Podcast 474: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World

In this episode, Martin dives into the myriad forms of environmental toxins that pollute our planet on a global scale whilst also having a profound impact on our health. Through insightful analysis, Martin illuminates the interconnectedness of these pressing issues such as chemical sensitivities and intolerances, autism, and geo-engineering. He emphasizes that while complete avoidance of these chemicals is impossible, we can make concerted efforts to minimize our exposure. Through awareness and utilizing appropriate resources, we can safeguard our health and well-being for future generations.

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MARTIN: Martin Pytela here,  Life Enthusiast, health coach. We should talk about chemical sensitivities or the environment. Last week we talked about nutritionals, specifically sweeteners. What is in your food? Well, the “what is in your food” continues with the chemicals. 

Curious stuff has been going on since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but especially kicking off after World War II. Lots and lots of chemicals have been added to the food that we eat. Some intentionally as additives and some unintentionally as contamination. The main issue here on my mind today is called environmental illness or chemical sensitivity. That happens to people, and more and more people are being affected by that. 

Chemical intolerance caused by environmental exposure. Children are now becoming affected to the point where they are being registered in the national birth registry, caused by either solvents, volatile organic compounds, pesticides, things like formaldehyde, carbamate, nitric oxide, inflammation, superoxide. 

The story goes like this: the food produced at industrial scale is being controlled or added to specific additives, with the intention of extending the shelf life. It’s an important thing, of course, right? Shelf life of food makes it less expensive. When your food is not spoiling on the shelf, you have less that you have to throw away. 

I remember back when I was a kid, baking was fresh stuff, the white bread stuff. We used to have bread rolls and stuff like that. They were good only for one, maybe two days. After that they would be let go to dry and they were used in ground up baking as in breadcrumbs. Bread like sourdough style bread that would last maybe 4 or 5 days at most.

But it was best fresh, right? We would buy as we wanted, what we wanted, as we needed, fresh. I remember milk lasted one day. Well, maybe not even a whole day. Even things like beer, when I was growing up, it was not pasteurized and it was only good for maybe 4 or 5 days on the shelf. It needed to rotate, it needed to be made fresh, and it didn’t have a long shelf life. 

What had we started adding? Things are either preventing mold or things that are preventing visual spoilage, like brown spots, black spots, and so on. So some are antifungals, others are antioxidants. Let’s call it that. 

The two most famous ones, BHA, BHT, they are added at a certain level. They have been established as .02 percent of the fat content of your food can be in BHA or BHT, which is “safe for you.” Well, it probably is. I don’t know, maybe it is safer to be eating unspoiled fats rather than spoiled fats, right? Oils, especially plant oils, will rancidize. And they rancidize because they’re made not well. When you are making the oils using high-pressure high heat extraction methods, you will no doubt cause peroxidation of lipids. Rancidization of fats.

So you have two ways of fixing it. One is to add chemicals that will possibly cause downstream damage. The other is to start making the product better using methods that perhaps are not as high volume and high speed, but that will not cause the peroxidation of lipids. And we are finding out that that’s possible. For example, on our website you will find products by Andreas Wecker, Andreas seed oils that are extracted using the correct methods and that are healthy, unspoiled with a shelf life of 2 to 3 years without refrigeration. Go figure. It’s possible. But they would have to be using methods other than the high speed, high-pressure, high-friction oil extraction methods. 

So that’s the food spoilage. One of the quickest ways of causing nutritional damage in your body would be by eating foods that are spoiled, like the peroxidized fats, or by eating oils that have been heated to high temperatures. So of course, things that have been fried. I guess I’ll sidebar into this: when it comes to fixing or cooking foods, the lower the cooking temperature, the less damage. So the healthiest methods would be stewing or poaching, as in heat treatment in water, steaming. Beyond that, maybe cooking with a wok with steam. The higher temperature pan fry is not nearly as healthy as steaming or stewing. And then beyond that deep fryer with high heat oils, that’s definitely no fun. And barbecue, of course, that creates cross-linked AGEs, advanced glycation end products, things that make you age are the caramelized proteins.

So when you get a piece of chicken that has just come off the barbecue, it will have brown stripes on it. And these brown stripes, they are the most flavorful. But at the same time, those are the ones where the flesh has been essentially burned, caramelized. So those are the sources of carcinogens. Interestingly, the herb that reverses that or makes it less damaging is rosemary. So if you’re roasting your chicken with rosemary or if you’re barbecuing your steak with rosemary, you’re going to see much less damage and much lower carcinogenic effect or activity. 

So that’s the cooking and the temperature. But I also wanted to talk about what happens to people: chemical sensitivity. So this is in reaction to the effect of herbicides, pesticides, coloring agents. What’s interesting is of course, that we’re seeing the effect in increasing levels with each succeeding generation. 

Back in the 90’s, we were writing that maybe 1% of children were in the autistic territory. Well, there was 1 in 100. Now it is one in about 30. These days there isn’t a classroom that doesn’t have 1 or 2 kids that are now on the spectrum. Of course, the spectrum is quite the range, with mild being just not exactly neurotypical and going through ADD and ADHD and aspergers all the way to the really affected where they are having problems with fitting in socially, being able to interact with people normally, having serious effects.

The biggest effect, that I’m aware of, caused herbicides and pesticides, is because they are designed to destroy living things. We did not understand, or at least the engineers ignored or didn’t understand that microbes, microbiome inside of us is very important. So for example, when they introduced glyphosate, which is a component of Roundup, it was originally patented as an antibiotic. And correctly so because it destroys microbes. The way this thing works is that when you spray this on a plant, it gets absorbed into the roots and at the root level, destroys the microbes that are designed to make nutrients available to the plant. So the plant dies because it’s unable to extract nutrients from the soil, because the microbes that would hand it to the plant are no longer alive. So far, so good, right? We’re destroying the plants we don’t want. And then we have created plants that are resistant to this, so that we could now plant the resistant plants and then spray the whole field. And only the resistant plants would survive. So far, so good. Except, the glyphosate is water soluble, which means that when you spray it on the field, it actually gets into the water, and that means it gets into the runoff, it gets into creeks and rivers and oceans. It also gets into the aquifer. So it goes into the soil. 

It also evaporates. So as it rises as vapor into the air, it becomes the clouds and it can rain down anywhere. So now we have glyphosate raining on us from the sky on every field, including the organic gardens, including the cities, including the lawn, wherever you walk in town, where your dog is walking, where your children are walking. The famous lawsuit that affected Monsanto and Bayer in a big way was a lawsuit of a groundskeeper in Florida who was told that the glyphosate that he sprayed was safe. And he was spraying it all around school grounds to control plants that were unwanted, essentially maintaining lawns so that they are free of pests. Or, you know, where you have a walking path, gravel or something, where you want to eliminate ugly things like dandelions or thistles or whatnot. So instead of killing them with hot steam or vinegar, you’re now killing them with glyphosate. Anyway, so this fellow was told to spray, that it was safe. He did. He got cancer proveably so, and he was granted a very large award. And it pretty much destroyed Monsanto to the point that it had to sell itself to Bayer. 

But anyway, the issue here is that, for example, this item that was originally patented as an antibiotic is indeed destroying microbes and is remaining in trace amounts on food and is in the environment, too. So when we ingest food, let’s just say wheat, because these days they actually spray glyphosate on wheat in order to cause it to dry up in the last phase of its growth. It produces beautifully consistent dryer grain, which is easier to harvest.

So from the perspective of getting more grain, better yield, it’s wonderful. However, it’s contaminated trace amounts only and it gets into us. And so even at parts per million and parts per billion concentrations, it is affecting us internally, not human cells, but the microbes that live within us. Turns out that the microbiome that lives within me, inside of me is what digests the food. To give examples, vitamin B12 is made by a specific microbe living in my gut, as is dopamine, as is serotonin, as are several other important substances, chemicals, hormones, things that we need. They are actually made by creatures living within us. So when we cause the terrain within us to be altered, we are shifting from healthy to unhealthy. So going back to, for example, the mention of autism, we now know that the autistic symptoms are made much worse when certain microbes are overgrown in the gut. So when we switch it, when we turn the balance of microbes, we actually take away the symptoms, too. This is quite significant. Anyway, the point is, as we are altering the microbiome, perhaps in favor of the microbes that are resistant to these chemicals, we are creating problems in the population and these problems are leading to chemical toxicity.

So this creates chemically sensitive people. For example, we now know that there are specific genetic pathways. I’ll read you a little quote. Due to advances in technology, it is now possible to use computational toxicology methodology to conduct virtual screening of gene environment interactions, gene and environment interactions as they relate to specific high profile diseases such as autism, and this is accomplished by using our current knowledge of gene pathways and protein structures, and combining those with high priority chemical toxicants. Using ligand receptor docking technology to identify high scoring gene variant and chemical combination. Such targeted investigations will greatly reduce the cost associated with genome association studies and also help to identify environmental insults, which offers the opportunity for prevention and treatment. 

Lovely sciencey comment. Essentially, it tells you this, you should be able to know ahead of time that a specific person, a child, will be sensitive to specific chemicals. Environmental causation, for example. Just recent development, right? Robert Kennedy’s candidacy for president of the United States. He is one of the advocates for investigating and disclosing what’s going on with vaccinations. And he has been branded anti-vax. And he responds with, I’m not anti-vax, I’m pro-science. Let’s get the information, let’s study it, let’s reveal it, let’s disclose it. If this stuff is maiming or killing our children, we should know. We should hear about it. Do not hide it. Do not ignore it. The stuff that’s happening is, of course, the rising tide of this.

There’s so much more of it with each succeeding generation that at some point, it will be impossible for the pharmaceutical companies with their control of politics, money in politics, of the information, as in they own the radio, TV, newspaper and now even the internet. I cannot get this message on YouTube. I cannot get this message on Facebook because those channels are fully controlled by either the government, which then in turn is controlled by the pharmaceuticals and their message. There’s no leak, or there are only very small leaks in the alternative channels where people are bravely saying, please hear me, this is anti-science, this is now propaganda, controlling real information. 

What all is going on, right? Individuals with seemingly unrelated exposures and multisystem health problems share a great deal in common. Their multi-system symptoms are often triggered by everyday low level chemical exposures. Many will report adverse reactions to food, medication, alcoholic beverages, or even coffee. In the 80’s doctor Nicholas Ashford of MIT described this phenomenon: “Toxicant induced loss of tolerance.” TILT is the name they gave this underlying dynamic. It involves a two step process whereby the initial acute or chronic toxic exposure causes loss of tolerance for everyday exposures, and these new onset intolerances perpetuate the disease process. They describe how low level exposures to common chemicals, foods, and medications may be the driving force behind the increased incidence to many hitherto unexplained medical symptoms, and how they are masking or resulting from overlapping responses to multiple incidents, is obscuring the fact that everyday exposure will perpetuate illness. 

And these concepts arose from reports by physicians, researchers, patients for more than a dozen of industrialized nations. So collectively, their observations provide evidence that “Toxicant induced loss of tolerance – TILT” may be a new theory of disease. 

So we have loss of tolerance resulting from an acute or chronic exposure event, which follows by repeated triggering of symptoms by everyday exposures such as gasoline vapors, engine exhaust, fragrance, cleaning agent. Exposures, which had not been a problem for the person previously. This phenomenon became increasingly common with the widespread introduction of synthetic organic chemicals, mostly following World War II, and then coupled with this, 90% of Americans spend 90% of their day inside of poorly ventilated structures, where unprecedented levels and types of synthetic volatile organic chemicals known as VOC, volatile organic compound or volatile organic chemicals are present, and this has led to the epidemic of chronic illness that we are witnessing today.

Sensitivities, right? And so this what I’m reading to you was written based on research that started well in the 1980s. What I just read was published in 2010, and yet another 15 years have gone by and we have nothing or very little to show for it. The chemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, which is a subsection of the chemical and the food manufacturing, which is closely related to the chemical, are lobbying very effectively with the government.

They have, we could say, turned the regulatory organizations into their own tools. Going back to Robert Kennedy, he calls it a captured agency. The agency itself has been captured by the industrial interest that it’s supposed to be controlling. These days, the FDA, EPA, NIH  NIEHS, many of these organizations that are supposed to be for health and for environment and maintaining our quality of life have been twisted. They have been subverted. They are now in full control of the industries that are supposed to be regulating. 

This is short-sighted in many ways because of course, shortsightedly they are allowing these toxins to continue to be used. In the long run, this is going to essentially kill the patient. This is the short-sightednes of a viral infection of a parasite or of cancer. Cancer will ultimately kill the patient or a parasite will ultimately destroy the host. And that’s what we have here. These companies, these whole industries, have become parasitic. They cannot see beyond the narrow self-interest of selling more of what they make, that in the process of selling more, they are, in fact going to kill the customers that are consuming their product. So in the end, this is all going to collapse. I just don’t know if it’s going to collapse before the human race, and maybe everything else with it is destroyed or shut down.

Because now the latest, the latest salvo from the pharmaceuticals is the introduction of the mRNA. These are tiny bits of protein. They’re called plasmid. And inside of the plasmid there’s a rolled up piece of DNA. And that DNA has a specific effect on whoever’s absorbing it. And as research shows, these are now based on venoms, toxic venoms. So when these things are now freely distributed and they have become aerosolized, meaning they can be distributed on the air, sprayed or in water, they can be injected into city water supply at any point through injections. They could be added as an additive to something like dental, novocaine, procaine, that sort of thing. Or it could be added to insulin. So anybody who’s injecting insulin would be injecting these. 

And once these things go into circulation, they spread. We now know that these plasmids are transferable from one person to the next through sputum. You’re spitting out a little bit of your body fluids. That’s sputum, sweat, urine, feces. So anything you touch, it’s very common for hygiene to be insufficient, urine and feces get onto stuff. 

Every time you end up with some kind of food poisoning, somebody in the food production who has ended up putting the wrong kind of microbes into the food stream, usually just bad personal hygiene, unwashed hands touching food. So clearly this will happen, is happening and you can expect that you will be exposed.

Why am I getting into that? Well, this is the next level of exposure we’re going beyond chemicals into now DNA itself. Previously we had chemicals affecting the DNA. Now we have the DNA itself being affected, modified, changed and distributed as such. So we can indeed expect a rising level of these chemicals, whatever form they are, and rising levels of their effects on the population in general. 

And there are some predictions that you can easily imagine that since there are more and more children becoming autistic, for example, that more and more of the societal resources will have to be devoted in care of these children. I mean, they have higher demand on education. Well, the milder forms are taxing the education system, the more affected ones, the ones that you can’t even put into a classroom, they are really causing high demand on care because after all, we are a society in which we do not abandon people who are less than perfect. 

I don’t know if the day comes when this will have to change, because it’s possible that there will not be enough people available to do the actual work, to be able to carry all the people that are requiring extra care. I’m reminded of earlier societies where the resources were not so abundant, like in the days of the Roman Empire. They would abandon infants that were less than perfect. In fact, they did not name children until they were about two years old, because the rate of loss of infants was fairly high.

Anyone that was less than right just was not supported. And even still, the nutritional balances, right? Like, you may have heard me talk about how the metabolic adaptation to environment or food resource takes place, we know that up to the Middle Ages, the typical experience was that a woman would give birth to a child every 2 or 3 years, so she would end up giving birth to 12, 14 children. But it was also common that many of them did not make it to adulthood. Maybe 4 or 5 would, out of the 12 or 14, and that had to do with either the adaptation to the food resource, because a child that’s not well adapted to what they’re being fed is not strong enough to survive the infections. And they were rampant. 

The biggest advance really, was when civil engineers came up with dealing with sewage. Previously, before modern days, we had open sewers, animal feces, human feces, all of that stuff just throughout the environment. When it’s in the open sewers, open ditches, it will dry up and evaporate. And so any infection that can be in that is just easily redistributed back into the air and so on. So it was super common for all kinds of illnesses to be recirculated through the communities. So people would die off or die from these infections.

And I guess we used to have population control through illness. And then the population control got away from us by allowing almost everyone to live. And now people in control are inventing ways to try and reduce the population in other ways through illness introduced artificially into the system. How glorious is that, huh? 

So instapot cooking, great. Because instapot is usually just steam. So you’re stewing, braising, steaming, I would say great. The other question, what about air frying? You have eliminated fat and oil, right? But you’re still cooking in high temperature air. So the food itself is going to be exposed to a fairly high temperature. So I’m sure it’s not quite as bad as frying with heated oil. But in general, I would say it’s less healthy than cooking at a lower temperature. It’s the temperature itself that is the issue here. 

So what did I get myself into here? Trying to advocate for what? What am I trying to tell you are the solutions to all of this? Well, we need to become more aware. We need to be questioning everything. We need to be shopping differently. Those of us who wake up need to be buying food that is less toxic. So one, genetically modified is in general not a good idea, even because the genetic modification probably causes these foods to introduce things into the environment that shouldn’t be there. Selective breeding is not quite the same as genetic modification.

In selective breeding, you’re choosing the tomato that’s bigger or redder or tastes better, or some reason like that. With genetic modification, you’re now injecting the tomato with cold water fish genes so that you can grow the tomato essentially by cross pollinating not by selecting the best, but instead by just smashing one thing into another. Mating a dog with a fish kind of thing. It should not be happening. 

The second thing is, most foods that are sold in a box with a barcode or in a bag with a barcode have chemicals in them, some less terrible than others. Some of the preservatives are fairly innocent, others not so much. Read the list. Emulsifiers, preservatives, antifungals. When you ingest these chemicals, they will have an effect on the terrain, on the microbiome, which will slant what’s going on inside your body so you’ll be better off cooking food from scratch. What you want to do is you want to buy foods that have been grown organically without the use of herbicides and pesticides, maybe with a minimal amount of chemical fertilizer. I’m not so sure about that. Fertilizers, and especially natural fertilizers are a good thing because they do improve yield. What we don’t want to have is herbicides and pesticides, because they really affect us in ways that we don’t like. Anyway, growing food using the organic method is better than buying the food that has the GMO herbicide pesticide on it, and then cooking from scratch, or at least watching carefully what is in your food.

For example, with the superfoods we make, we have our own shop and we make these green superfood blends, and we make them from foods that have been either wild crafted as in grown in the wild without farming, or grown organically, or grown in at least a nontoxic manner. And then these foods have been preserved using methods such as freeze drying. Fermentation works really well as a preserving method, and freeze drying is quite reasonable because it retains at least 85% of the nutrients intact. The good thing about dried foods is that you have allowed the enzyme activity to remain. It just goes dormant, and when you put water and heat back on them, as in like moisture when you rehydrate and ingest these foods, the enzyme activity remains intact, and it’s almost as good as having it fresh. 

The other method that works well besides fermentation is, of course, freezing. Frozen food is not exactly as good as new, but pretty darn close because it has all of the nutrients and even the enzymes just slowed down. So I’m advocating for very careful and considerate use of what we ingest. And this goes to everything, right? You start with food, water, chemicals as in cosmetics. What do you use on your body? When you ingest something, swallow it, or whether you put it on your skin only affects the speed of how fast you absorb it.

When I put it inside of me, it absorbs a lot quicker than when I put it on top of me. But whatever I paint my face with will absorb into me. I mean, this is demonstrated with patches like you can buy nicotine patch or cobalamin patch or whatever else patch. All we know is that it absorbs into your body, just slower.

Anyway. Be judicious and careful in what you get, cleaning products and then quality of the air. So air filters are probably a good idea because after all, when we live in a home, it has all manner of volatile organic chemicals that are getting in the air, flooring materials, vinyl or the laminate flooring. There’s plenty of stuff coming off of that, even carpets. I mean, you can find carpets that are either natural fiber or low toxicity, but you need to be asking those questions and you need to be willing to pay the price. 

And of course, many times you don’t get to decide because you’re moving into a home that somebody else built. At least the older homes, they have mostly exhausted or evaporated all of the chemicals because the greatest emission is when this stuff is new, time it declined. 

And then really question all of the medical interventions. The number of lives destroyed with the injections are just… The mainstream press, the mainstream media are suppressing the message. This problem is big, large scale, rampant and increasing, rising. It’s worse than it’s been. And yet, of course, it has become unacceptable to have a voice. It has become unacceptable to question. 

Well, there’s this really cool voice. Keep coming back to it today. But this Robert Kennedy, I don’t know how much exposure he will get. He will probably not get any exposure in the mainstream media, but he has a good chance of getting his message across. It would be an interesting thing to see if he actually did end up winning the presidency. Curious to see. 

Anyway, I think more and more of us have the option of living somewhere where we are not in the food desert, but instead somewhere where food is grown. I know that there’s this tendency to push us into larger and larger cities, into greater and greater concentrations. But maybe, just maybe, it’s possible for the awake ones to be resisting this and just living in a way that’s more ecological. And I guess those of us who are not in a big city independent of commuting, we can certainly do that. All right. What’s your take on global warming? 

So first of all, there are two issues. One is environmental destruction perhaps, or impact on the environment. And the other one is the climate. So we know for a fact that there are multiple effects coming into this. The rotation of the Earth around the Sun, the sun, the tilting of the axis and whatever. There are these cycles that cause either warming or cooling of a specific period. So we could be having warmer summers and colder winters, or vice versa, milder summers and milder winters. And then there is this long range cycle that has to do with climate. And then there is the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The most interesting greenhouse gas is water vapor itself. When you have clouds, they actually trap heat on the surface. But more clouds, they reflect the sunshine. So under a cloud cover you have less heat. So there are these influences of the climate of the cloud cover of the carbon dioxide itself. We have records that show that right now the carbon dioxide level is about 400 parts per million. There were not long ago 700 parts per million, and the climate was colder. So go figure. It’s not necessarily tied directly to carbon dioxide. My great concern is preserving the environment. Not toxifying the planet. Not destroying the nature as such. Not pushing chemicals into waterways, destruction of the fabric of life. It’s really interesting. Like these last two years, we have seen more carbon dioxide come into the air from burning of forests than billions of cars would produce. All of the goodwill, whatever it is that we’re decarbonizing, our economy has been completely obliterated. The difference that we are making by switching from coal burning to something else has been like a 5% difference against 95% of what the volcanoes and what the forest burning is putting in the air.

I think what we’re seeing is the climate becoming more extreme, which means that we have more dramatic winters and more dramatic summers. Warmer air holds more water, which means that storms are likely and there’s more water in the air. Therefore, more water will come down. So when it rains, instead of being a mild, misty rain, it’s going to be now a deluge. So we’re seeing these strange events where more water will come down in one day than you would expect to see in a month or two, which will, of course, overwhelm the environment. We will have flooding events. So what’s more important? I think doing a responsible thing would be not using plastics, because plastics seem to pollute the environment terribly, or at least finding some ways to recycle them, which seems to be difficult. There’s not a whole lot of market for recyclable plastics, but still, focusing on not pushing these things into the environment is probably a good thing. Environmental destruction through pavement, backfills of swamps or wetlands, Maybe a better name for swamp is wetland. It would be wonderful to try and preserve these because they are the natural ways of recycling the organic toxins that come out. There’s the military with their stuff, the HAARP, which is of course, that’s an ionosphere radio, some sort of a thing.

I don’t understand it well enough, but the way I understand it is that it can create massive weather events. And then of course, we have the chemtrails, right? Spreading of chemicals by aircraft into the air. I mean, it is there. They’re doing it. They’re engineering the climate. I don’t know who they are, who put them in charge, who gave them the permission to do that? Is it good? Is it bad? I don’t know. If they didn’t do it. Would we get too hot? Because they’re doing it in a clandestine, unpublished manner. We don’t really know whether it’s helping or not helping and what the full effect is of that. 

Anyway, it’s complicated. Economically, I think that all people or all scientists agree that global warming is happening. Well, there definitely is some climate disruption, no denying that. But the causation of it, I’m not so sure, is the carbon economy. I think we could do much better things for the environment. I think we could do much better things to spend money on, like the amount of money that we as a society are devoting to this decarbonization of the economy as if we directed it, or on more important or more effective things. It would be smarter. Bjorn Lomborg. L-o-m-b-o-r-g. Look him up. He’s quite interesting. Read his stuff. 

Anyway, thank you people, this is Martin Pytela, health coach at Life Enthusiast life-enthusiast.com. Thank you for being here.