Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Could endocrine disruptors, forever chemicals, and toxic exposure be leading to some of your hormonal health issues and pelvic pain problems? What if it was increasing your risk for certain cancers?
With 350,000 chemicals globally registered, it’s easy to quickly feel overwhelmed by it all. But Lara Adler gives you the confidence to make simple changes that can have profound effects on your health.
Dr. Ginger Garner experienced PROFOUND changes in her own life over 20 years ago – when she adopted some of the practices that Lara discusses in this conversation. The alterations Dr. Garner made before her children were born impacted everything from allergies and weight struggles to 100% resolution of a painful 10 year fertility struggle.
We are hoping through this conversation, you feel empowered with knowledge and practice tips to reduce your toxic exposure and improve hormonal health and reduce your risk for developing other diseases.
Lara Adler is an Environmental Health Educator and Science Communicator who teaches health professionals, and individuals with health-based businesses to better understand the role of environmental chemical exposures in causing or contributing to chronic health issues, so they can more comprehensively support the clients/patients they serve. She trains practitioners to become experts in everyday toxic exposures so they can improve client outcomes without spending hundreds of hours researching on their own.
Combining environmental health education and business consulting, she’s helped thousands of health professionals in over 35 countries around the world elevate their skillset, get better results for their clients, and become sought out leaders in the growing environmental health & detoxification field.
Lara is a member of the National Association of Environmental Medicine, and the American Holistic Health Association.
0:00 Dr. Ginger Garner: Hi everyone, and welcome back. I’m here today with Laura Adler. She is an amazing person that I first met, has it been almost a decade?
0:15 Lara Adler: Close, we’re getting there. I think it’s been eight years.
0:18 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, almost a decade ago. And I can’t tell you how happy I was to A, meet her and know that B, she was solely committed to educating people about environmental toxins and pollutants out there in our world. And so first, I want to welcome you, Lara, to the podcast.
0:37 Lara Adler: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
0:41 Dr. Ginger Garner: I’m so glad to talk to you today. A little side story, but before I share that, I want to tell people about you first. Laura is an environmental health educator and she teaches pretty much everyone, but I think you do a lot of focusing on health care professionals and.
1:02 Lara Adler: Yeah, it’s predominantly health professionals and individuals that have health focused businesses.
1:09 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. And that’s so important because you’re helping them understand the role of environmental chemical exposures, how it contributes to chronic health issues, which I can’t wait to talk about, and how as a healthcare provider, myself and all the rest of us out there can better support our patients, our clients, but also if you’re listening, you can support better health.
You will be amazed to learn the connection between those two things, between what you’re putting on your skin, what you’re eating, what’s out there in our environment, and how our quality of life is impacted. Laura trains practitioners to become experts in everyday toxic exposure so they can improve client outcomes without spending hundreds of hours researching on their own, which is kind of, I came about learning, I’ll tell my little story in a minute, but I kind of stumbled on this through a book several years ago.
But with her health education and business consulting, she’s helped thousands of health care professionals in over 35 countries around the world elevate their skill set, get better results for their clients, and become sought out leaders in the growing environmental health and detoxification field. Laura is a member of the National Association of Environmental Medicine and the American Holistic Health Association. So welcome, Laura, once more. Thank you.
2:35 Lara Adler: I am excited to dig in.
2:37 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, I can’t wait to talk about it. I have to say that, like many healthcare providers, I would say maybe nearly all of us, none of us are given this education in training, like zero. So I graduated from PT school with a master’s in 98. I went back later and got my doctorate. Of course, I need to interject that in getting my doctorate. I also no one was teaching this stuff, right. So I got out in 1998.
And I believe that’s in 1996. Around that was when genetically modified organisms were introduced, I think into our food supply without anyone knowing without permission without labeling without anything. And it was only a few years after that, I began to like have a lot of health issues myself. PCOS, infertility, really bad allergies, cardiometabolic issues, and of course, that included being overweight. That probably sounds like a typical kind of cocktail of issues. And then I ran across Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation. It came out in 2001.
So I was a couple of years out of PT school. I was already thinking of quitting, honestly. I was so frustrated with the field. I was working with people in chronic pain, chronic disease. And if it wasn’t for yoga, I probably would have quit. And with all that combined, like the high productivity requirements and that something was missing, like people in chronic pain and they weren’t getting better, then I started using yoga, of course, on myself. I went back to my first training, which was in yoga and that kind of thing.
And in reading his book, I also got smarter about eliminating environmental toxins. Well, a few years later, things turned around. And because I got serious about the environmental piece, and I really credit that, that thing, that thing that you’re an expert at with changing my life. Like, it completely changed everything for me. I don’t have allergies. I don’t even really have seasonal allergies anymore. I cleaned up my diet. I cleaned out all the crap out of my house and all these, you know, cleaners with all this fragrance and all this other stuff in it. I have three kids now. I don’t have those cardiometabolic issues. I ended up having a surgery where when the surgeon came out, he was like, there’s no indication of PCOS whatsoever.
Like, I’m not even sure where the diagnosis came from. So I think it’s a pretty powerful testament to being able to change your environment and clean things up and really change your life. Yeah. So that’s why I’m so excited for you to be here. And, um, that’s my first exposure, right. To this whole environmental conversation, which was 22 years ago. And then I had my first child at 18 and, um, 18 years ago. And I have to say 18 years ago, it was hard to find stuff without BPA in it.
5:53 Lara Adler: Well, nobody knew. I mean, that information wasn’t even out yet. So Those products didn’t exist.
5:59 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. I, the internet was pretty new also. And I ended up ordering things that were BPA from other countries who had already banned it. So I ordered things from New Zealand. I ordered things from other countries and it was like really random, you know, cause I was searching these obscure websites to find glass bottles. Like I was breastfeeding, but I was not going to use plastic at all. And to get stainless steel canteens, that’s when Klean Kanteen was like, yes, brand new company. Yeah. So anyway, that was my exposure 18 years ago was like scrubbing the internet trying to find BPA free stuff. But let’s just start with the basics. Like, why is that important? People may not even know, hey, what’s the deal with BPA? I think most people do. But maybe not.
6:47 Lara Adler: I can actually think, I mean, I guess it depends on what circles you’re in, right? Certainly for individuals that are in the wellness space, whether they’re providers or just consumers that are looking to optimize their health, it’s more likely that they have heard of BPA and maybe know what it is. At the very least, they have seen, you know, products in the store that are labeled BPA free and that language sometimes can be misleading, but that language does serve to at least put the question in people’s mind. If this product is free of this thing I can make the assumption that this thing is maybe not something that I want to avoid, right?
So like it kind of sort of very subtly gets a point across whether that labeling is accurate and truthful is another question, but I think maybe it might be helpful even before we get into BPA to just kind of contextualize what we’re talking about in terms of environmental toxicity. Because for folks that are not familiar with the field, that phrase can mean different things to different people.
So, you know, generally speaking, when people hear the phrase environmental chemical or environmental toxin, they might think of things like air pollution, of the chemicals coming out of a smokestack in a factory, of a train derailment spilling chemicals. The obvious stuff. The obvious stuff. And those obviously are also environmental chemicals, but that’s not the arena in which I do my work and educate. I’m really focused on what are the exposures to toxic chemicals, even if they’re not big, huge exposures like somebody you know, dealing with a chemical spill or a factory explosion, the chemicals that we’re exposed to just by living our normal everyday lives, through the products that we buy and use every day, through the foods that we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe.
And these are, they’re invisible threats, because for the most part, each individual exposure that we get and even collectively, might not result in an obvious, overt symptom. So oftentimes, again, when people hear the phrase toxic chemical, they might think, oh, if everybody was exposed to these toxic chemicals, why aren’t people like pouring into emergency rooms and flooding poison control phone numbers with phone calls?
And that’s not typically the type of reaction people aren’t going to use a shampoo or a light assented candle and then suddenly, you know, break out in blisters and hair loss and vomiting that would send them to the emergency room. And so there’s often this disconnect between what people kind of picture in their mind and then the reality of what is happening. And so I’m trying, like, it’s helpful to kind of bridge that gap between what people are thinking.
So really the discussion is on these really small and seemingly, emphasis on seemingly, insignificant exposures that individually are no big deal, but collectively research is showing, well, yeah, actually these are having a huge impact on our lives. And BPA is just one of those chemicals. There are 350,000 chemicals registered globally. We don’t know anything about most of them. We don’t have data on most of those chemicals.
And we also don’t know how many are actively in use. So registration of chemicals is different from use of chemicals. And certainly not all of these are bad, right? Chemicals in and of itself is a very benign, like chemicals, just a description, right? Chemicals aren’t either good or bad. Collectively, we have to look at the individual molecule. And so this is where people sometimes say, Oh, I want skincare that’s chemical free. Well, that doesn’t exist, because everything is made of chemicals, right? Our hormones are chemicals, water is comprised of chemicals. So chemicals aren’t inherently bad, or good. They’re just there.
And so the work that I do and this conversation about, you know, BPA and all of these other chemicals that we’re exposed to are really just focused on the small subset of chemicals that we know or suspect are harmful. And there are many of those. So yeah. Yeah. That’s the landscape with which this conversation sort of sits in.
11:23 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. So. Tell me how you got exposed, no pun intended. Tell me how you got exposed to that. What turned you onto this? You know, what was kind of your origin story?
11:38 Lara Adler: Well, it’s kind of a little interesting. For the longest time, I used to say that it was quite accidental. Like I stumbled into this space. I was working as a health coach and I was working with people that were, this was like 14 years ago, 14, 15 years ago, working with people mostly who were looking to lose weight. And you know, my clients were very compliant. They did all the things they made, all the changes that I had recommended, which was really great. And most of them had success. They lost weight. They kept it off. They felt great. Excellent. And then they moved on.
I had a handful of clients that were really compliant and they changed their diet and they started sleeping more and they started moving their bodies more and all of the sort of good things that we know to be helpful for that process didn’t work for them. Just nothing happened and they were frustrated and I was frustrated and I was kind of a new health coach and so I felt really compelled to kind of find the answer, right?
Like that was my responsibility to find the answer. And so I started digging into the literature on resistant weight loss. Like what am I missing? There’s gotta be something else happening that I’m not aware of. And it was really through that exploration of the literature that I stumbled into the field of environmental chemicals, in particular obesogenic chemicals, which are chemicals that can predispose us or lead to weight gain and other metabolic issues, absent any changes in calorie intake or calorie expenditure, right? That calories in calories out and nothing to do with that.
And that really blew my mind because at that point I had spent, you know, 10 or 15 years just in my personal life, reading and obsessing about like nutrition and wellness. And I also read Eric Schlosser’s book at the time it came out. Like, so that was very, and I, you know, I wasn’t even doing that work professionally at that time. I was just fascinated by that. I had spent a year in a health coaching training and had never once been presented with this topic. It just wasn’t aside from like a one-liner that quote, pesticides are bad, but no evidence to actually support. Yeah. Like no real meat on that bone, if you will. Then that was really the extent of the conversation. So that’s sort of the origin story that I shared for a really long time.
And then I had this moment a few years ago. I guess it was about six years ago now. I went back to Connecticut where I grew up. It was like my father’s 80th birthday and you know when you go back home to like your childhood bedroom and you kind of poke around at the few things that remain that you didn’t take with you into your adult life that you just kind of left in your space. I found a plastic box of index cards that was the handwritten bibliography to a paper report that I wrote in high school in the early 90s. And it was about vegetarianism because that was, I became vegetarian in the summer before high school. So really early on, again, that’s where my sort of interest in food and nutrition came from.
And I randomly pulled an index card out of this bibliography and there was a quote on there that I guess I referenced in this report that said something about, you know, people are moving, more and more people are moving to a vegetarian diet in part because of the toxic chemicals, whatever, whatever. And I was like, what? It just kind of blew my mind that this was even on my radar remotely in the early nineties when I was frankly a kid. And then pair that with the fact that my father for the last, I’d say 30 years, um, has worked in the coating industry. Many of his clients are manufacturers of nonstick coatings.
And so I remember in college, again, before doing any of this work, I was sending him articles about Teflon toxicosis, which is the condition that birds will succumb to often if Teflon products or nonstick products are heated in the home, they release these gases that are fatal to birds. And bird owners generally speaking, no, not to have nonstick in the house because of this. And so I would forward these articles to my dad, unbeknownst to me, he was forwarding them to the president of the company.
So I became a little bit of a thorn in their side, long before this idea of ever stepping into this work had crossed my mind. So there’s these kind of parallel experiences in my life. And I’m like, Oh, okay, I guess This probably was the path the entire time and I just didn’t know, I didn’t have awareness of it then. I think that part’s fairly interesting.
16:36 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, it is fascinating. And something that you said, I think will resonate. I just want to repeat it because it was really important that you said, um, you were working as a health coach and you’re addressing all these lifestyle medicine issues. What we know as lifestyle medicine, it was not defined like that back then, but now it is. Now we have, um, untold texts and things on it. So in lifestyle medicine, for those of you who don’t know, we are addressing sleep, sleep quality, physical activity, nutrition, of course, environmental toxins are in there now, and it wasn’t back then because it wasn’t even clearly defined, our interpersonal relationships and stress management. And then what else am I leaving out?
17:26 Lara Adler: I mean, I think that’s the big five, right? Like I always say, it’s nutrition, stress, sleep, movement, and environment.
17:34 Dr. Ginger Garner: And environment, and then relational, psychosocial, social, that kind of thing. So you describe working with these people on all of this stuff, except for the environmental piece, because it frankly didn’t exist. And honestly, in the 90s, a lot of things happened where we were increasingly exposed to these things. Because of capitalism and other issues out there and lack of regulation or shady regulation, if you will.
So, the pace at which we were exposed has like greatly, is exponentially increased. And so the thing that you said was the people were doing everything right. They were being very compliant. They were listening to you and doing what you had asked them to do, and they weren’t getting better. And the little bell went off in my head of like, oh, you’re describing me, right? That was my exposure to it in a roundabout way too, because I was doing those things. I was doing those things that I had studied in PT school, having gone to school of medicine at UNC, which was a great school. And yet, and yet, things weren’t coming together. And so I think that’s where our conversation begins is if you’re listening and you’re doing all the right things, maybe you’re seeing a dietician or a health coach or someone who’s trained in lifestyle medicine, which could be a PT, OT, it could be a number of people and it’s still not better. This is the key. So listen in. It could be environmental.
19:00 Lara Adler: Yeah, it very well might be. And you had mentioned earlier that you didn’t have any training in this, in your trainings and programs. And that’s still the case for the majority of medical programs, right? So there was a survey done, I think this was done in like 2013, or 2014 of medical school curriculum to say, to look at how many of these programs are talking about environmental medicine. And of the ones that do, which very few do, only the average number of hours offered in that education is seven, seven hours. And that seven hours is typically going to be devoted to things like cigarette smoking, some occupational exposures.
The conversation or the education, I should say, is not focused on the low level chronic exposure that like 100% of people get just through living their normal everyday lives. And that’s just for medical school. So for people that are not going to medical school, all those other types of licenses or sub-niche categories or trainings that don’t require licenses, there’s almost none, and people have to seek it out intentionally.
And so turning that ship around or pivoting that medical school curriculum or curriculum as a whole, that probably will take decades. Even though we’ve had decades of research into this topic already, awareness of this topic is now reaching a kind of a breaking point, right? So when I started doing this work, nobody knew what an environmental toxin was besides, like I was saying earlier, air pollution and oil spills.
And so now, fast forward 12, 14 years later, the landscape is completely different. Most people have heard of BPA, of PFAS chemicals, of lead in the drinking water. So we have these, you know, things like Flint, Michigan and the lead catastrophe that happened there. It really brings attention to these large topics. We have that train derailment in the Midwest or wherever that happened. I don’t remember exactly the name of the city. Where it dumped tens of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals.
So we have these kinds of pivotal events that really snaps people’s attention into focus. And so the landscape is very, very, very different now, which is great because it means people have more awareness. And what that means on an individual level is that people are starting to ask questions and they’re starting to ask questions of their care providers. And oftentimes their care providers have no idea, right? Or they tend to be incredibly dismissive of this topic. And I think there’s a lot of factors into why they’re dismissive. I think people, care providers are perhaps somewhat frustrated by the openness of information on the internet. And so people feel like they are more educated than their providers. There’s some ego happening there. In some cases, that’s true, and people are more informed. Right?
Dr. Ginger Garner: I think overall, as a practitioner myself, I celebrate the fact that information is so readily available. And it, it In fact, that’s what this whole podcast season is about, is tackling medical gaslighting. And so that brings up a really important point, is when you go to your provider with the stuff that you’re about to learn in listening to this podcast, if they aren’t educated about that, that’s a red flag. That’s a red flag that it’s time for you to, because it’s not your job to educate your healthcare provider. If they’re not aware of these things, then that’s a red flag to find a provider who is, particularly if they are dismissive. If they’re opening to learning and you can send them to a website to get educated, wonderful. Then you’ve brought one more person on board that’s helping change things. But yeah, that’s two really important points.
One is talking about, this is a question, I have a two-part question, really. One is, How do we tackle this dismissive, what’s being called medical gaslighting now, when you go in and you say, well, what about something as obvious as BPA? What about something as obvious as other chemicals that are in shampoo, even ice cream, petroleum-based products, right, that are in the things that we buy, skincare and food?
So let’s talk about that first. How do you tackle that when you go into your provider and you ask them a question and you get that dismissiveness there or that has nothing to do with it? I’ll give you a case that I had. This is several years ago. I had someone who was newly diagnosed with lymphoma, started treatment, went to an integrative, well-known integrative oncology center where they were told what they ate and the things they put on their body had nothing to do with their ability to get better and be able to fight cancer and overcome it.
And so this person was a provider, was a well-educated provider. And of course he’s listening to the white coats in the room say, I can eat my fast food, I can eat my junk, I can eat whatever I want, I use whatever skincare products I want and it will make no difference in my health at all, particularly while, you know, going through chemo. Let’s just say someone has that experience, because it happened. And when he came back to me, I was just like, oh, I can’t believe this is happening in an integrative center that should know better.
25:13 Lara Adler: Yeah. I mean, I wish I had a really simple pat answer for you, right? This is how we handle that. I think that I’m a big believer in the way that we present information can make or break whether or not people hear us. This is a lot of the work that I do with the practitioners that I work with is how do we have this conversation in ways that are not, you know, judgmental or finger waggy or anything like that, or sensational or fear-mongering. And all of those rules also apply to if we are speaking with a provider, we wanna, come from a place that is matching the type of evidence that they typically would like to see. So coming to them and saying, oh, I saw online that. They’re just going to be like, OK, well, there’s a lot of stuff that people say online, right?
And so this is where instead you can say, hey, there was a paper published in Journal “Name”. You speak their language a little bit, because if somebody is a clinician, they will have done their due diligence in reading however many tens of thousands of papers that they had to read through their schooling, and hopefully they’re still keeping up with literature. And so I think that approaching that conversation from that perspective can perhaps ease some of the defensiveness that a lot of providers may have of saying, I heard online that. I read on this blog. I saw somebody on social media say. Those are not the sources that are going to give any provider pause, and they shouldn’t be, right?
And so, really speaking from a place of evidence and saying, hey, I read this research paper, I read the study, read this meta-analysis. It requires some scientific literacy to be able to do that. But I think that’s an important skill for people to have. So one, I would say, come prepared with the right ammunition. Right. Don’t is a terrible analogy, but like, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. It’s one of those.
27:23 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right. Yeah. All of our analogies and metaphors. I know they’re all weaponized. It’s horrible. They are. We should have a podcast just on that, on the, on the language because.
27:34 Lara Adler: I recently changed. I used to share this sort of idiom that has been around for a long time, that environment loads the gun, genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. And in this gun-happy climate that we’re in, I was like, you know what, I think we need something less violent. So now it’s your genetics opens the door and environment pushes you through it. So it’s a little bit more benign. But it’s that concept, right?
A little bit of what you were talking about before that, like, you know, even with the individual with cancer, right, that you mentioned this individual case, First of all, we know that only five to 9% of cancers have a genetic component. The rest are environmental. And environmental in this case does mean not just toxic exposures, but all of those lifestyle factors that you were talking about. Do you smoke? Do you move? Do you exercise? Do you have stress and trauma? All of these other more controllable factors than our genetics. And, you know, knowing that should really push a lot of the emphasis on what can we do to optimize our health to minimize the expression of whatever genetics that we may or may not have, right?
And so interestingly, and I may be jumping the gun on sharing this because maybe we’ll get there, but there was a really interesting study published earlier this year on healthy women with no history of cancer aside from maybe history of some types of skin cancer, no hormonally driven cancers. And the researchers took fine needle aspirate samples of breast tissue at the beginning of the study of these participants. And then they had them switch their personal care products from whatever they were using to ones that were phthalate-free and paraben-free, which are two endocrine disrupting chemicals.
They’re two of the more heavily used, they’re well-studied, for their endocrine disrupting properties. And after 28 days, they reassessed, they did another fine needle aspirate breast tissue sample. And they found that in that 28 days, the markers for breast cancer, the genes and sort of phenotypes that are more typical in women with breast cancer, reverted from where they were to a normal state, meaning healthy state. which implies that these women, the healthy women with no history of breast cancer already had the start of the study, not normal, not healthy representation of these cancer associated genes. And so in 28 days, that was able to shift.
So the idea, and this is a new study, right? This was just came out this year, but the idea that like changing our environment won’t have any bearing on a cancer diagnosis, it seems quite silly, especially given that we know the multiple ways in which in multiple places that we are exposed to essentially these foreign estrogens, these xenoestrogens, or these, they’re not just estrogen endpoint, endocrine disruptors. that our physiology is already designed to respond to low levels of hormones.
Like that is how our physiology works. The hormones, the estrogen, the testosterone, all the hormones, whether they’re sex hormones or not, that course through our bodies, that happens in incredibly tiny levels, extraordinarily low levels. I like to say that our hormones communicate in whispers. Right? Like they’re not screaming and yelling. It’s not a bowl in a china shop.
And the major life changes that we see in puberty, in sexual maturation, in menopause, those are not massive swings in hormone changes, right? They’re still very small. And our physiology is designed to respond to these incredibly small levels of hormones. And so this is where the concern is from the environmental health lens. Is we are exposed to similarly low levels of hormones or chemicals that mimic hormones every single day at the volume that our body is used to listening to.
32:08 Dr. Ginger Garner: And that is like a perfect segue. That was like part two of the question.
32:15 Lara Adler: Great. I don’t even know what part two was, but glad I took us there.
32:19 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. The first was always be, here we are with the weaponized examples again, armed with evidence. Be prepared with your evidence, which we’re about to talk about. And that’s a perfect segue as how we communicate with our providers, making sure, A, that we’ve actually kind of interviewed our providers, are they, you know, environmentally literate and aware of these things or not? And if they aren’t, are they open to it? If they aren’t, okay, fine. Then we move on and we find another healthcare provider who is, because it’s incredibly important.
And now that’s what we’re about to get to. If you can elaborate for the listener on the concept of xenoestrogens, of estrogenic endocrine disruptors, because there’s more than just estrogenic effects. And then these environmental chemicals, they are endocrine disruptors and our endocrine system is in charge, you know, of everything that we do in combination with the nervous system. And they absolutely negatively impact that health, which is important, not just for musculoskeletal and pelvic health, but it’s important for our overall health. So take us through like, you know, ground level and you know, why these, xenoestrogens are so important to get out of our, our diet and right out of our house. Yeah.
33:42 Lara Adler: Yeah. So there’s about a thousand chemicals so far that have been identified as having endocrine disrupting properties. Like you said, it’s not just, sex hormones of estrogen and testosterone. There’s evidence, for example, that BPA can alter our leptin and ghrelin. And those are the hormones that are responsible for signaling of hunger and satiety, which in and of itself, you can start to go, Oh, well, maybe that might be influencing some of the metabolic issues that I’m dealing with because those hormones are directly being affected.
So there’s about a thousand of these chemicals, many of which, I mean, a dozen or more at a minimum that we can be exposed to every single day, even just before we leave the house, just through our normal lives. And, you know, I think the important thing for people to understand about endocrine disrupting chemicals specifically is that they don’t play by the traditional toxicology rules of the dose makes the poison.
So the dose makes the poison is this sort of foundational approach to toxicology, which says in order for something, roughly, in order for something to have a very high response, meaning an effect, the dose also needs to be high. And our bodies can tolerate low doses, right? And that is, it’s not that it’s not true, it’s just not always true. So it is a true but partial statement.
So there are absolutely without question many exposures that follow this sort of linear and predictable path that more exposures is way worse than less exposures. So radiation is a really good example. There’s radiation just ambiently around us. You eat a banana. There’s radioactive isotopes in a banana. That’s actually referred to as the banana equivalent dose. People will use a banana as a point of reference of like, this is how much radiation is in something. It’s the same amount in a banana. And we obviously can tolerate that. We can tolerate flying in airplanes. We can tolerate the occasional X-ray, not that big of a deal. You get something like a nuclear blast of radiation and you know, that’s deadly.
So that is what the majority of individuals, including the field of toxicology, which is the field that determines part of the regulatory toxicology is the field that looks at what are we going to say as a governmental body of something that’s safe? What’s the safe level of something so that we as a society can protect ourselves? And so toxicological research tends to only look at these really high levels of exposure. Then they work backwards until they reach a point where they actually don’t see any more exposures, adverse exposures, and they go, okay, well, it’s linear, right? It’s predictable. So anything below this point that we said, we don’t see, I don’t see anything here. Okay, let’s build in some safety factors just to be sure. Okay, that’s great. And then they don’t actually test anything below in those low exposure ranges.
Except as people who inhabit this planet, those low exposure places, that’s actually what we’re getting. We’re not getting these really toxic high doses. We live in this zone of exposure that’s literally not being examined by toxicology. They don’t look at the data. They don’t plot. They don’t do data and research on those exposures. We have independent scientists and epidemiologists and exposure scientists that do that research. And when it comes to endocrine disrupting chemicals, specifically, they tend to be, in some cases, more toxic at that very low level. Why? Because again, our physiology is designed to listen to hormone signaling that’s that quiet, right?
They’ll tune out if it’s that loud. If it’s really, really loud, they won’t respond in the same way. And so what this means, and not to get to data, science, toxicology in the podcast, but essentially what this means is that we don’t have good data, in terms of what’s safe, that reflects our actual exposures. So when we hear people say, oh, the amount of chemicals in these products is so small, it’s not going to affect us. It’s the dose that makes the poison.
They’re leaning on this view of toxicology that doesn’t really apply when it comes specifically to endocrine disrupting chemicals. And that’s the mismatch. And that’s where people are dismissive of the idea that toxic chemicals or low levels of toxic chemicals in our consumer products, could at all be harmful. It’s what corporations lean on when they say, hey, the amount is safe. And what did we use, like, how are we defining safe?
Are we defining safe of, again, going back to what I said, no one’s rushing into emergency rooms with blistering and hair loss and nausea and vomiting and organ failure. Well, those end points in toxicology where they’re saying, oh, this is safe, this is toxic. They’re looking for tumors, cancer, death, gross histological changes. They’re not looking for disruptions in the gut microbiome, slight alterations of thyroid hormone. They don’t even look at those.
39:31 Dr. Ginger Garner: It’s the same as our healthcare system now. Right. They’re not looking for the small things.
39:36 Lara Adler: They’re not looking. And so as I like to say, or there’s an adage that says absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So if they say, well, we don’t, of course, you’re not going to find it if you’re not looking. Right. And so they can’t say, well, there’s no harm there when they haven’t looked. Right. And so again, we have independent scientists that are looking and they’re like, actually, actually, yes, there is harm. We’re seeing harm reflected in the data.
40:02 Dr. Ginger Garner: Right. And that’s important that that research is happening. The way I like to describe it to people is the same thing is happening in that industry with toxicology as happens in the healthcare industry. And to help the listener understand it a little better. It’s like when a patient comes in and sits down. And I asked them for their labs and someone may say, well, you’re a pelvic PT, why are you asking for labs? Well, here’s why, because you know how many people have come in, sat down and they’re pre-diabetic. and their PCP said labs look fine. They’re not identifying the small precursors of disease that then they’re waiting to tell them because you know what? Insurance companies won’t pay them to counsel them on prediabetes perhaps. So then the labs look fine. They’re not telling them until they’re full-blown diabetic and then you’re full-blown diabetic.
So I feel like the environmental kind of machine is similar in that they’re not looking for these precursor repeated exposure, small dose. They’re waiting until something explodes and is catastrophic and is terrible. Well, then it’s too late, right? And so this is where your work comes in that you can help people identify these things and prevent things from happening, reverse disease processes. And that’s what’s so amazing about what you’re doing.
41:25 Lara Adler: Thank you. I think so. I think it’s important. I think that, you know, we need to have more people that are fluent in this topic so that we don’t have people that are being dismissed. You know, I think one of the things, I’m always looking at what the objections are, you know, where are people going, yeah, but, or actually no in this conversation so that I can understand where their confusion is or where their sort of gap is in their understanding.
And I think a lot of people are still, again, under this impression that like low doses don’t matter and that our bodies can handle it. We have a detoxification system. We don’t need to do anything. We have our liver and our kidneys and our lungs and our colon. And we have these organs, these systems that like literally that is what their job is, is to detoxify these chemicals. And they become very dismissive of this entire topic. And it’s frustrating because we do have, at this point, five decades plus of really good research on these chemicals. And I think a lot of people set the bar of proof extremely high, right? We have to have absolutely airtight proof that A causes B. And that’s just not how the science works in this area because we don’t test chemicals on people. And the only way to get that really, really strong causative evidence in most cases, the fastest way or most efficient way is to directly test chemicals on population.
We use animal studies for that. And then people get upset and say, well, there’s not proof. I’m not a rat, you’re not a rat, right? And so it’s like, okay, but if we’re using animal research to demonstrate safety, that same model should be perfectly fine to represent harm. You can’t have it both ways. Either it works or it doesn’t. And no, we don’t test chemicals on people. Historically, there have been unfortunate instances where that has happened, but collectively we’ve decided, hey, that’s not ethical to do. And so what we rely on is data from animal models and then human epidemiological data where we’re doing population reviews and we’re looking at levels of chemicals and associations in the literature between those levels of chemicals and such and such disease.
Right before we got on to record, I saw a new paper that just was published today, haven’t even read it yet, on PFAS chemicals and thyroid cancer. And they found a very striking, it’s the first time that that has been examined and they were like, yep, there’s a really strong association between people that have higher levels of PFAS compounds. Which to me that makes perfect sense because PFAS chemicals are a fluorinated compound and they are a halogenated chemical, a halogen on the periodic table of elements. And right alongside fluorine and chlorine and bromine is iodine, which is what our thyroid needs to function. It is the Goldilocks element. Too much is not good, too little is not good, just the right amount.
And we know from other research that iodine gets displaced by these other halogenated chemicals, so chlorine, bromine, and fluorine. So we already know that, so it’s not a real stretch or a real leap to see this data about PFAS chemicals, which are fluorinated chemicals perfluoroalkyl substances, that’s what the F stands for, would affect our thyroid.
45:19 Dr. Ginger Garner: Describe to our, for the listener who doesn’t know about PFAS chemicals, give us a little description of that.
45:26 Lara Adler: Yeah, so PFAS, perfluoral, per and polyfluoral alkyl substances is what that PFAS stands for. It is an enormous class of chemicals. It’s not a chemical. We don’t actually have a solid head count. Estimates range from 9,000 to 14,000 plus individual molecule configurations of these chemicals that serve different purposes. They’re used in all levels of the economy, commerce, military, medicine, at all levels. And it is, we are exposed to many types of PFAS in our daily lives.
In our daily lives, they’re found predominantly in things like cookware, in paper, food paper packaging, that is grease proof or oil proof. So think of like your microwave popcorn bag or a pizza box that would otherwise absorb grease and be ugly because it had big grease stains on it. They put a grease proof coating to prevent that. And those are usually PFAS chemicals. They’re incredibly strong bonds, which means they’re very difficult to break apart into their individual elements.
Because of that, they’re highly persistent. They don’t break down easily in the environment. They bioaccumulate in our bodies. Some PFAS molecules have a half-life of five to eight years. Some of them have much longer half-lives. And that just means that any amount that you have in the body, it’s going to take that many years to be reduced by half, given no new exposures.
47:08 Dr. Ginger Garner: And that’s why they’re also called forever chemicals.
47:11 Lara Adler: Forever chemicals, yes. That’s sort of the umbrella term because they’re so hard to break down and scientists are like desperately searching for ways to do that. They found some, but they’re not applicable to all types of environments. And so these PFAS chemicals are linked to a wide range of health issues, including certain types of cancers, developmental issues, fertility issues, and certainly now thyroid cancer. And so this, it’s an enormous class. Estimates are that like 99% of the population has PFAS already in their bodies.
They’re in, like I said, non-stick coating, they’re in grease-proof paper, they’re in stain-resistant textiles, so stain-resistant treatments on carpeting, on your couch, They are in those sprays that you use for like your suede shoes to waterproof them. Anything that’s a waterproofing Gore-Tex, that’s your raincoat, your camping tent, your outdoor backpack. All of these materials have PFAS molecules that we are interacting with on a regular basis.
They’re in our drinking water. So it is a concern, right? I think this conversation understandably can be very overwhelming and can feel a little doom and gloom. I’m well aware of that after spending 12 years doing this, but go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to say to point back to that breast cancer and personal care product study, right? There is evidence that we can do things about this that will benefit us. That is just one study. We do have, um, there’s good intervention studies, even on lowering PFAS levels in your body by washing your hands and vacuuming more in your house, right?
So these are just really basic, simple activities or behavior change that we can implement pretty easily to lower our exposure. And that’s really where, even if we don’t have conclusive evidence to say, oh, you know what? Hand washing and vacuuming, although it lowers PFAS exposure, we don’t have long-term studies to say populations who do this have less cancer or less whatever, right? We don’t have that data because this is emerging science. And maybe in 20 or 30 years, we will have that data, but we don’t have it yet. But why wait for absolute proof in research like this, when we already know that the goal is to reduce our exposures in as many places as possible. I think it’s a fair assumption to make that if we see associations with higher levels of these toxicants and disease states, it’s a fair assumption to say lower levels of these are likely going to lead to less disease states. And that’s the goal.
50:15 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, they’re only going to help. On your website, I saw I love this. This is a phrase that I pulled right off of your website where you say the goal is action, not overwhelm. Yes. And so in having this conversation, because I have this conversation with every patient that walks in the door, I want them to start addressing these things. But it can feel really overwhelming. Sorry, I hope that you didn’t hear my dog in the background. She’s very upset that she can’t currently get on the sofa.
So what’s a good first step to take? Because you’re going to feel overwhelmed with this. Like you said, there are new papers out every day. And of course, the average person isn’t going to go out and read those papers. That’s what you’re for, to help us interpret all these things. I saw that you had a resource and this may be where you want to point people to the 10 toxins checklist that’s on your website.
51:06 Lara Adler: Yeah, I wouldn’t even send them there. Again, I would actually send them to my Instagram because my Instagram is where there’s so much education, there’s recommendations on alternatives and things that people can do and actions that people can take that’s just accessible to anybody. If somebody is a professional, a health professional in some capacity, yes, go get that practitioner checklist that’s on my website.
But for the average person, it’s really not going to be very helpful. Instead, they’re going to need a little bit more broader education. And that’s really what my Instagram account is for, which in my handle is just @environmentaltoxinsnerd. But the other thing that I wanted to mention in terms of the action not overwhelmed with where people should start, is I really encourage people to just approach the starting gate of looking of where there are opportunities for changes that are free and easy.
Because again, if we step into this conversation and say, oh, you have to throw out all your personal care products, you have to throw out all your cleaners and buy everything new, already you’ve got people who are gonna go, I’m not gonna do that. I spent good money on that stuff. And I said, great, okay, use that stuff up and when it’s time to replace it, you can find better alternatives, but start with the things that are free and the things that are easy and aren’t going to require you to like uproot your life in any capacity.
And so the free, the best interventions that I think fall into the free and easy category. And this first one tends to be people get are like, is to stop using scented candles plug-ins, air fresheners, Febreze, all of those home fragrance products, the vast majority of those products are going to contain, among many other chemicals, phthalates, which are an endocrine disruptor. They are one of those endocrine disruptors that was studied in that breast cancer study with personal care products. They’re also in your scented candles, your air fresheners, your reed diffusers, your incense, all of these things that we use to make our home smell nice. They’re consistently causing or producing pollutants that will live in our air and that will settle in the dust in our homes where we will continuously be exposed to them.
So the first thing is like, just don’t buy those. And if you have them, throw them out. That would be the only thing that I would say, just ditch them. And that ultimately in the long term will save people money because you don’t need to buy those things. So don’t buy those products. Then open your windows. This is a very simple intervention that people can do. Like I said, the chemicals, whether it’s from a scented candle or any other, you know, your paint on your walls that’s off-gassing, they don’t just disappear, right?
They stay in our air. The U.S. EPA has found that indoor air can be five to 10 all the way up to 100 times more polluted than air outside. And we regulate air outside, we don’t regulate air inside. And so opening our windows is a really great way to get rid of some of those toxicants that have built up in our air.
The other one is to wet dust often. Like I said, these chemicals off gas and then they settle in the dust in our homes. And so we can lower exposures, that intervention study that I mentioned about lowering PFAS or flame retardants is another one, can be lowered just by increasing cleaning. And that includes wet dusting. And wet dusting is just a damp cloth, right? And that we then throw in the washing machine as opposed to like the feather dusters that just move stuff around. Really simple thing.
Take your shoes off when you come inside because you’re going to be tracking in all kinds of toxicants, heavy metals, pesticides. And if you have carpeting in your home, you’re just nestling those chemicals into your carpet. That might not be a big deal if you’re an adult. If there’s babies in the home, that’s really concerning. If there’s pets in the home, that’s really concerning. And so those are some of the places that I encourage people to start. that don’t really require any kind of investment in making these changes. Take off your shoes, open your windows, increase vacuuming and wet dusting, and ditch the scented candles. And then certainly from there, people can look at swapping out personal care products and household cleaners like you mentioned that you did early on, you know, many, many years ago.
55:50 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, yeah. Those are such good recommendations, Laura. I know that when I first begin to dig into it. I was overwhelmed, but I was also angry as much as I was overwhelmed because these things aren’t, these are such basic things that cut down on our risk of chronic disease, chronic pain, infertility, certain, you know, a risk for cancer, you know, for example.
So if you’re listening and you’re feeling a little bit, hey, why didn’t anybody tell me about this before? And you’re feeling a little bit angry, that’s okay. Welcome.
56:27 Lara Adler: Yeah, welcome to the club.
56:29 Dr. Ginger Garner: Welcome. But now you have an opportunity to make the shift and just and don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. There’s a nonviolent one.
56:40 Lara Adler: Yes, a little bit.
56:41 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, we can talk about a little bit more nonviolent. So if you’re a healthcare provider, I would encourage you to go to Laura’s website. Give us that website again.
56:53 Lara Adler: Yeah, it’s just my name. It’s Laraadler.com.
56:59 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yep. And on her website, she’s got a great top 10 toxins checklist that you can use to start getting educated. She also has a lot of other courses. There are freebies on her website. Her website is chock full of information. And the low hanging fruit option is go to Instagram, @environmentaltoxinsnerd, and give her a follow. Are there any other places that you would like to direct them to, to find you?
57:25 Lara Adler: I think those are the main places that I kind of hang out in the world.
57:30 Dr. Ginger Garner: In this, in the sphere and the space. Awesome. Well, you guys go check that out. Check out her website, check out Instagram. And also we will have some of the links that we mentioned and things in the show notes. So that makes it a lot easier for you. Just check those out. And thank you so much, Lara.
57:49 Lara Adler: Thank you so much for having me.
57:51 Dr. Ginger Garner: This was so helpful. And I hope that it’s helpful for all you guys listening too. Thank you.
https://youtu.be/u8QFPB7MqAk Follow us for Free: About the Episode: What if your pain isn’t “normal” — it’s been misunderstood? In this episode, Dr. Ginger sits down with Dr. Madhu Bagaria, a...
https://youtu.be/04zjmpV1td4 Follow us for Free: About the Episode: Men’s sexual health is often misunderstood and reduced to quick fixes. In this episode of The Vocal Pelvic Floor, Dr. Ginger...
https://youtu.be/p3A1foLw6wI Follow us for Free: About the Episode: What if your desire isn’t broken — it’s just been misunderstood? In this episode, Dr. Ginger Garner sits down with Dr....