The TOP FOODS You Need To Buy Organic To AVOID TOXINS | Dr. Mark Hyman

nearly 75 percent of the non-organic fresh produce sold the United States contains residues of pesticides much of our food is contaminated with glyphosate which is great on over 70 of crops which means you want to really that's a weed killer you want to make sure you use organic food if you can or generally raise food if you can um but if you can't there's there's a

great guide from the environmental working group that came out every comes out every year with a list of The Dirty Dozen worst contaminated fruits and vegetables and the Clean 15 the least contaminated and basically if you follow that you can kind of avoid the most contaminated food so to come up with this year's list the environmental working group or ewg went through the usaid data on

46 000 samples of 46 of the most popular fruits and vegetables they wash them they peel them as when we do at home before testing them for pesticides now after washing 75 percent nearly 75 percent of the non-organic fresh produce sold in the United States contains residues of pesticides that's what the report found and so they you basically score each type of produce from clean to

dirty uh based on a percent of the samples tested with the technical pesticides the percent of samples with two or more uh detectable pesticides uh the average number of pesticides found in a single sample the average amount of pesticides found the maximum number of pesticides found in a single sample and the total number of pesticides found in the crops there's a lot of different ways they

look at how bad is it contaminated basically this means that in that list it's telling you which crops were treated with the most and the highest volume and the most variety of pesticides but it doesn't quite go to connect the dots between that and what are the health risks but there are I promise you so what is the 2023 Dirty Dozen strawberries always top the list

so if you're not going to eat those organic don't eat them and I'm going to listen now but you can see in the show notes we're going to post it there as well strawberries spinach which we all like kale collards and mustard greens which are stable for people if they're not organic don't even peaches pears nectarines apples grapes Bell on hot peppers cherries blueberries and green

beans so if those are not organic don't don't eat them blueberries and green beans are actually new additions to this year's list the green bean samples had residue so residue acetate which is a toxic pesticide that the EPA band over 10 years ago um over um overall more than 90 of strawberries apples Cherry spinach nectarines grapes sample tested positive for residues of two or more pesticides

but the good news is there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't have to buy organic that actually isn't harmful so uh the cleanest produce typically has a tougher outer peel or husk or a shell that you have to remove right avocados for example corn pineapple onions papaya sweet peas that are frozen asparagus honeydew melon kiwi cabbage mushrooms mangoes sweet potatoes watermelon carrots so those

are all okay to eat if you don't want to buy a kiwi organic it's probably okay or your avocado organic is too expensive that's okay if you don't want to buy your onions organic okay if you want to you know get a mango it's not organic no big deal same with sweet potatoes so you can save a lot of money uh by actually focusing on this

list so it's important to understand that whether we like it or not we live in a toxic world we have to understand where those toxins come from we have to reduce our exposures and we have to upgrade our body's own biological detox system and we know how to do that it's not that hard I've written a lot about it you you can't get rid of them

from our environment but you can reduce your exposures and you can actually do a little homework for yourself and switch to safer products for your skin care or household cleaning products your food products so you know how to live cream and green without a whole lot of effort now we have been exposed to more and more and more number of environmental toxins than ever before in

human history and the problem with medicine is in medical school and today too when I went to medical school and now there's almost no education about the effect of environmental toxins on our health unless it's an acute toxic exposure like if you're in a factory and you jump in a vat of mercury well okay they know what to do but basically they ignore it the truth

is that low level exposure to multiple different substances over your lifetime is a huge risk factor for so many diseases from heart disease to cancer to obesity to diabetes to dementia to Parkinson's to autism to depression I mean the list goes on and on on infertility I mean I could go on and on so it's not just sort of a oh let's detox and get rid

of a bunch of toxins it's really about understanding the biology of environmental toxins our body's own detoxification system and how do one reduce our exposures while at the same time up leveling and upgrading our own biological detoxification systems so we're going to talk about all that now how do environmental toxins affect our health well they do it through a lot of different mechanisms but they're basically

poisons and they cause inflammation they cause oxidative stress they cause DNA damage they cause disruption in our mitochondria they damage our our stem cells I mean the whole flood of environmental toxins there's over 80 000 of them now that have been introduced to the industrial uh sort of world since the night early 1900s that we've never been exposed to before and we somehow have to figure

out how to deal with them well thank God we have a system to do it but it's still overwhelmed so environmental toxins as I said Dry cancer they are hugely impactful for example in blood sugar and insulin sensitivity most people don't realize that diabetes and pre-diabetes and even obesity can be driven by environmental toxins something called bisphenol a which is a uh compound that's down and

aligning a lot of cans plastic bottles on paper receipts from credit cards or gas stations when you touch that it goes through your skin and bisphenol a as a huge driver of in some resistance and pre-diabetes independent of what you're eating it affects cholesterol metabolism it drives inflammation oxidative stress mitochondrial injury screws up our thyroid function affects our appetite leptin signaling I mean pretty much everything

gets haywire when we're exposed to too many environmental toxins now the downside of living in the modern world is that we're all pre-polluted when we're born there's 287 known environmental toxins found in the umbilical cord blood of a newborn I mean maybe they take out the blood of the emocal cord send it to a lab and the average amount of toxins is 287 many of which

have been banned for decades like DDT or pcbs or dioxin and 217 of those are neurotoxic meaning they're directly damaging to the brain there's pesticides phthalates which I just mentioned flame retardants heavy metals like Mercury lead Arsenic and they have huge effects across the spectrum of human health so one of the ones that we should really be paying attention to that we really want to avoid

and get rid of the first I just mentioned earlier is bisphenol a b or BPA it's found in plastic water bottles and canned foods it's a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen in the body we call these xenobiotics or xenoestrogens and they're hugely impactful in regulating hormonal health and risk increasing risk of cancer and it's been linked BPA to breast cancer to infertility reproductive issues obesity heart

disease uh and uh it's not that hard to get rid of it in your life basically don't touch credit card receipts don't touch gas station receipts that come out of the machine don't eat from plastic bottles unless they're BPA free or from canned foods unless they're BPA free so make sure you look at that you can use stainless steel glass bottling packaging look for BPA canned

fruits the next compound is phthalates phthalates are also plasticizers and they're found in food containers children's toys it's banned in Europe there's a legislation in Europe called reach it gets rid of most of these chemicals that are allowed in America and when there's ever an attempt to limit by law or a bill to reduce our exposures the food industry and chemical industry comes in hard with

tons of lobbying dollars millions and millions and millions tens of millions of dollars to defeat bills there was one on bisphenol a that got defeated and unfortunately it was trying to be banned but uh it didn't pass because there was so much Lobby against it but it's found in children's toys it's found in like the plastic little rubber duckies in a bathtub and they stick it

in their mouth bad idea also makeup has a lot of phthalates in it so get rid of all your unhealthy makeups and we're going to talk about how to do that but there's a beautiful website called ewg.org the environmental working group they have a skin deep database you can put in your product what you like to use or other products you can find that have no

contaminants and see the level of toxins and what they are and and find Alternatives so they also are are really bad for you because phthalates cause hormonal chaos uh they're LinkedIn different cancers to birth defects to thyroid problems so make sure you um you check it out and the basic rule is if you wouldn't eat it you probably shouldn't put it in or on your body

right so for skin care products everything goes for the skin when we go to the emergence from the heart attack what's the first thing we do as a doctor we slap on a toothpaste tube cream full of nitroglycerin because it goes right through the skin and it's the fastest acting better than taking it by mouth or before we can get an IV in we just slap

that on and so it goes to the skin hormone patches testosterone gels we know the fentanyl patch I mean there's all kinds of drugs that are delivered through the skin so when you're putting it on your skin it's actually getting inside your body so you want to make sure that if you wouldn't eat it you shouldn't put it on your body like coconut oil but you

can eat that and you can put on your body so that's a win but there's a lot of products out there that are safe that you can use another one that's concerning is glycol ethers uh they're in household cleaning products Cosmetics paints uh they damage fertility they lead to birth defects there were some allergies asthma um and these and these are really bad because they're pretty

much in all of our household cleaning products and the environmental working group ewg also has a whole guide on household cleaning products so you can use the least contaminated products or ones that have no toxins in them that work well so make sure you check that out and there are so many other toxins like heavy metals Mercury lead arsenic Mercury's from fish from our fillings from

coal burning plants pollution lead is often found in Crystal wine glasses or glazed plates I see many many patients have those and they get sick from that it can be in the ground it can be from cold burning if you live in a cement plant or a coal plant that basically goes up in the atmosphere comes down in the soil your kids are playing with it

they'll be dragging the house the baby's on the floor so let exposure is real there's houses that still have leaded paint all the leaded gasoline that was used for years all that went in the air and goes down into the soil it can be in vegetables if you're growing in an urban environment for example you're growing greens and you think you're eating kale and being healthy

it could be full lead now arsenic also is a big problem and it's found in rice many places because in the ground it can be in pressure treated lumber that you have on your deck and getting your feet it can go actually in in chicken feed to prevent the the feed from going moldy which is great for the feed and the mold but it's not good

for you and it gets in the chicken you eat it so it's pretty it's pretty important for us to make sure that we get rid of those um so I think the the key is um we need to avoid toxins and so the question is what are the top strategies to reduce our toxic burden well we can basically remove the toxins but we we also have

to upregulate our detox system so first thing is avoid Plastics wherever you can try stainless steel like containers I have those or glass containers for storing food in your in your fridge stealing so water bottles glass containers are great for leftovers don't buy water and plastic water bottles get a water filter I like reverse osmosis and you can actually get a water bottle bringing with you

make sure you detox your home get simple cleaning products a laundry detergent cleaning product for Windows for counters for dishwasher stuff everything and there's a great source Thrive Market you can get it's an online grocery store basically you can get all the best cleaners from Seventh Generation and other eco-friendly non-toxic food companies uh and now of course check out ewg's guide on household cleaning products on

skin care products uh they're great um so I think make sure that you just are diligent about getting toxins out of your home um second is mercury is a big one and often we don't pay attention to what we're eating and people eat tuna fish swordfish sushi sadly all the oceans have been polluted no matter where you get your fish from it's pretty much pre-polluted as

microplastics mercury and other toxins pcbs Farm Fish can be just as bad so there are a few kind of ways to get around it one is to eat very small fish sardines mackerel Herring anchovies small salmon can be okay but still that can have mercury also there's a great regenerative aquaculture company called cetopia.fish and they actually provide beautiful delicious clean fish that you can get Frozen

sent to your home it's an amazing fish actually and also reduce your exposure to uh the the problems that are from um you know all the the chemicals in your environment by having an air filter in your house that reduces their Airborne pollution indoor air pollution is a real thing whether it's mold or whether it's um other things like contaminants off-gassing from furniture or rugs I

mean you want to obviously try to have a clean home and not full of products but I mean you buy a Tempur-Pedic bed and it smells awful it's off-gassing those are called vocs volatile organic compounds you really want to avoid those in your house and then um you want to start to learn about how to actually upgrade and increase your body's own detoxification system and the

best way to do that is by using a couple of strategies that are really important one is maximize your intake of phytochemicals plant-based compounds these nutrients and plants work on upregulating different Pathways in the body including a lot of detox Pathways there's amazing Cornucopia of phytochemicals that work on boosting glutathione and boosting our detox Pathways and increasing our ability to get rid of stuff so the

biggest category is the cruciferous vegetables broccoli collards cabbage kale brussels sprouts they really upregulate glutathione in the body and help to maximize the main detoxifier also there are amazing things like garlic and onions that also contain sulfur that are great for detoxification also things like Rosemary curcumin Ginger and a skin of a lemon like if you grate lemon into a salad or something the skin of

a lemon has limonene these all help up regulator detox Pathways we also need the right nutrients right we need methylation support B12 foli B6 we need magnesium selenium zinc and and many other minerals and vitamins to actually help up regulate or detox Pathways we need amino acids in the form of protein to help with some of the amino acid Pathways so there's lots of ways we

Now understand the body's own built-in detox system and we have to support it uh the next thing you knew is um sweat so your body gets rid of toxins through both exercise increasing the lymphatic flow and circulation to exercise increase circulation and also um saunas uh so a sauna is an amazing way to boost your detox system and and help body remove a lot of environmental

toxins which are fat soluble and you can actually measure them on the sweat you also want to take the right supplements as I mentioned so you want to take additional support about good multi methylating support zinc vitamin C glutathione boosting stuff and acetylcysteine lipoic acid milk thistle a lot of other herbs can be used to help the Boost the body's detox Pathways so I highly recommend

getting on a regular support system for that I do because we're all exposed sometimes if you have a real big issue um you might need to see a doctor and get treated like I did for mercury poisoning I needed chelation I needed to actually use a medication to help remove the metals from my body if it's lead you can use EDTA it's Mercury you can use

the MSA and they're they're extremely effective they need to be used properly and safely with a doctor supervision there's a lot of steps to properly getting rid of mercury but you need a good functional medicine doctor so it's really really really important to do that if you love that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here we are inundated with a

thyroid problem because our thyroid is like the canary in the coal mine it's super sensitive to all sorts of environmental toxins to stresses in our diet to gluten and low thyroid function affects one in five women and one in ten men that's a lot