a void or
swap, which is taking away the problem as much as we can that’s hitting our body.
The add is really critical is adding in certain components into our lifestyle and
even into the nutrition that we consume that offset problems from these chemicals,
interestingly enough. And so certain foods do this. Omega -3 fatty acids.
We know vitamin B9, which is folic acid. We know quercetin,
which is similar to vitamin C. These are antioxidants, can really have a big effect
on offsetting some risk from exposures. And wouldn’t you know that these are all
basically whole foods, kind of plant -based nutrients that I try to get people to
figure out how to do the best job at getting, but essentially we have some
superpowers in our choices. And even sleep, you know, sleep is incredibly important
to add in not just quantity, which we’re all looking for, but really quality,
because we’re washing our brains and our spinal cord while we sleep. That’s been
really great science that’s come up over the last five to 10 years. Exercise and
sweating and using all our physiology to our best, you know, we’re harnessing
what we’ve been given. We just need to be able to do it in the mindset of not so
much maybe losing weight or whatever, but maybe just detoxing because it’s just a
really good way to do it. So that’s the ad component that I think is just so
important to think about as well.
Colleen: You also mentioned in the book there, you call
them the four human fertilizer supplements, which I think, you know, I really liked
in the book, I’m the type of person where telling me to avoid stuff is great, but
you have to tell me what to put in. And you’re very specific with the foods. And
I mean, you have a 21 day detox, lot of resources in the book, which I appreciate.
I’m the type of person just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. But you talk
about the four human fertilizer supplements that are really important. Can we break
those down?
Dr. Cohen: – Sure. So those were really developed not just from my background in
anthropology, which I love and I always tap into, but just seeing patients and
seeing what comes through the office and we know that we are deficient in so much
nutrition that is sort of out of our control to some degree because, you know, we
can eat a really clean diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, Mediterranean, which
I talk about a lot, But not all of it has the same nutritional value because our
food system is kind of screwed up, right? In modern day times, which is now, our
food sits in a lot of low temperature freezers or refrigerators before they go to
big box stores. And all of that time since being picked, it’s losing nutritional
value. So if it’s organic, right, I promote that a lot. I talk about it, I talk
about other ways to clean your produce and stuff like that because you remove a lot
of pesticides, which is a win, right? Only thing we have in really the food
industry is organic, believe it or not, USDA organic, that’s very helpful. But what’s
interesting is that there’s two components. There’s what’s on your food and then what
is its nutritional value and how do you get a higher load of nutrition to do what
I said, which is like offset problems, right? So I thought about all the food
system and the soil often is not so nutritious anymore. There’s people might have
heard this, but we’re sort of using up a lot of good nutrition in our soil.
And the time that food takes, I had blueberries, I think, from Peru a few months
ago, and I thought, boy, I wonder how long it took to get my organic blueberries
from Peru to my supermarket down the street. Unless you’re growing your own food,
which unless you are you’re really advocating for local farmers which I applaud and
trying to eat you know sooner from being picked we’re all sort of at the whim of
the food system and so from that understanding I realized that when patients come
through they’re deficient in vitamin D which everyone seems to be right, modern day
life and we’re deficient in certain nutrients, certainly iodine which is very
protective to the thyroid gland, which is a really great discussion in terms of how
the thyroid gland has sort of led to an epidemic of thyroid conditions. And it’s
really, in many ways, a nutritional problem. And so all of the things that I was
seeing deficient, I realized this has got to be the plan to suggest for people to
fill in where we’re missing. So the four things, sorry, long -winded answer, but the
four things that I really stand by, and it couldn’t be a lot more, but this is
what I think is the simplest and is really, number one, a really great multivitamin.
And when I say a multivitamin, that’s great. I mean, not your typical, the ones I
grew up on actually, but the ones without colors added, BHA, BHT preservatives,
fillers, they have enough of what they’re supposed in them, which is,
you know, for any lay person, how do they know, right? But that’s how you have a
third -party testing type of brand, because the really good brands, and there’s not
that many of them, really rely on third -party testing. That’s unbiased to tell the
consumers that they really do have what’s in there and the amount that they say
they have in there. And a multi should really have iodine, at least 150 micrograms,
which is not an outrageous amount. It’s a very reasonable amount, but it’s a daily
amount of iodine, among other things that we need daily, to keep ourselves, our
cells thriving, to keep our body and our physiology in good shape. And so the first
was the multivitamin, and I give a bunch of information as to how you suss that
out. The second thing, not in any particular order, is vitamin D, which many people
have heard of before in terms of being low. Vitamin D3 is really what you get over
the counter. And vitamin D3 is so critically important to the immune system. It’s
also good for heart disease prevention, vision, just a whole host of things that D
is good for. And that typically has to be a supplement because we’re not getting
enough in our food system no matter how great a diet you have. The third is
probiotic and I go into the gut microbiome and why the gut is so critical to the
immune system, largest immune organ, but that the microbes that we’ve been living
with that line the interior of the gut, which is 26 feet of bowel, is really
comprised, we hope, of really healthy bacteria. There’s trillions of them, but we
want the good ones. And so you’re really taking a probiotic, if you’re not eating
probiotic foods, which I also talk about in the food, in the book. But that
probiotic supplement is for the mere mortals like me who don’t have time to cook or
don’t get the right foods all the time. And then the last of the four fertilizer
supplements that I talk about in depth is omega -3 fatty acids, which is like fish
oil. But so much of it is junk because it’s hard to source. And so I talk about
how do you get a good brand, how do you kind of understand walking into any store
had a look at that label and understand it.
Bridgett: – Right, and you know, some other
things before we go that I really want to talk about. You did two things that were
so simple to look for. Well, one of them was looking at the recycling on plastic.
Now when I see a number seven, nope. So can you talk about,
you know, how that, the different types, just some of the simple things like that,
just as a start.
Dr. Cohen: – Yeah, well, I never understood, and maybe your audience didn’t
either, I didn’t understand what the triangle with the number is on the bottom of a
plastic container. And it’s pretty much all plastics, right? But it’s even the big
blue car boys, you know, you see emptied out at, you know, Lowe’s and Home Depot
and whatever, where people return them. Or even on your, you know, drinking water,
Poland Spring, I don’t know, whatever, all the delivery services. But it’s also, you
know, applesauce containers. If you go into like Walmart or any food store, you can
see literally 14 different types of applesauce containers. So the idea is that
plastics have, interestingly enough, they were given designations of what those
plastics are made of by an organization from the plastics recycling industry.
So it was all started in, I think, 1988, where the plastics industry wanted to see
if they can recoup money by recycling, putting these recycling codes that they could
basically get money back. So they were designating what those numbers were so they
could make it easier. Well, I say, well, let’s use that to our benefit as
consumers, right? So now that we know science about what those plastic chemicals are,
and we know actually which triangle and which number they might be in, we can guide
our choices a little bit better. So there’s the one through seven designation.
Anyone could look on Google or search engine and say plastic recycling codes. And
you’ll get wonderful descriptions. We have it in the book. But the idea is that
number one is PET, P -E -T , which is polyethylene terephthalate.
Two is another type of plastic. Three is polyvinyl chloride.
Four is, I can’t remember what it is off the top of my head, but then five is
pretty much safer as well. I actually should open my book and actually give you the
exact thing. But the idea is that six is styrene or polystyrene, which is
carcinogenic, styrofoam.
And seven is typically, typically bisphenol A. So when I tell people what to look
for, I always say stick with one, two, four, and five. Stay away from three which
is polyvinyl chloride in general not the greatest exposure either to eat, you know
Or technically to breathe in but you know you have to weigh that out and then six
is styrofoam and seven is BPA and if you go practice this like if you just go
into a supermarket, you’ll get it It’s pretty quick and pretty easy and if you have
choices you can make those
Colleen: Yes, I remember five four one and two the rest are bad
for you Thank you
Dr. Cohen: Yes, it is. And I’m just trying to because I really want to show this. And of
course, I’m like scrambling to find it. And it’s funny because I have it in the
old book. And so now I’m like, oh, maybe I could just find it faster in my old
book because it was there, too. Here it is.
So those are watching the video. Yes. And you have the diagrams, right?
You have all the triangles and break it down, which you can basically see the
types of products, like, “Hey, look, if it’s your plastic laundry detergent, am I
really going to tell you to swap that out? Like, who cares, right?” But if it’s
going into your body, you might think about the drink or the food that has that
triangle. And if you have a choice, then maybe do that. I mean, the goal is to
kind of stay away from plastics as much as you can, but we live in the real world
and it’s really difficult to do that.
Colleen: That’s so true. And I think also when you
were talking about adding, – You break that down too. You’re like eat two to five
cups of vegetables every day. Consume dandelions. That was a little bit of a shocker
for me. Can we talk about why we should consume dandelions?
Dr. Cohen: – You know, the thing
is dandelions, which are just yellow flowers that we used to pick and do– – Right,
give to our parents too. – But wasn’t there like, didn’t you like go like this with
your thumb and knock them– – Oh, you get all the yellow around your finger. – Yeah,
or put it – Yeah, maybe that was another type of yellow. But anyway, long story
short, we’ve had our fun as kids, at least I did with dandelions. And they were
always considered a bad guy and everyone wanted to mow them down. Well, it turns
out they have some actually pretty interesting detoxification properties.
It’s one of those things where I probably wouldn’t necessarily go out in my backyard
and do it because I know that we’ve been sprayed locally with different pesticides.
So I think about that in terms of my exposures. But for most, you know, other
people who may see them, there are really easy ways to crush them down and to
actually make them into all sorts of things. You can also find it as a capsule,
you know, from a good brand that does it and they’re cheap, right? Because
dandelions are everywhere. So it’s, you know, I want people to have as much
suggestions, you know, as possible. There’s also, you know, NAC that’ll set 16
supplements that you can take, which are basically making your liver kind of turn up
its natural enzymes to break down chemicals. NAC is pretty commonplace in supplement
aisle. But I don’t want people to always rely on supplements. Like I really, I’m
really saying those four fertilizer chemicals supplements, because I really feel like
those have the highest yield benefit for human health if they’re done well. and that
we may actually not be getting, even in the best diets, enough of what we need to
stay healthy. So that’s why it’s just those four fertilizer ones, but brands matter
too.
Bridgett: – Right, and before we go, I wanted to just talk about water, ’cause you did
spend a lot of time about water filtration systems and the importance of that. And I love
how you addressed, ’cause my big question was, okay, so what about my refrigerator
filter? and you answered it in there, but can you talk about just like why maybe
getting a filtration system? And which one is the best? Which one is the best?
Dr. Cohen: Yeah, no, this is really high yield. I like people to hear this because it took me
15 years to figure this out and I’m happy to share. So let me just give you a
couple quick fun facts because you need that to know the why and then the how. So
in we, a US population, 85 % of the population is served by waste water treatment
plants for their drinking water, okay? Waste water treatment plants are just these
big plants that funnels lake water, streams, sewage,
runoff, anything that comes through the water system goes through our waste water
treatment plants and becomes our tap water, our city tap water, okay? Unless you’re
on wells, which are also very commonplace, but that’s only serving 15 % of the U .S.
population on average, right? So all of these wastewater treatment plants, and there’s
160 ,000 that serve 85 % of the U .S. So most of us, you could arguably say,
are on these wastewater treatment or tap water. Only is covered in terms of the
laws to protect us from chemicals, only covers about 91 chemicals under the Safe
Drinking Water Act from 1974. That hasn’t changed in 50 years,
despite the fact that we have so many more chemicals that are being made,
manufactured, runoff in the water, sewage, whatever. So nothing has changed in that
law. And so stuff comes through those treatment plants and then comes right out the
other end, pretty much unchanged except for those one chemicals if they trigger an
alarm that they’re too high, right? They get remediated. That being said, it also
travels a very long distance. My tap water comes from a place that’s 30 miles away.
So anything, it’s added, fluorine is added, a bunch of things are added
intentionally, which we need so that we don’t have pestilence and end up like 18th
century humans dying. But, you know, we have to kill off infection, but it also can
travel through lead piping, PVC piping, breaks in the piping, whatever. So my real
commentary is, no matter where your water comes from, whether it’s a well for the
town or your home or municipal tap water, you have the right– and I feel like a
really smart way as an obligation to your body, perhaps, is to try to think about
how to clean it when it hits your home, when it’s at the point of use, which is
your kitchen sink, right? That’s where you get to control. You don’t have to worry
about all the different things that happen to your water. When it gets to your
home, that’s where you have the most control. So I started off like everyone else
with bottled water when I wasn’t sure about water in New Jersey and when we moved
- Then I kind of moved up to say, “I don’t know, maybe I’ll do a pitcher.” And
didn’t know much about it. Then I was using the fridge plus the, you know, over
the years. The technology though has gotten so good in terms of cleaning water.
The most important type of, I should say the most aggressive type of water
filtration is called reverse osmosis. And the reason I now shout on mountaintops is
because the price point has come down so dramatically over 15 years. It used to be
$800 for one, than $750, I mean, I’ve been watching Market. They’re $275
now for a really reputable reverse osmosis water filter, and then there’s different
ways to have it. You could have it on the counter, which you have to keep filling
up, which I find to be difficult. I tested them all out. And then I had one that
was put in by a plumber for $150, literally timed the guy from the second he got
to my house to the second he left, same with my office, because they Sometimes
we’ll tell you, “Oh, it’s complicated,” and then they charge you by the hour and it
goes up. So the long story, for $275, $150 of a plumber for like $400 up front,
you now have a system that will probably last you between five and 10 years.
Changeouts for the cartridges are $30 every six months, maybe even
more. And it’s a much actually cheaper system in many ways than a lot of the drop
-in picture filters that are not is aggressive in terms of the way they clean the
water. So long story short, long answer to your short question is that reverse
osmosis is ideal, but I would never poo -poo anyone from using any filtration for
their water. And those are carbon block in the fridge or in the pitcher, they’re
called carbon block. Water goes through very fast for convenience, but that also
means it doesn’t take off as many contaminants as say something that’s making water
while you sleep through lots of canisters and then ending up in a tank.
Colleen: – And I
really appreciated the last section of your book, The Allow, because you tell us all
this information, but then you give us lists of foods that you can allow, like a
hundred different foods and DIY for different cleaning supplies and recipes.
And I think that’s really important so that when you’re feeling overwhelmed by
reading some of this, you go, okay, I can just look here and know if I’m getting
the right, you know, doing the best for my body, my family’s bodies. And I think
even the medical testing and everything I really appreciated in the book because I
think that’s important as well.
Dr. Cohen: – I feel like people have a right to know how to
get even testing for heavy metals if you want it from your insurance. Like why are
we paying out of pocket all the time for things that we could really cover in just
a couple tests from a primary or a healthcare practitioner who’s willing to put the
ICD -10 codes, also the cancer testing. It’s always occurs to me that how much money
we spend to get answers. And I myself am a consumer as well,
and I just want people to utilize what they’re paying for, utilize the system as
best you can in the nicest, easiest way. So, here hand this to your doctor and
maybe they’ll be willing to order it now that they have all the information they
need, or you could go more extensively to outside labs. So, I just want choices
available and, you know, food options available and recipes available. We’re not
perfect people. I’m not a purist, I’m a realist, but I do feel that these kind of
choices, this kind of information is health in society,
even the most expensive lipstick can be loaded with lead compared to say something
at Walgreens on the corner. I want people to know that, that this is how we break
through all of this ideas that expensive things are safer. It’s just not true.
Colleen: Dr. Aly Cohen, thank you so much and congratulations on the launch of Detoxify.
We hope but everyone goes out and takes a look at it. We’ll have a link in the
show notes.
Dr. Cohen: – Yeah, I just wanted to make sure people are interested.
It’s just a lot.
Bridgett: – If you’re watching the video, she’s holding up the cover.
Dr. Cohen: – Yeah,
no, I’m really pleased. So it’s kind of exciting. So thank you so much for having
me and your audience for listening. I appreciate it. – Thank you.