Reduce the Toxins in Your House

High toxicity causes subtle symptoms that are often not enough to impact your life to a point where you can’t work or do the things you want to, but which slowly add to your general decline. These small, accumulating symptoms may include brain fog, memory issues, fatigue, hormone imbalances, and metabolism and weight regulation. Such changes are all very common signs of high toxic load, and depending on your genetic predisposition, your symptoms might be different.

Dr. Chen believes one of the reasons current medical science ignores this issue is because there’s no simple medication that you can take for it yet. Many doctors can’t deal with the lifestyle changes required to treat it because they can only spend a few minutes with each patient. Fortunately, that’s not the case with Functional Medicine.

Toxicity in Personal Care

Ingredients used in the same products are vastly different between the US and the UK. The regulations in the US around what chemicals are allowed in our everyday products, even in our food, are much worse in the US than in many other places.

The EU isn’t perfect, but in the US, we have to learn to read labels by ourselves, which shouldn’t be the consumer’s job seeing as you need a degree in green chemistry and toxicology to be able to decipher the nuances of different ingredients. To address this issue, the Green Beauty industry is growing, as places like Target and Sephora realize consumers want non-toxic products.These then become more expensive, partly because high-quality ingredients cost more to produce.

The biggest issue comes with the preservatives and fragrances used in cosmetic and personal care products. If you’re trying to reduce your toxic exposure, look for unscented products. The term “fragrance” can actually hide hundreds, if not thousands, of different chemicals, many of which are endocrine disruptors, impairing hormone production.

Common Sources of Toxins

Environmental contributors account for much of our toxin exposure. Open your windows to freshen the inside of your home, and if you can afford it, buy a purifier. If you want fragrance, get a plug for pure essential oils. Burning cinnamon in cider is a great way to add natural fragrances to your environment from a natural source.

With that said, there was a 1989 study that showed one in every six deaths could be attributed to air or water quality. The Environmental Working Group has a Tap Water Database where you can read your area’s water report. In fact, your water supplier is federally obliged to provide you with an up-to-date water report, which shows what’s in your drinking water and what they tested for.

However, by law, they’re only required to test for around 93 different chemicals and even the best quality tap water has things that filters will catch. So everyone should invest in a water filter to the best of their budget. In fact, 10 million homes still have lead pipes, and shipping water to your home can be very costly without any guarantee of less exposure to plastics, PFAS, and other chemicals.

Minimizing Exposure & Detox

It’s good just to know where these exposures are coming from so you can take steps, no matter how small, to minimize exposure. That doesn’t mean you have to completely stop buying every food that’s wrapped in plastic from the grocery store, but rather to make smarter decisions. Finding brands that don’t use PFAs in their packaging, and getting your meat wrapped in paper at the butcher are all great ways to minimize exposure.

Some of us can handle toxins better than others, meaning some of us can detox better depending on our genetics. Dr. Chen starts with focusing on how well the body is excreting waste and regulating that process with her clients. Then she focuses on the symptoms associated with leaky gut which allows toxins to leak into other parts of the body, inhibiting full detox. The mind-body connection is also important to this process, so Dr. Chen recommends breath work, as well as movement to stimulate circulation. Once all that is achieved, then she moves patients to higher levels of detox to get rid of the heavy metals and mycotoxins left in the body.

Listen now and start your detox journey today!

Guest Bio

Dr. Chen is a board-certified UK medical doctor with 15 years of clinical experience, who now lives in California with her family. When she moved to San Francisco, she decided to make it her mission to help people reduce their toxin load because she believes environmental toxins to be one important root cause not enough doctors are talking about.

Links

https://www.instagram.com/plateful.health/
joindetoxright.com
www.platefulhealth.com
Unblock your detox pathway Quiz: joindetoxright.com/quiz
Tap Water Database
Related Podcast Episodes:
Decrease Toxic Exposure and Become More Resilient, with Dr. Joseph Pizzorno
Start Living Clean, with Lexi Davidson
Detox to Reverse Disease, with Dr. Joseph Pizzorno