Episode 242: Are Your Household Products Impacting Your Health and Hormones?
With Lara Adler
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome Environmental Toxins Expert and Educator, Lara Adler. She and Dr. Pompa will be discussing environmental toxins, but more specifically, the obesogenic chemicals that are found in our home and personal care products. We will learn what they are, where they are found, and most importantly, how we can reduce exposures. There are surprising ways that toxins affect us from weight gain and diabetes to thyroid disease and infertility. Many of these chemicals are hiding in plain sight. Avoiding all toxic exposures can be really overwhelming. Lara is here to help you navigate this.
I’d love to tell you a bit more about our guest. Lara Adler is an Environmental Toxins Expert and Educator and a Certified Holistic Health Coach who teaches health professionals as well as the public about the links between environmental chemicals and chronic health issues. She takes a practical, real-world approach to dealing with toxins that is informative, accessible, and actionable. She’s taught thousands of allied health practitioners like health coaches, nutritionists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and women’s health experts, as well as health enthusiasts like you in her online courses. Our CHTV audience can go to homedetoxcourse.com to take Lara’s Tools for Teaching Toxicity course which is great for those of you that want to take your health to the next level by systematically reducing exposure to toxins in your environment. Again, that link is homedetoxcourse.com.
Practitioners, Dr. Pompa’s seminar is coming up. Please join us in Las Vegas on November 2nd to the 4th for our Live It to Lead It event. It’s not too late to register. Please go to hcfevents.com and use promo code CHTV to take $200 off the ticket price. Alright, let’s get into this episode. It’s not one to be missed. Let’s welcome Dr. Pompa and Lara Adler to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Lara, thank you for being here on Cell TV; welcome.
Lara Adler:
You are so welcome. I’m thrilled to be here and to talk with you and maybe nerd out with your audience a little.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, absolutely. On this subject, it’s a good one to nerd out because it’s a nerdy subject. It’s one that I’ve been talking about for years. I’ve said this on every platform that I’ve spoken from that the big reason why people can’t lose weight today is toxicity.
Lara Adler:
A hundred percent, 100%.
Dr. Pompa:
Obesogens, as we were laughing before the show, I’m like are they still called that? We used to call them obesogens, meaning chemicals that actually cause weight gain or at least interfere with weight loss even. I have to ask this because like I said, this has been a message of mine for so long. How did you get into this? Who’s into these specific chemicals and how to get them out of your life, we’re going to talk about all of that on the show. How did you get into this?
Lara Adler:
In a round-about way with a little bit of an asterisk in that story. I have this funny thing that happened last year that adds a little bit of an interesting twist. As I jokingly say, no one grows up as a little girl being like, oh, one day I want to talk about toxins as my dream job. That’s not real, but I was always interested in health and nutrition from my early teen days because I became interested in being a vegetarian, and then vegan, which I’m neither at this point in my life. At the time, I was really fascinated by the health aspects of that way of eating. I dove into all of the books that were around in early ‘90s around that topic. It was just what I nerded out on privately in my life, but I didn’t really think about it professionally in any way. I had a whole other career; I spent nine years in the stock photography industry completely unrelated. I still always had this burning nerdy passion about health and wellness and nutrition.
I had a couple of people talk to me about holistic health coaching. They said, well, you could do that. I said, “Okay, let me check that opportunity out as maybe it’s a way that I can flex this muscle professionally.” I found it fascinating. I said, “This is it.” I went back to school; got certified as a health coach; started seeing clients. Like a lot of beginner health coaches, my clients were coming to me for weight loss. Some of my clients, they did all of the things that I recommended. They cut out all of the bad foods: the glutens, and the sugars, and the dairy. They exercised. They slept well. They lost weight and they kept it off. It was this great success.
Then I had this handful of other clients where they did all of those things and nothing happened for them; nothing happened. They were frustrated. I was frustrated. I said, “Let me see what I’m missing.” because I just finished school. They taught us x, y, and z, but I’m guessing that I’m missing something. It was through that investigative process that I landed into this world of chemicals that can trigger weight gain and other metabolic issues. I was like, wow, holy crap; I’ve been reading and researching and immersing myself in this world for 15 years now at the time, and this was the first I’d heard about it. It really struck me as being not okay; not okay that these chemicals that were being manufactured and used in consumer products were there in the first place. Then not okay that people didn’t know about it and not okay that practitioners weren’t talking about it. It was outrage, to be honest, that fueled me into this space.
What was interesting, and this is the little twist, is in 2017, last year I went to where I grew up for my father’s 80th birthday. Went back to my old house, was poking around my old bedroom from high school. I found a box of index cards from a report that I was writing in 1993—I think it was ‘93—on being vegan. The first index card that I pulled up said—was a quote from some book saying that people were moving to a more plant-based diet because of all the toxic chemicals in the environment. I was like, wow, that was 25, now 26 years ago. In a way, I guess I was at least a little bit aware of this stuff for a lot longer than I’ve been in this space professionally.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I find that most doctors still aren’t talking about it; definitely, don’t understand it. That’s why on this cellular detox, it’s like, look, this is what saved my life. I never thought I would be in the weight loss arena. How did I end up there? It’s because of what you said. People were coming to me with unexplainable illnesses. One of the things that I realized is they can’t lose weight either, or they suddenly gain weight, or they lose muscle and gain fat. They become skinny fat which happened to me. It was all toxin driven. Then when you look at, which I know you talk about thyroid conditions, most of its toxin driven.
Lara Adler:
Yes, any autoimmune condition.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, diabetes. I read a study once. It was like 35% of diabetes is toxin related. I think it’s 80% because when you add in the autoimmune component, this is a global happenstance.
Lara Adler:
It’s a global issue. What I think is mind boggling, especially considering how few medical professionals are actively engaging with their patients around this, is that environmental chemicals have their fingers in every single chronic health issue. Every autoimmune issue; every neurodegenerative issues, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s; we’ve got low IQ, behavior problems; autism; ADHD; you’ve got even gut issues; skin issues; fatigue, any kind of energy issues; any kind of chronic disease, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, testicular cancer; all of these things; PCOS, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, all of these have an environmental chemical component. It totally boggles my mind that this is still considered this fringe topic, this fringe concept, and it’s not. GQ Magazine actually just published an article called, “Sperm Count Zero” which is talking about the meta-analysis that was just done looking at the levels of sperm is dropped by 50 to 60% over the last 30 or 40 years. It’s a problem. They’re pointing the finger at these synthetic chemicals that we’re being exposed to that mess with our hormones and mess with testosterone. Again, it boggles my mind that not everyone’s talking about this.
Dr. Pompa:
That research is, like with all these conditions, is that toxins are the cause, right?
Lara Adler:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Yet, practitioners, doctors, they’re not even talking about it or addressing it even in functional medicine. Let’s face it; they’re running more genetic tests. They’re doing all these great things, supplements, but really, very few are going upstream to the cause. Look, I became an expert in cellular detoxification because people are doing it wrong. You’re an expert in how people—and I love this about you because how people can actually avoid these things. You can do all the detox you want; if you don’t get rid of the things in your life, forget it. Matter of fact, it’s my R number one of my cellular detox.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
Remove the source.
Lara Adler:
You have to. The analogy that I use to explain this to people is this. Pretend that you’re on a rowboat. You’re just rowing along and enjoying the scene. All of a sudden, there’s a little hole in the bottom of your boat and it starts filling with water. Now, a little bit of water is okay because our body can handle that. Every boat comes with a little bucket that you can empty out any of that water. To quote industry, “a little water never hurt anyone,” right? At a certain point and time, that boat starts filling up and you start dealing with symptoms. Boat starts filling up. You start panicking. You start chucking bucket fulls of water over the side of the boat.
At a certain point and time, you are going to get fatigued. Your arms are going to get tired and you are going to give up. Then what happens? Your boat fills with water; it sinks; you drown. That means you get an autoimmune condition. You get diabetes. You get cancer. You have some kind of health crisis. In that situation in real life, instead of spending our effort and energy bailing out that boat, which is important, the first thing that we do is plug the damn hole. That’s what you would do in that situation. That’s really what I’m striving to teach people to do. Let’s plug the hole first so that every bucket full that we do throw over actually has an impact.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s plug the holes because I think there inlays part of the problem though because when we look at people’s lives, these things are hidden. They don’t realize. They’re saying, okay, yeah, it makes sense. Let’s talk about how to plug the hole. Let’s talk about where these hidden obesogens are.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, I’m sure that you’ve talked about obesogens to your audience in other topics.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but this is a new show, so let’s talk about it. There are specific chemicals that cause weight gain and weight loss resistance more than others.
Lara Adler:
Yes, and they can do that in a couple of different ways. One of the ways is just through endocrine disruption. If chemicals interfere with our hormone system—our hormone system is what regulates our metabolism, our energy, our hunger, and satiety. That’s the major thermostat that regulates everything in the body. A lot of the chemicals that we’re exposed to can actually lead to metabolic distress through this process of endocrine disruption. They can mess with our signals of when we’re hungry and when we’re full. They can mess with the hormones leptin and ghrelin that really screws with our signaling of should I stop eating or not. On that pathway, it’s an indirect pathway. It’s causing x to happen. When x happens, we consume more calories or we do some other process. Our metabolism slows down.
One of the other ways which I think is really powerful to understand is through the activation of something called the PPAR gamma receptor. This receptor is our master regulator of fat cell development. When it gets activated, it causes one or two things to happen. If this PPAR gamma is activated and a cell is in predevelopment, it’s a stem cell, that cell will now become a fat cell as opposed to something else.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, it turns our stem cells into fat cells.
Lara Adler:
It’s turning stem cells into fat cells.
Dr. Pompa:
The repair of your knee joint, or your -inaudible-, or whatever.
Lara Adler:
What’s interesting is the research seems to indicate that it’s doing it at the expense of bone—what cells that would have become bone cells. I’m not really sure how that factors into things like osteoporosis or something with issues with bone density or not, but that seems to be what the literature is suggesting that it’s doing it at the expense of bone cells. We have this increase in the number of actual fat cells in the body. PPAR gamma activation to a stem cell means more fat cells. For cells that are already our cells, our fat cells, when PPAR gamma is activated, it actually starts increasing the size and capacity to hold fat in that cell.
Now, we’ve got this double whammy. We’ve got more fat cells and the fat cells that we have are larger. Those larger fat cells are just receptacles for lipophilic toxins. They’re just containers for more toxins. The body has this defense mechanism that says, hey, if there’s not—we’re going to store all those toxins in our fat because then it saves it from circulating around into our other vulnerable tissues, our other organs circulating through the body. If you don’t have enough body fat to store those circulating toxins, the body’s going to go, hey, let’s kick it up here. We need to start packing on some fat, some adipose tissue so that we can expand our storage capacity for these toxins. That’s really what we’re looking at here.
The example that I like to give that we all know about are the people that go on some kind of anti-depressant and they have side effect of weight gain. They start putting on 10, 20, 30 pounds. That’s because those pharmaceuticals activate PPAR gamma. They’re doing the same thing that we now know that a lot of these chemicals in our environment are able to do. Unfortunately, we’re exposed to not just one or two of these obesogenic chemicals but dozens and dozens of them probably in a single day, every day. I think right now there’s about 50 chemicals or compounds that have been identified as obesogens. My hunch is that as the research continues in this space, that number’s going to get way bigger.
Dr. Pompa:
Think about it this way, too. If I could add even to some other ways these come in. They go to the cell membrane because it’s fatty. They blunt hormone receptors. That’s one of the links to diabetes which is obviously going to increase insulin which is a fat storing hormone; again, indirect. Obviously, can block thyroid receptors. Now, you can’t get your T3. Then, of course, that’s going to lead to weight gain. Then another way is that it gets—mercury is an example. It gets in the pituitary, hypothalamus. That controls your whole hormone system. In me—
Lara Adler:
A whole cascade of health effects.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I got skinny fat. I was catabolic in my muscle in that I was getting fat around the waist. Skinny fat is not attractive, but yet, a big sign of neurotoxicity. Then lastly, certain chemicals turn on genes of obesity, epigenetics. My gosh, we just went through five ways, maybe six, seven. I don’t know.
Lara Adler:
A lot of ways.
Dr. Pompa:
Talk about, okay—
Lara Adler:
I think what’s scary, to be honest, is the epigenetic factor that you just mentioned because that’s predisposing future generations to have a harder time. They’re going have predisposed to weight gain and they’re going to have a harder time losing it.
Dr. Pompa:
I talk about the Duke study. They gave two different identical twin mice a toxin, same toxin. They had the exact same food, exact same exercise.
Lara Adler:
Everything.
Dr. Pompa:
Identical twins. The one exposed to the toxin got obese.
Lara Adler:
Yep, and it changed his fur color.
Dr. Pompa:
Exactly; then the problem was the next generation of mice. They became obese despite their diet and how much exercise. Sound familiar, folks? This is what we’re talking about. This is what epidemic toxins are creating. Okay, let’s talk about some of the hidden ones because people are home going right now, oh my God, I want to avoid these things the best way that I can. Where are the hidden stuff?
Lara Adler:
People always ask me like, what are the most important ones to address? Where do we address? I always say we address the ones that are easiest to change first because otherwise, we start swimming around in this panic that is anxiety producing. We all know that stress is also toxic on the body. It’s a different type of toxin, but it’s real. I like to start with the things that are easiest to change. The very first thing that I recommend people do is to really emphasize the consumption of organic produce in our fruits and vegetables, period, across the board, as much as is feasibly possible within budget.
The reason for this is the pesticide residues that are on conventional fruits and vegetables are obesogens. They’re also cancer causing. They’re also hormonal disrupting. They’re also reproductive toxins. Let’s knock a few of these exposures out of the park at once and look towards consuming organic foods. Now, there’s been a couple of studies that are super interesting that have looked at both adults and children to see what happens to their circulating pesticide levels in the body when people stop eating conventional and eat a mostly organic diet; not even 100% because it’s really hard to do that. What both of these studies found, one was in adults, one was in children, was that switching from conventional to mostly organic led to an 80 to 90% drop in circulating pesticide levels in three to five days.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Lara Adler:
It’s super-fast.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s incredible.
Lara Adler:
Super-fast; and what that tells us is that our body is wicked smart; not for every chemical, not for every toxin, but—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, heavy metals and things, they burrow in deep.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, they burrow in. It doesn’t apply to all chemicals, but for certain chemicals like the organophosphate pesticides, if we plug the hole, the boat will not sink. The bucket will not overflow. We can really have a dramatic impact on our circulating pesticide levels immediately, less than a week. I tell that to people, especially to parents who are like, raising kids, it’s hard to spend the money on organic, as much as you can prioritize, go to the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen, Clean Fifteen list to help with budgeting if you have to do that. For me, it’s a non-negotiable. It’s just what we do as much as possible.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and by the way, just to expand what you said there. The Dirty Dozen, folks, is basically these are the 12 things that you must always buy organic. They’re loaded. Typically, it’s more porous things like strawberries are always on it.
Lara Adler:
Yep, spinach
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, spinach is loaded.
Lara Adler:
Spinach is always on there. What’s interesting is that the Environmental Working Group is pulling those numbers—because they do this every year. They’re pulling it from USDA data. What’s even more interesting is when—the methodology that the USDA is using to test for these residues is trying to mimic consumer behavior. They actually are washing produce with water before they do the test. People are like, oh, I’ll just wash it, and I’ll wash the pesticide off. It doesn’t work. A lot of times, the pesticides are systemic which means that they’re not on the food; they’re inside the tissues of the food.
Dr. Pompa:
I remember years ago, it was a Penn State University study where they were spraying the corn, but the problem was the glyphosate and the chemicals were going up right into the plant. That’s what you mean by systemic. Then there’s the Clean Fifteen, which means that these are—typically, they don’t spray a lot on these things. Avocadoes is one of them that you really don’t have to buy an avocado organic. They don’t use a lot of spray on that. I don’t know. There’s some other ones on there.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, I think it’s a great way to budget. To me, like I said, food is my number one expense because it should be.
Dr. Pompa:
You have no idea what my food budget is. Put it this way. Amazon owns Whole Foods now. When I walk in there, they should be serving me champagne, okay. You have no idea.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, no kidding.
Dr. Pompa:
You have no idea what I spent there last year. I’m not even going to tell you.
Lara Adler:
No, trust me. I live across the street from a health food store. I’m there at least once a day, so I know.
Dr. Pompa:
You know what it is though? By the way, when I didn’t have money, my food bill was still the most expensive because it’s of value. Always, no matter where it was, my food has always been my greater expense because that was my value. Whether I was on college income or now, it’s still the same.
Lara Adler:
That’s the way it is around the rest of the world. People’s food expenditure in countries around the world is higher than it is in the United States because we artificially suppress our food costs through government spending in that area. It’s an artificially low number here in the United States. Anyway, that’s the number one thing I tell people to do is push organic as much as possible. The number two thing is—and there’s two parts to this. The first, this has to do with home fragrances, so fragrances in your home. The first part is if you have scented candles, air fresheners, plugins, any kind of Febreze, any of those type of home fragrance products, just throw them out.
Dr. Pompa:
Gone.
Lara Adler:
Don’t buy them again. That’s a free tip.
Dr. Pompa:
When I walk into a house with those things, in an hour, I’m brain fogged. They’re living their lives this way. Those air fresheners are some of the most toxic things on the planet. I think we looked at one, we were counting neurotoxins in them.
Lara Adler:
They’re terrible.
Dr. Pompa:
Every one of them had at least three neurotoxins in them.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, and they contribute to our indoor air pollution. We don’t think of our homes as being polluted in the inside. EPA has found that the air quality inside our homes can be 5 to 100 times worse than what’s outside. It’s partly because of all of these synthetic fragrances. I think of it as a nasal detox. When we eat junky food, and Roy Rogers, and Fritos, and soda, and all that stuff, our palette is completely inundated with these hyperpalatable flavors: salt, fat, sugar. Healthy food tastes bland until we start eating that way and then our palate shifts. Those foods that we used to find delicious are now so hyper-sweet or so hyper-salty. The same thing is true when we ditch the fragrances. We swim in it, so we don’t realize how bad they are until we take a break from it and then re-expose somebody to those fragrances. They’re going to go, oh my God. How did I ever live like this? Our nasal palette will adjust.
Dr. Pompa:
I don’t know where this fits in. So far, I’m right on top. Those are the biggies. Here’s my third most irritating. This might be your two for six. Fabric softener.
Lara Adler:
Oh yeah, they’re bad.
Dr. Pompa:
I go drive by people’s homes and I get sick. I smell people coming. Again, six neurotoxins on average in fabric softeners. Oh, not only are you breathing it, but you’re absorbing it transdermally into your skin.
Lara Adler:
Through your skin, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
A hormone, if you give someone a hormone, you put it on their skin, you’re giving them these obesogens right into their skin.
Lara Adler:
I think a lot of people sometimes are resistant to start making changes because they think it’s going to cost them a lot of money. This is one that’s free and it saves you money. Don’t buy them; just don’t buy them. Do an indoor air detox. Open all your windows, take this garbage out. Then just don’t buy them again. For people that really do like having fragrance in their house, they can use essential oil diffusers. They can bring in flowers. They can do it simply.
Dr. Pompa:
Healthy, yeah.
Lara Adler:
They can do that. That’s part one of that. I’m going to circle back around to part two of that fragrance section. Step number three is to move into the kitchen and to really start looking at the plastics that you have in your kitchen where they come in contact with food. Now, I’m not a Luddite. I don’t want people to think that they have to go back to using wood everything to give their—
Dr. Pompa:
Did you say a Luddite?
Lara Adler:
A Luddite like they’re—
Dr. Pompa:
What are those people called?
Lara Adler:
The Luddite is just somebody who doesn’t want to be around any advancement in technologies.
Dr. Pompa:
Mennonite, that’s what -inaudible-.
Lara Adler:
Oh yes, well, speaking of Mennonites, that’s great that you brought that up. There was an article in a magazine about five or six years ago titled, “Want to Avoid Toxic Chemicals? Drop Out of Modern Society.” The article was about this one population in the United States that had really low levels of BPA and phthalates in their blood; both endocrine disruptors, both obesogens. It was in Old Order Mennonites sect that they studied. No, not a Mennonite; a Luddite.
I say that because I don’t want people to be plastic phobic. There are plenty of things in our lives that are plastic. I’m sure part of the chair that you’re sitting on is plastic. My computer is plastic. There’s plastic that are great, that make our lives better, easier, safer, faster, etc. The plastics where they come in contact with food are a problem because they leach these obesogenic compounds. They do it 24/7 whether or not—yes, it’s worse if you put them in the microwave, but they do it regardless. There was a couple of studies, one primary study in 2012 that looked at all of—2011 that looked at all of the different types of plastics. All types of plastics even the bioplastics and corn plastics leached some kind of estrogenic compounds. That’s a synthetic estrogen. Those estrogens are part of what contribute to that hormonal disruption that can lead to some of these weight problems, really any other estrogen problem.
Dr. Pompa:
BPA free now has become like the new fat-free or the non-GMO. These are great marketing tools, but I’m like, okay, BPA is just one of the chemicals. It’s about popularity. They act like that’s the only chemical. There’s five hundred.
Lara Adler:
It’s marketing. It was moms actually in the ‘90s that got really—or early 2000s that got really upset when they found out that BPA was in plastic baby bottles. They put up a stink. That started this BPA bad boy storyline that we have which is true; it’s a bad boy. Companies started taking it out and they just swapped it with sister—
Dr. Pompa:
Maybe even a worse one
Lara Adler:
—chemicals in the same family. They’re worse. It’s a switcheroo. What that tells us is that the chemical industry and these manufacturers are just banking on consumer ignorance. They’re banking on the fact that we don’t really know that stuff means anyway. Now, we see BPA free labels—I see it on plastics that never once contained BPA in the first place. Ziploc bags, they never had BPA because BPA is a type of compound that’s used to make plastics rigid and hard. It was never in Ziploc bags, but every Ziploc bag now says BPA free.
Dr. Pompa:
They’re going to sell more bags if they—
Lara Adler:
It was about 15 years ago, Tropicana came out with an orange juice that was “cholesterol free.” I should hope that there’s no cholesterol in my orange juice.
Dr. Pompa:
They had fat-free on orange juice, too. I didn’t know oranges had fat. It never did.
Lara Adler:
It never did, but for the person who’s like, I don’t know. My cardiologist said I’m supposed to be watching my cholesterol. They’re going to buy that orange juice over any other orange juice. It’s just marketing.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it works.
Lara Adler:
It works. I think what people need to recognize is BPA is the poster boy, but it’s not the only compound that’s in plastics. Phthalates are in plastics. Phthalates are in plastics that are soft and flexible, so our drinking water bottles can leach compounds that mimic estrogen that are in the phthalate family. PET plastic, which is what are pull and spring bottles are made of, is Polyethylene Terephthalate. That’s what PET stands for. There’s been research that indicates these plastics all leach compounds.
There’s four things that increase the rate at which these things leach. This is why people say don’t put plastics in the microwave: heat, oil, acidity, and abrasion. I’ll add a fifth one which is time. If we’re putting our hot, oily, acidic tomato sauce or tomato soup in a plastic Tupperware container and then afterward the container’s forever stained orange, it’s because the physical barrier between where the plastic stops and the sauce starts gets blurred. You actually have molecules of your sauce physically embedded into the plastic matrix of the container. The inverse is we now have plastic molecules in our sauce.
Dr. Pompa:
I always say that tomato sauce might be the worst offender. It’s acid.
Lara Adler:
Yes, it’s acid, yep, and it’s oily. It’s the one, two, three punch.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s oily. It’s full of it, yeah.
Lara Adler:
That’s just an example of where we start. Start with the plastic food storage containers. Go for glass instead. It’s super inexpensive. I use mason jars for everything; not just for drinking, but for storage. They’re inexpensive. They’re hard to break.
Dr. Pompa:
Folks, if you have a bowl, a glass bowl, you can put your sauce or whatever in that. If you put plastic wrap on top of it and it never touches the food, could the vapor hit it and drop down? Yes.
Lara Adler:
Yes, but it’s still way less.
Dr. Pompa:
Minimal; yeah, exactly.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, totally minimal. Now, actually, they have these really great silicone bowl lids that are essentially, they serve as a replacement for things like Saran Wrap on top of bowls. It creates a perfect airtight seal. Those are great and fairly inexpensive. People don’t have to break the bank to start making changes. I think we have to prioritize our health and that’s what this is. Some investment I think is required, but you can do it over time. When I first started, I would just take the pickle jars, or the sauerkraut jars, or the nut butter jars. I would run them through the dishwasher and reuse them. If they’re glass jars, they’re okay to do that.
Dr. Pompa:
With your Tupperware, folks, you can put things like pretzels in them. It’s not going to go into the pretzel. Use it for other things like that.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, or use it for crayons, or use it in the garage for nuts and bolts. You can start phasing. You don’t have to throw all this stuff out; you can repurpose it. Start with the storage containers. Here’s the challenge that I give people is to open up their cabinets and just look. Don’t do anything, but just take a look at all the plastic. Little kids with all their plastic drinking cups, and plastic plates, and plastic utensils, the plastic pasta strainer, the plastic mixing spoons, mixing bowls, those black plastic spatulas that everyone has.
Dr. Pompa:
There is common spatulas that are better.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, there’s so many things that are better to use than plastic. I tell people it’s a systematic phase-out. Don’t feel like they have to do it overnight or in a weekend. If it takes six months to start to do that, great; that’s still amazing progress. Don’t let the time be a discouraging factor for people that don’t want to dump everything out and rebuild their kitchen from the ground up. Those are the first three.
From there, I would really encourage people—at this point, it forks. There’s the next couple are all equivalent in importance: cleaning up household cleaners, cleaning up personal care products, and filtering your drinking water. People don’t recognize. They don’t realize how many toxins you’re being exposed to through their drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency through the Safe Water Drinking Act only regulates 91 contaminates and regulates them poorly. There’s hundreds of chemicals in our drinking water that are unregulated.
Dr. Pompa:
Even hormones now.
Lara Adler:
Even hormones, or pharmaceuticals, or medications. We have narcotics. In fact, cities will use the amount of narcotics in the wastewater to extrapolate out how many drug users are there in the community.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s scary.
Lara Adler:
It’s pretty scary. Then we have industrial chemicals that a lot of the chemicals that are in our drinking water. Atrazine is the largest, most widely used herbicide. It’s in 94% of drinking water tested by the USDA. It’s an obesogen. We’ve got perfluorinated compounds, PFCs compounds, which are found in non-stick cookware. They’re found in firefighting foam. If you live anywhere near a military base, they use these foams. It gets into the groundwater. It doesn’t get filtered out by your city water.
These directly attack the thyroid. They are obesogens. We’re not being exposed to giant quantities of these compounds at any given point, but guess what? If they’re hormonally active, if they’re capable of being bioactive at low levels, our bodies are designed to respond to these parts per billion, parts per trillion levels of natural hormone antibody. It makes perfect sense that these parts per million, parts per billion, parts per trillion that we’re getting in our drinking water could also have an effect. It’s the frequency language that our body already operates on.
Unfortunately, toxicology as a field of science really operates under this outdated concept that the dose makes the poison. That in order for a chemical to have a negative effect, you have to be exposed to a high dose. If you’re exposed to a small dose, then the effect is going to be smaller. While that’s true for some things like radiation, it’s not true for these hormonally activate compounds. In fact, the opposite is true with that these very small levels can actually be more impactful than a high dose exposure. It is important. I think water filtration is super important to address for people. It’s a little bit lower down on the list only because the investment is usually higher, so people sometimes feel a little resistance. What I really want is people to start taking action right away on the simple things that they can do today, this weekend, this week. Once they have that under their belt and they feel good, then let’s tackle some of these bigger issues.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely; you mentioned it. Ladies, I hate to bring it up, but she did mention your personal care products. On average, 518 chemicals you use every day; 200 and some of those are known cancer causers or obesogens. Okay, now we’ve hit the sore spot. It’s like, yeah, because I’m not giving up my eyeliner. This is the one that hurts.
Lara Adler:
You don’t have to. If we were having this conversation 10 years ago, I would be like, it’s pretty hard to find good stuff. The landscape around personal care products has changed dramatically in the last few years. In fact, the natural and organic sector of the personal care product industry is the fastest growing in the industry period. In a sector that has pretty static growth year over year, the natural and organic is one of the fastest growing.
It’s because people really are starting to—a, it’s because people are sicker than ever. They’re going, what is going on here. They’re starting to look around at their environment. They started and are continuing to demand safer products. You’ve got all of these small independent companies that have just sprung up from nowhere that are serving to fill this gap in the marketplace. Even maybe seven or eight years ago, there was only a handful of companies that I could find. They were really expensive. I had to order them online. They weren’t in stores. Now, there’s so many companies out there that are making safe, clean skincare, I can’t even keep up. People ask me all the time.
Dr. Pompa:
What are your favorite lines?
Lara Adler:
Let’s see, great question. Beautycounter is a really great line. Beautycounter is a direct sales company, but you can also just order directly from their website. They’re a very mission-driven, education-focused company that’s really seeking to overturn the current legislation that we have around chemicals in personal care products. The last time we had federal policy update in this area was 1938 was the last time personal care product legislation was updated.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s ridiculous.
Lara Adler:
It’s a real problem. Beautycounter’s a great line. Evan Healy is a great line. Juice Beauty is a great line. Vapour Beauty is a great line. I have a collection on my website at laraadler.com/beauty which is just some of the products that I use every day. There’s so many great products. People can go to places like The Detox Market which is a curated online collection. They have stores in LA. That’s a super well curated, clean products for makeup and skincare that’s excellent. There’s hundreds and hundreds of lines now that are available.
They don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Sometimes they’re just as affordable as what you’d see in the grocery store. What’s great is that Target sells some of these lines. Target sells a makeup by a company called W3LL PEOPLE. For people that are shopping at Target because it’s just what’s around, or it’s what they can afford, it’s amazing to have these low toxin, non-toxic skincare products that are just on the shelves with all the others. That people can buy it just because it’s there and have the benefit of not being exposed to chemicals through their personal care products. I think that’s a giant win for everyone.
Dr. Pompa:
Here’s a big one everyone can switch today is the darn deodorant you’re using.
Lara Adler:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s going right into these pores absorbed. These things are so toxic.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, so toxic and what happens is—there’s a difference between the antiperspirant and the deodorant. People like the antiperspirant because it stops the little pit-sweaty stains. If you’re in a business meeting, whatever, and you don’t want to have that, fine, but the antiperspirants contain compounds that are intended to block the sweat glands. They create these little gel plugs that literally block your sweat glands.
Dr. Pompa:
Not good.
Lara Adler:
It’s not good. Sweating is one of our detox pathways.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a double whammy on you.
Lara Adler:
It’s a double whammy. These ingredients also have fragrances which means they have these synthetic chemicals like phthalates in them. They have parabens which is another one of these endocrine disruptors. They have aluminum-based compounds which are not—they’re neurotoxic. We don’t want to be exposing ourselves to aluminum. I think there’s this—we have to weigh vanity and health.
Dr. Pompa:
Always.
Lara Adler:
We just have to do that. For a long time, there was not a lot that we could choose from to make the decision easier. Now, there’s so many products that we can choose from. At the very list, switch from an antiperspirant to a deodorant. Then the next step is to move away from deodorant that have these synthetic compounds. There’s so many non-toxic deodorants on the market, Primal Pit Paste. My favorite is Pure Pits. I’ve been using that for eight or nine years and I love it. There’s dozens and dozens of options available for people.
Dr. Pompa:
Pure Pits, I’ve never heard of it.
Lara Adler:
Pure Pits is great.
Dr. Pompa:
Another one is again, I mentioned fabric softener, but what you’re washing your clothes in every day. Again, a pet peeve of mine because I know the amount of endocrine disruptors that are in there, neurotoxins. You’re absorbing it in your skin. It’s on you all day long. That’s the issue I have.
Lara Adler:
Yes, if we think about our bed sheets. Most of us sleep in some depending on the season.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re right; all day and night because your bed sheets. Seventh Generation, Meyer’s, you can go down. There’s so many now.
Lara Adler:
There’s so many that are better, absolutely 100%. There’s a great company called MyGreenFills that has some really great non-toxic laundry detergents. They send you refills every month in a little—
Dr. Pompa:
I know the owner of that company.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, Steven.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Steven. I’m going to switch. I have it sitting in there right now.
Lara Adler:
Oh, good, awesome. This stuff is great. I think there’s so many options available for people. It’s so exciting to see the marketplace shift. What that tells me is that our consumers are fed up with being sick. They want cleaner, safer options. The marketplace is responding. You’ve got these big multinational companies that are really working hard to maintain their market share and to keep the consumer uneducated. They work really hard to do that. The chemical policy in the European Union is a lot stricter than it is here. We’ve got companies, multinational companies that have to reformulate the product for the European market, but they won’t reformulate them for the US market.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s sad.
Lara Adler:
I think this is where as consumers, we start demanding transparency and buying safer products. It’s already happening. It’s shifting the landscape. It’s why Target, and Costco, and Walmart, and CVS, and Walgreens all have written policies around, or plans, or programs to start phasing out some of these chemicals in their store brand products. That will ultimately shift the entire marketplace. We’re moving in the right direction; it’s just happening slowly.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s just irritating just because people are—they’re going for more and more medications.
Lara Adler:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Nobody’s willing to step back and say, well, why are my hormones disrupted. Why is this going on? Why is my thyroid not working? This show, we discuss the causes, everything you’ve got there. Yet, I promise you, people just still can’t connect the dots in realizing it’s the accumulation, the effect over years is how you got there. Folks, your body has an ability to heal; remove the interference. That’s why this show’s important. Look, we didn’t have time to get to every one of them, but they can go to your website. You also have an online course that you take people through this: how it affects your life and home, getting rid of these things, the source. Tell them how to find that.
Lara Adler:
Yeah, I have actually a whole series of courses, some more advanced than others. They can just go to laraadler.com. It’s L-A-R-A-A-D-L-E-R.com and check those out. I have a whole master class on obesogens that really explores this topic further. I have a whole course on water filtration and how to find the right water filter for you because everyone’s water is different. People don’t recognize, and they think, oh, I have a Brita. A Brita is good enough. It’s not good enough. Yeah, people can just check me out there or I also share a ton of stuff on Instagram. You can find me @envirnomentaltoxinsnerd on Instagram. Yeah, it’s a big topic. As you can tell I hope, I love talking and teaching about this stuff.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re talking to the right audience here. We have a lot of practitioners, doctors who watch this show. I know your courses, you’ve helped a lot of those get this integrated into their practices.
Lara Adler:
It really is a two-fold thing. It’s learning about it for ourselves, so we can take care of our own homes, but then learning about it to the degree that we can feel comfortable talking to our clients and patients in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them, scare the crap out of them, but instead is really educating and empowering them to make better choices. I think that in this age, where not enough—just like we started by saying, not enough practitioners are talking about it. When practitioners do start talking about it, they’re starting to get an audience of people that are like, oh, please tell me more. I don’t know anything about this. It’s a great avenue for professionals to explore.
Dr. Pompa:
We need it because obviously one of my passions is educating professionals -inaudible- the proper detox. I would love to invite you to my next—not my next seminar because we’re filled, but the one in April. Ashley, my team member here, we’re going to get you there because the focus on that seminar in Spring is cancer.
Lara Adler:
I love it.
Dr. Pompa:
We really need to address these chemicals as well. We’re talking about obesogens here, but believe me, they lead to cancer as well; well hormones are cancerous.
Lara Adler:
They all play double duty. These obesogens are carcinogens; they’re neurotoxins. That’s the problem with these chemicals is it’s not just causing one thing to happen. It can cause a whole bunch of things to happen. How the disease manifests depends on the genetic weak link of the individual.
Dr. Pompa:
Yep, well, we’re going to get you to that seminar as a speaker.
Lara Adler:
Excellent.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so hopefully those dates work out. Ashley will get with you on that. Listen, Lara, thank you so much for being on the show.
Lara Adler:
You’re so welcome. This is so much fun, Dan.
Dr. Pompa:
This is my wheelhouse, my passion. I love this conversation. Gosh, share the show with your friends and family, folks, because this is the key here. You have to get upstream to the cause. Lara, you’re doing it better than anybody, so thank you.
Lara Adler:
Thank you.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Don’t forget to check out Lara’s toxicity tools course by going to homedetoxcourse.com. You can also check out her other amazing courses there as well. Practitioners, you are invited to join us at Dr. Pompa’s Live it to Lead It seminar in Las Vegas from November 2nd to the 4th. You can go to hcfevents.com for more information. You can use the promo code CHTV to take $200 off the ticket price. We’d love to see you there.
We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We are deeply grateful for your support. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
