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Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!
Katie: This episode is sponsored by Just Thrive Health, one of my favorite companies, and especially their new Digestive Bitters. So I’ve been talking about gut health for years before it was so trendy. I love that everybody’s talking about it now, and the one brand that I have continuously used for my gut health is Just Thrive.
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Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode dives deep on what the data actually says about autism risk, going far beyond mercury and going into other risk factors, including environmental risk factors that we have the ability to change in our own lives.
And Dr. Anne Marie Fine is one of the world’s leading authorities on environmental medicine, and she brings so much knowledge to this conversation. She’s the medical director and co founder of the Environmental Medicine Institute International, which is a one year postgraduate course for physicians specifically on this topic.
She’s also a licensed and board certified naturopathic physician and has held license to practice medicine in multiple states for over 20 years. She’s a fellow of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and currently serves on the Integrative Health Policy Consortium as the science advisor to Made Safe as well. She is super knowledgeable on this topic, and she brings the actual statistics and data about how things like environmental risk factors, beyond just heavy metals, though we talk about those too, but how different environmental risk factors from BPA to pesticides and other endocrine disruptors directly or indirectly affect autism risk.
I think this was a fascinating conversation. I certainly learned a lot and I know that you will too. So let’s join Dr. Anne Marie Fine.
Dr. Fine, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Anne: Well, thanks so much for having me, Katie. I’m delighted to be here.
Katie: I’m really excited for this conversation and to get your really data backed take on what I know is a very relevant issue to a lot of moms, and I would argue even society wide as we’re going to talk about autism. Which is something that statistically seems to very much be on the rise with a lot of circulating theories to the one or many reasons why it might be, and I feel like you bring such valuable and needed perspective to this conversation.
So I know this is a big topic. We’re going to get to go in many directions in this conversation, but to introduce the topic broadly, can you kind of talk us through what are we seeing when it comes to autism? Is it in fact on the rise? And then maybe categories of some of the broadest potential factors that you see, and then we’ll get to go deep on each of them.
Anne: Oh, that sounds great. Yes, what happened with autism is that a few decades ago, it was really one or three or four in 10, 000. And today it’s 1 in 36 according to the CDC’s own website. And this is very alarming and we haven’t seen a lot of productive conversations about what is causing or contributing to autism.
It’s really multi faceted. So I combed the literature to discover what has been published in terms of causes and mechanisms of action of ASD. And I was struck on how on target some of these contemporary researchers are getting because for so many years, researchers really focused on the genetic theory of ASD. And then other people were saying, no, no, no, it’s clearly the environment, but now we’re seeing solid evidence that it’s the interaction between genes and the environment that appears to be driving this epidemic. I would say that it’s driving the entire chronic disease epidemic too, but we are, we’re talking about autism right now. So, in environmental medicine, we have a saying, genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger. In the case of autism, what this means is that these genes that, people have, children, people, they have not changed for thousands of years, but what has changed dramatically our environment. The environment in which these children are conceived and developed and born into. And, you know, one way to think about this is let’s say a child, has genes that deal with metals detoxification are compromised. And so if you’re born into a environment with a lot of toxic metal exposure, then this child will not do as well as another child whose metals excretion genes are working just fine. Your ability to detox is written in your genes. And it’s affected by epigenetic factors like nutrition and chemical exposures. let me just talk just a minute about epigenetics. What does that mean? Epigenetics is really where it’s at because when the Human Genome Project was finished in 2003, what they were hoping is they would find one gene for each disease and it would be so clear cut.
They would have clarity and they would great drug targets, right? And what they discovered was we really didn’t have as many genes even that we thought we had and that diseases were multi genomic. So epigenetics just means, epi means, it’s a Greek word for above. And it means if you have, if you think about the genes as your hardware, epigenetics is the software, it’s your environment, and it has the ability to turn certain genes on and turn certain genes off. And so in early prenatal life, this is a very vulnerable time of toxic exposures, which is why we really need to pay attention to it, not just what happens after the baby is born. And so what we see is when the brain is developing so quickly and the rest of the body, your environmental exposure to a certain toxicant or another going to have a bigger impact because so much is quickly developing at that time.
So these substances are even able to reach the fetus through the placenta, even from the earliest times of gestation. Fetuses by the way, have, and children as well, but fetuses, I’m talking strictly about them right now, they have not yet developed their detoxification pathways that they will when they get older. For example, fetuses do not clear BPA, that’s bisphenol A, as well as adults. And BPA will be one of the chemicals that we talk about. And then before we jump into BPA, I just want to bring up an older study that looked at chemicals in newborn babies cord blood and they found 287 different chemicals in the umbilical cord blood.
So what that means is that our babies are being born pre-polluted and this is a problem. 180 of those chemicals were carcinogenic, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system. And so we are dealing with in general, in our society, in humanity today, we’re just dealing with a huge body burden of toxins that begins in the womb and continues once the child is born and goes through his life.
And then before we get into BPI, I just want to get back to that gene question or concept. For example, there’s a gene called glutathione as transferase one. And sometimes that gene is completely missing in a person. It’s a glutathione gene. Glutathione is your body’s major molecule for detoxification, and also it’s an antioxidant as well. And so they started looking at this gene and other genes dealing with glutathione and found that in the autistic children, they often have issues with this one gene. You can’t say, you can’t put all of these ASD people in one group. You can’t say all autistic kids have a problem with this gene.
No, it’s multifaceted, but that is one of the genes talked about. And then one more thing I’ll say about nutrition. About 50 percent of children with ASD have a zinc deficiency. And there is another gene in your body called metallothionine that is zinc dependent, and it literally is one of the genes that helps usher out metals.
That’s why it’s called metallothionine. And what affects zinc? One of the things that can affect it is mercury. And mercury has been found many places in the environment, including high fructose corn syrup. And so It can displace zinc from the metallothionine gene, which means the metals won’t be able to be excreted from the body.
So that’s just one little nutritional aspect of what we’re talking about here. So that would be like an epigenetic push towards these metallothionine genes, even if they’re completely pristine and they work beautifully. If they don’t have the zinc that they need, they’re not going to work as well as they could. So I’m going to talk about environmental factors that are associated with ASD.
Katie This is so fascinating to me because it is as you’re explaining, so multifaceted, which I think is helpful to like really highlight and add that to the conversation is that it’s not a black and white one lever type situation. And seemingly like this more holistic approach is going to help us step into probably much more effective solutions and just a better mindset as we move through this conversation.
So I just wanted to call that out because I feel like that’s a really important point as we go forward. And I love this idea, your explanation of epigenetics and how the genes, as you said, like, only load the gun and it’s our environment that pulls the trigger. To me, the really exciting thing about that is we do have some degree of ability to affect change in our environment, even though we can’t change our genes.
So to me, this is actually a very hopeful thing to understand. And I’m really excited to keep going in this conversation with you.
Anne: I like how you hit on the hope aspect of it because I think there’s a lot of hope here. And with, knowledge we can do better and so I’m trying to talk about some of the things that I have found that can really make a difference. I am going to start with bisphenol A, BPA, and autism because a study came out last year that was super interesting. And what they found is that the top quartile of moms with BPA, so the top 25 percent of mothers, who had the highest amounts of BPA, their children had six times higher risk of an autism diagnosis at age nine in males with low aromatase activity. And the reason why that is so, that struck me… six times, that’s, you know, that’s a lot, very significant.
And if you look at the top quartile of BPA, if you compare it… let me just back up for just one second. The CDC actually is keeping track of Americans levels of chemicals in them. And they’ve been doing this since 1999. Every few years, they take blood and urine samples from a few thousand Americans all over. And then all of this, all of this information is available on the internet. So, this is what we use in environmental medicine. If we test a patient for something like BPA or a metal like mercury or lead, we can go back to this data and it gives us an idea of where this person stands compared to all the other thousands of Americans who were tested.
So this BPA, the BPA, that was shown to increase autism by six times. It’s only the 75th percentile on this data from 2015 to 2016. And then to take that a little bit further, the median urinary BPA concentration of 0. 68 micrograms per liter, this is where we start to see the increased odds of ASD diagnosis, this equates to a total intake of only 13 nanograms per kilogram, given a maternal body weight of 80 kilograms. And if we extrapolate this into everyday exposures, what does that mean? How do you get to 13 nanograms? It’s a good question.
Well, one serving of canned soup can contain several to tens of nanograms. One glass of milk can contain, I looked at that information and there were so, milk has been highly scrutinized for BPA content. And there were so many varying levels of BPA. I’m not going to say one of them here, but it’s not just the plastic tubing that is used in dairies, but the researchers concluded that some of that BPA exposure was from the holding tank.
So I always thought of it as tubing, bad tubing. It’s rubbery, right? It’s, you know, excreting the chemicals into the milk, but it’s also the holding tank. So milk has some BPA. So those are just a couple of things to think about with the BPA. And so that’s something that we need to hone in on. And then the other thing I’ll say about BPA is in Europe, they’ve just banned BPA in food contact materials, and that’s a huge, huge deal. And in the U. S., a lot of companies have gone to something called BPA free, which sounds good, we don’t want BPA, but they just substituted it with something that we call regrettable substitutions like BPS or BPAF or other bisphenols. And you you don’t really know what the substitution is because when they say BPA free they typically don’t say what what they replaced it with. So that is something to be aware of just because something says BPA free, but it’s still plastic or don’t be so easily swayed by greenwashing.
So that’s the BPA story. Then there’s another study that came out in 2021, a different study altogether on BPA and autism. And they also found, and this wasn’t just in the boys, it was actually in the boys and girls, it was actually a little bit stronger for girls. In the third tertile of BPA exposure, so the top 33 percent of BPA exposure in the moms. In the children, they had an odds ratio of three, a little bit over three for the girls and then about two overall. And so that’s just another, that was from 2021. It preceded the BPA study that I led off with. So, let’s talk about mercury next, because mercury is super interesting and super problematic. And as we know, it was taken out the childhood vaccine schedule in about 1999 to 2001.
It used to be in the childhood schedule and now they replaced it with, aluminum is one of the things they replaced it with. But a littlle bit of background on mercury, it easily crosses both the placenta and the blood brain barrier and it accumulates in the central nervous system, particularly in the cerebral cortex and cerebellum. And so in this, they not only removed the mercury from the children’s vaccines, but they even removed it from the Rhogam shots that the moms get when they have an Rh factor issue with their child. So everybody wants to say, Oh, so, you know, it really wasn’t the vaccines we took the, it really wasn’t.
Yeah, and we took the mercury out and now the autism rates continue to rise, so that must not have been part of it. But there are so many other places to get mercury, we still have issues with mercury exposure, even if they’re not those childhood vaccines anymore. They still are in the multi dose vials of flu vaccine. But, so other sources of mercury in the environment, it’s in air pollution, it’s in high fructose corn syrup, which children, especially children who are eating more of a ultra processed food diet, they’re getting a lot of high fructose corn syrup. It’s in other food additives as well. It’s in mom’s dental amalgams. It’s in fish, it’s, if a volcano erupts and you’re around that, they call it like a volcano fog, there’s mercury in that as well. There’s mercury that even comes out in wildfires, which is something that we’re seeing more of. So mercury is very much in the environment, in coal fired power plants, they emit mercury as well, and there are a lot of them in China. There’s two big plumes of mercury that come over from China, and they hit like the Pacific Northwest, and then they hit kind of the top half of California. So we have multiple sources of mercury still in our environment to be concerned about. And so the studies that look at mercury and autism are still showing correlations.
And so they are suggesting, even the recent studies, that mercury is still a risk factor for ASD, that it’s actually causal and or contributory. And then I don’t think I need to go into so much the mechanisms of actions, but, mercury, it’s a neurotoxin. It causes neuroinflammation. And it activates the microglia, which are these cells in your brain. We also talked about, well we didn’t talk about it in this podcast, we probably won’t, but endocrine disrupting, there are other endocrine disrupting chemicals that can also do the same thing. So there’s one study on the hepatitis B vaccination that I wanted to bring up because they were cognizant of the mercury being taken out or the thimerosal as a preservative, that was about 50 percent ethylmercury. They were very cognizant about choosing a study group that got the Hep B vaccinations when they still had mercury in them. So this is Hep B with mercury, and it no longer has mercury in it. Now it has aluminum, we’ll talk about aluminum. So what they did is they used a cross sectional study from 1997. And they looked at two groups. The first group of kids, they got Hep B either on the first day of life, which is when it’s recommended, or within the first 30 days. And then the second group either got the Hep B after 30 days or not at all. So those are the two groups. Day one or within 30 days, and after 30 days or not at all. And they compared them. And what they found was a three times higher risk of autism in the newborns who got the Hep B on day one or within a month. And so that was one of the Hep B studies. So now that mercury has been replaced with aluminum, let’s talk about aluminum. This is a very interesting story.
I recently did a podcast on Alzheimer’s disease. I was looking at autopsies of people who died with Alzheimer’s and looking at the content of aluminum that had been found in their brains. And yes, they did find more than the control brains. But what really blew my mind is that there was more aluminum in the brains of autistic people who died and people with MS. There was more aluminum in those brains than even the Alzheimer’s brains. So what is the deal with aluminum in the brain? Well, it’s also a neurotoxin. And now that we have substituted, or put aluminum as an adjuvant in vaccines, it’s something that really needs to be looked at more closely. So the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research set the amount of aluminum per dose in vaccines to 850 micrograms of aluminum.
So on that first day of life, when the hepatitis B shot is recommended, that aluminum will be injected into the body. And when you inject something into the body, you don’t… aluminum that you absorb orally, maybe from your food or your water, it’s actually not very highly absorbable in your gut. But when you inject aluminum or other things, it’s not going to your GI tract. It’s not going to your liver. It’s going directly into your system. So there’s been some study on aluminum and autism spectrum disorder, and they are seeing a parallel rise in aluminum being used as adjuvants and ASD. And they’ve noted that brains in ASD patients contain more aluminum than controls. Aluminum is neurotoxic, and so there’s a lot of evidence supporting aluminum as an etiologic factor in ASD. So I wanted to bring up that. And then this next study is very, very interesting because it speaks to what I mentioned earlier where your genes, your ability to detoxify are written in your genes, and then we have to look at the environmental triggers.
And so there’s a whole subset of people out there who are chemically sensitive. And these people cannot detox well, they have impaired detoxification pathways from a variety of different sources and they’re super sensitive to their environment. And when I started practicing medicine 25 years ago, we considered the chemically sensitive people, we considered them canaries in the coal mine. They, because of their sensitivity, they were alerting us to a problem in the environment. And over the next 25 years, what I saw was this group, first of all, this group of chemically sensitive people grew. But then I also saw that people in general, as their body burdens of chemicals grew, they have just become sicker.
And I don’t just mean children. I mean, adolescents, I mean, adults as well. It’s the body burden of chemicals. Our toxic loads are driving this epidemic of chronic disease. So I came across this study, and it was, it’s fairly recent, and what they did is they looked at chemically sensitive parents and autism. So they didn’t, this was not a study of, you know, does the child with ASD have high mercury or aluminum or anything like this?
This had to do with the parents. And so they took a group of chemically sensitive, they took a large group people who were chemically sensitive and they qualified them. And the chemically sensitive parents in the top 10 percent of this group versus the bottom 10 percent, had a 5. 7 times risk of autism in their children, and that wasn’t enough, a two times greater risk of ADHD. And so that was a really important article that came out because it gives us, again, there’s hope if you are a chemically sensitive person wanting to conceive, there’s some work that you can do to prepare yourself to reduce your own body burden of chemicals and to have a more successful time, both with getting pregnant… sometimes people who are really toxic, it interferes with their fertility.
That’s one of the problems with toxins, but the chemically sensitive parents can take steps including pre conception care. Okay, pre conception care. So, Katie, do you have any questions on those so far?
Katie: Well, I’ve been taking so many notes and you actually brought back a memory for me. So one of my first high school jobs, well, the first one was entomology lab. The second one was I was a caretaker for a woman who had multiple chemical sensitivity, like a very extreme version. And I remember even having to have separate clothes that I wore only at her house to wash them in like, baking soda and vinegar only, like there was a whole protocol making sure I didn’t have fragrances in my hair or anything when I went into her house, and how she had developed it actually from receipts, from touching receipts in her job for years and the BPA that we now know is present on receipts and how this had like expanded into her becoming so sensitive to everything.
But it opened my eyes to the idea that these things that I couldn’t look and smell or see in my environment were impacting her very visibly. And it was probably the earliest time that I thought to start paying attention to beyond just like the scent of something or like, but what actually deeper was going on there.
So I thought that was so fascinating. And then I also just wanted to highlight. I think most people are aware of that there used to be mercury in vaccines, for instance, or that it’s in fish, but I did not know that it’s also in high fructose corn syrup. And when we see that data, like you mentioned of our consumption of this and how much it’s gone up in the past few decades, to me, that’s just really, really telling.
So I love that you’re bringing up the data about all these pieces and that thankfully, as awareness grows with this, we have so many options that don’t have to include these things. It’s not that we have to like avoid any food that tastes good or avoid, you know, options. There’s so many alternatives. So I love that you’re bringing awareness to this issue.
Great. So that was the chemical sensitivity study and now I want to move on to air pollution. So air pollution, oh, air pollution has been all over the news for contributing to Alzheimer’s disease. Wildfire smoke has been in the news for contributing to Alzheimer’s disease. Well, clearly it has some effect in the brain. What about air pollution and autism? And there are some studies looking at that and the one that I want to cite today, really instead of measuring like PM 2. 5 in the air, what they did is they measured, they took addresses of mothers and then they looked to see how many feet away from a busy freeway they were.
And what they discovered was just living within a thousand feet of a freeway doubles your risk of having a child with autism. Now, I love this piece of data because this is something that’s pretty easily overcome with a good air filter in your home. So if you are near a freeway or maybe near an airport or near a field that’s spraying pesticides, you want to make sure, this is such an easy fix, you want to make sure you have a really good air filter in your home so you can filter these things out before you or your children ingest it. So that’s something interesting. And then the other thing I want to say, I know this isn’t a talk on autism, but there’s been very strong research out of Mexico, Metropolitan Mexico City, which is very polluted.
And they are, and they do measure PM 2. 5 and 10, you know, and what they are finding in Mexico City is Alzheimer’s in children as young as 11 months old. And so that is from the air pollution, mostly from cars. I mean, it’s a lot of diesel down there and it’s a very crowded city. And so that was really interesting to take a look at that. And they’re finding Alzheimer’s in teenagers, and it’s horrifying. It’s just horrifying because they’re finding that the teenagers with Alzheimer’s have an increased risk of suicide because I mean, one can only imagine being in high school and you can’t remember the locker combination to get your books.
You can’t remember to do your homework. You can’t remember and you’re young. So that is a horrifying statistic. So. Okay, so moving on from there, I want to talk a little bit about pesticides and autism. There’s a pretty good connection there. And there’s one particular pesticide called chlorpyrifos. It may stick in your mind because it was almost banned in the United States. It is banned in Europe, but it almost got banned here. And then it came back. So the chlorpyrifos exposure during pregnancy conferred an odds ratio of 6.1 for the child’s risk of autism. So that’s chlorpyrifos. And then when they looked at pyrethroids, which is a different class of pesticides, they found pyrethroids exposure in the third trimester conferred a 1.8, almost two times risk. And then the imidacloprid, which is one of the neonic pesticides, was found… well, actually what they did, this was a case control study. They found the mothers of children with ASD were found to be twice as likely to have been exposed to the imidacloprid. So those, those are a few studies on pesticides and autism, but again, this is something that we have the ability, this is like low hanging fruit, we have the ability to take steps to ensure that in our homes we are not spraying pesticides indoors, we’re eating as organically as we can. If there’s pesticides spraying outside, for example, we can get air filters for our homes. So the information that I’m presenting can be acted upon. There are some things that we don’t have a good way to avoid, but my approach, and this is SAPA true, but my approach is to have the knowledge to know, what you can have control over and what you can avoid. And then for those things that you don’t have any control over, then just don’t worry about it. It’s total body burden. It’s the barrel effect. It doesn’t matter what’s in your barrel of toxins. The thing that makes the barrel flow over, it’s the straw that breaks the camel back. It doesn’t matter which particular toxin it is, you need to keep your barrel as low as you can.
Okay, so that was pesticides and autism and then I’m going to talk about PCBs and autism. This is really sad because PCBs have been banned since the 70s and they’re still being found in pretty much everyone. And so they looked at a group of Southern California births, so children with ASD, that was 545, the general population was 418. And they found that the highest versus the lowest quartile, so the highest 25 percent exposure to the lowest, conferred an adjusted odds ratio of 1.79 for ASD. And then for intellectual disability, it was actually higher, it was 2.41. And then they broke out which PCBs it was. Now PCBs, they’re tricky, super tricky, never going to be listed on a label. Well, so a lot of things are never going to be listed on the label, and that’s where your own knowledge comes in.
You have to know. You have to as a mom, you are the head of the EPA in your own home. So, where are the PCBs coming from? Mostly, 90 percent of them are coming from food. And they’re coming from meat, dairy, fish and then like 10% other. So meat, contributes about 50% of PCBs. Dairy is about 25%. Fish is about 15%, then 10% just for other dietary exposures.
And that’s something that, this is something that would be considered really hard to avoid unless you just don’t eat meat, dairy, fish. But some of the higher sources of PCBs I will talk about. Historically, it’s the farmed salmon that had the highest amount of PCBs. And now they’re finding it in wild caught salmon, according to the literature that I have been seeing as well. And that’s concerning, but we do know that the oceans are getting more polluted and this is transferring into the fish and other other fish and other seafood that we’re eating.
So PCBs are largely from food. You can breathe them in a little. I’m sure you’ve seen this. There’s been articles about older schools in the United States use PCB caulk in the schools, and then it gets in the air and the kids and the teachers are breathing it. Yes, that is another way to be exposed, but typically it’s food. And then let me just close up with the microplastics, because microplastics has hit the the mainstream media. Oh wow. And the latest research looked at microplastics in the brain and found from 2016 to 2024, eight years, it increased 50%. They’re finding microplastics in the brain. And there’s some, we’re starting to see, I have a March 2022 study here, where they say pre and post natal exposure to microplastic is a potential risk factor for autism spectrum disorder. So they are starting to look at it. And I just want to say, I don’t drink Starbucks, so I don’t have a Starbucks cup.
And I don’t mean to call out Starbucks. I just want to call out the disposable cups that all the coffee places use. Those cups, you know, the paper cups, they’re not paper. If they were paper, the minute you poured your hot coffee or hot tea in it, it would, disintegrate. And then you would have a burn and, there would be a price to pay for that.
So they are lined with plastic. Those paper disposable cups are lined with plastic, polyethylene, I believe. And the top plastic found in brains was the polyethylene. I’m not saying it’s the disposable paper cups. There’s other places you get that particular plastic, but I thought it was worth mentioning because a lot of people don’t know that.
And in addition, those plastic lid on your disposable cup, the that has a little a spout for you to drink out of. It’s plastic, that has BPA in it. And so your hot drink is helping the BPA leach from that lid and going into your drink, your beverage of choice. And so in terms of microplastics and BPA, we have some action items that we can do to keep it out of our bodies, like bring your own cup to Starbucks or wherever you want to go to get some coffee to go, you can bring your own cup. You cannot touch those receipts. Or, if you need the receipt, and believe me, when you go to a bank and make a deposit, you do want to save that receipt. That’s the only proof you have that you deposited something in the bank. You can ask them before they hand you the receipt to put it in an envelope, and I’ve been doing this for years at the post office, at the bank, anywhere I can.
I mean, usually, if it’s at the grocery store or something, I just say I don’t need a receipt. But if I need to keep a receipt, I ask them to put it in an envelope. Not one person has ever said, we don’t do that, or I’ll have to charge you extra. No one has ever said that. And so I want to recommend that as a way to avoid BPA and also microplastics.
Katie: I have taken so many notes and this is so helpful and I know that you also… like this is only a fraction of the work that you do and all the research that you have. So as we get close to the end of time, I would love to make sure we highlight and I’ll link as well where people can find you to keep learning. As well as maybe for moms who are just now learning about all of these many places we’re encountering these environmental toxins.
What are maybe the three really important baby step starting points that all moms can be aware of and start making changes around.
Anne: Yeah. Okay. That’s, a good intro. So I teach, I teach environmental medicine to doctors. That’s actually my business. Very passionate about it. I want to train an army of doctors who are environmental medicine experts so that they can work with people to evaluate tests, eliminate toxins and get people better. And that’s where my heart is. But what I realized in the last year, I realized that really, I’m a bit of an optimist. Realistically, people and moms probably aren’t going to see an environmental medicine doctor. There’s just not enough of us. So my company, Environmental Medicine Education International put together a course for consumers. And it consists of like seven hours of video on things you can do as the EPA of your own home at home to make your living space clean. To make it clean and to eliminate and reduce and avoid a lot of these toxins that we talk about. And so I wanted to make sure… I will give you that link in your show notes. But in terms of generalities, I feel strongly that people should have air filters in their home.
And people should filter their water. They should have water filtration systems in their home. And I also feel that some people look at water filtration as, Oh, you know, that’s, I can’t afford that right now. And I always want to point out that every place I’ve ever lived had a place where I can go and take my own glass bottles and get our water from a commercial… There’s commercial water stores, that’s all they do, I’m sure you’ve seen them. Or you could go to like Whole Foods and they have water at the front of the store and you can get your clean water that way. But clean water and clean air in the house is really important.
But even more than that, fragrances. Fragrances of all sorts have to go. We didn’t even talk about phthalates, we didn’t have time, but phthalates are endocrine disruptors and they are associated with childhood health issues as well. And your phthalates will never be listed on an ingredient list, but you will find them in those plug in air fresheners that people like to use. Those are cancer bombs. I mean you have plugged in your own cancer bomb in your house. They put out phthalates from the fragrance.
They put out benzene, which is a carcinogen. They put out formaldehyde, which is a carcinogen. And so, plugging in any kind of artificial air freshener is a big, big no no. And that goes for laundry detergent. It goes for dryer sheets. You don’t need dryer sheets. That’s toxins. You’re just putting toxins in your laundry. And, but we are so conditioned through commercials and what everyone else is doing. I remember the first time, this was decades ago, I was getting rid of dryer sheets. I only did it because my mom did it. And all the commercials talked about how soft your laundry would be. I really, it’s kind of sad how you get a little brainwashed, but I was thinking to myself, I was so sensitive to scents. I’m like, I’m just getting rid of it. And I was so worried when I went to open up the dryer door.
Like, is everything just going to be like a wrinkled ball and I’m going to have to like iron everything? Like, what’s my laundry going to look like? And it was no different. It was no different. It was, it was laundry that had been washed and dried and then you just fold it and put it away. So getting rid of all your fragrances is super, super important.
Eating organic would be another thing as much as you can, it totally worth, it’s worth the money to eat organic. Very important.
Katie: I love your line about becoming the EPA of your own home because I say often, probably often enough that listeners might be getting sick of it, that we are each our own primary health care provider. And that the best outcomes happen when we work in partnership with Doctors who have specific knowledge while we’re taking ownership and staying in the driver’s seat.
And I love that you extended this to all the topics we talked about today. And I think that concept is really helpful of just stepping into that leadership role, that ownership position of our own home and all of the factors that are within it. And I love that you backed everything with so much data and also stayed in a message of empowering hope. And just raising awareness of the factors that are out there that we are up against and how to navigate those without getting super overwhelmed or falling into fear of everything, but just some clear action steps.
Right, right. Yeah. So yeah, let’s just emphasize that there are going to be some things you have no control over. And so you just really put your effort in the areas that you control. And there’s quite a few of them, especially as a mom. You basically are the CEO of your own home. You’re the head of the EPA in your own home.
You’re the primary care provider in your own home. You’re your children’s advocate, teacher. I mean, you’re it. Mamas are it. I am a mom.
Katie: Oh, I love it. And I think that’s a perfect place to put a pin in it for today. And I know you have such far ranging wisdom on so many topics and the environmental factors that relate to other things as well. So perhaps we’ll get to do another round one day and dive deep on a whole other area. But I have found this conversation so fascinating and I’m so grateful for your time.
Dr. Fine. Thank you so much for being here and for everything that you shared.
Anne: Oh, you’re quite welcome. Thank you for having me.
Katie: And thank you as always for listening and for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
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