[00:00:00] JJ: I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout, sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness Hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven most of all. By my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can, and that’s where you come in.

[00:00:35] JJ: That’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcasts to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness.

[00:00:57] JJ: Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out. 100. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe [email protected] to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self toxins. This is such a huge subject and it can be a super scary subject too, because as you start to dig into it, literally this happened right before we were recording the show.

[00:01:27] JJ: My husband wanted this. Specific type of rice, and I didn’t get it for him. The Instacart order came in, he goes, where is it? I go, well, if you look at the ingredient, it’s got some things in it that I am not gonna buy for you. He goes, oh. And so, you know, as you start to unpack toxins, it feels like you’re like, where can I be?

[00:01:49] JJ: How can I live? Right. And so our guest today, this is a repeat guest on the show. It’s Dr. Aly Cohen, and she is. So logical and a a about how to approach this. She’s a triple board certified doc. She’s a triple board certified rheumatology internal medicine and integrative medicine. She’s an integrative health expert in Princeton, New Jersey, and the author of.

[00:02:14] JJ: Two books for the consumers. We’re gonna be talking about detoxify today, the everyday toxins harming your immune system and how to defend against them. She also has a textbook on the subject, so this is her whole world and she’s so reasonable about how she approaches this. We’re gonna give you a cheat sheet that she’s put together of the things you’re gonna want to throw away right now.

[00:02:36] JJ: Now, here’s the thing. She approaches this not from like get all this stuff out, but really from what? What is gonna make the biggest difference right now in your house, in your life, in your body? And let’s focus on those first. She has a four step process. She walks you through. The four A’s, which we’ll be going through.

[00:02:55] JJ: And she also has some great information online. So I’m gonna put all of that at jj virgin.com/aly a y, and I will be right back with Dr. Aly Cohen.

[00:03:18] JJ: All right, Dr. Aly, you’re back again. Welcome back. Thank

[00:03:24] Dr. Aly Cohen: you for having me.

[00:03:25] JJ: And I think of you as the, the toxin queen. I don’t know if that’s quite the best thing here. Right. But now this is your second book on toxicity. Third. Third. Oh, it’s your, now you’re truly, you’re the the triple toxin queen.

[00:03:39] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah. I have a tech textbook over my right.

[00:03:41] Dr. Aly Cohen: Is it my right shoulder? Right shoulder, right there.

[00:03:44] JJ: Yes.

[00:03:45] Dr. Aly Cohen: And that was the first textbook for Oxford. And then we moved into, now we’re into Consumer books, which is all good.

[00:03:51] JJ: It’s all, it’s very timely because I think people are, they’ve been around, but I think people are becoming very, very, very aware of it.

[00:03:59] JJ: And one of the things that I think is so interesting that you talk about is. I’ve always liked to say that your body is a history book, and I think people look at this big acute toxic load, but that’s not how toxins hit us. Like they hit us as this little bit over and over that just kind of accumulates in our history book.

[00:04:21] JJ: And so you actually say this, you say that that chemicals are actually more dangerous at low doses than high ones, and that really flies in the face of everything that’s out there. And I think it’s how a lot of stuff gets sneaks in. For sure. So like, let’s, let’s talk about this myth and blow through it.

[00:04:40] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah. Well, well first of all, your point about, you know, acute versus chronic heavy loads versus slow insidious exposures are really both interesting. The big ones teach us a lot. Those are the occupational exposures from people who work in migrant farming or in pesticides or in factories with vinyl chloride.

[00:04:56] Dr. Aly Cohen: We learn a lot from those guys. And then you have what really is facing the rest of us mere mortals, which is these. Low level exposures to lots of chemicals that are unregulated in the US for sure. Um, and really they’re small amounts, but they’re, but they’re able to do a lot with the, with the size and, and concentration and power of what they are.

[00:05:20] Dr. Aly Cohen: And then we have mixtures. So it’s not just like we’re ever just exposed to one chemical at one given moment. We got medications, we’ve got chemicals from ex. Plastics, you name it. And so that’s kind of how we, you know, we should be looking at it. They don’t all smack you in the face, right? They don’t all give you a rash.

[00:05:37] Dr. Aly Cohen: They don’t all always, you know, give you something where you’d be alerted to this fact. The fact is, is that they work in very interesting ways that the cellular level, and that is how we, you know, how I address it in the book.

[00:05:52] JJ: Yeah. And that’s to me what makes this so scary because it’s not like I had a son who actually had an acute toxicity issue and nearly died, but for most of us it’s just this little drip.

[00:06:06] JJ: And toxins aren’t studied in combination at low levels that have accumulated over years.

[00:06:13] Dr. Aly Cohen: So Right. Each have their own properties. Like when I talk about, you know, to. Big classes of physicians and other training programs that I’m working on. You know, the idea is that there’s, there’s lots of factors involved.

[00:06:26] Dr. Aly Cohen: I wanna educate people why they should care, right? So you have the type of chemical, what it’s half-life is meaning how long it takes to break down. In a typical system you have, whether it’s a neurotoxin or liver toxin, its function or its damage. So all of these things around the chemical itself, exposure levels, that kind of thing.

[00:06:45] Dr. Aly Cohen: Then you have the host, which is us. Then you have the host, whether or not they have working kidneys, working liver, there’s, you know, they’re exercising, they’re sweating out chemicals, they’re drinking clean water or any water at all. They’re eating certain vegetables and fruits and, and produce that offset.

[00:07:02] Dr. Aly Cohen: So you have the chemical problem and then you have the host factors and all of that makes it very, you know, specific to each person. But what we do know is there’s a lot you can do across all humans and across all chemicals. I.

[00:07:15] JJ: Good, because I wanna talk about what we can do. But first of all, like the things that I think we need to look at is where are these things coming from?

[00:07:23] JJ: What are the biggest offenders? Because I would think that the number one thing is try to avoid the biggest offenders, and then how can you really know what’s going on with you, and then what do you do about it? So let’s dig into the biggest offenders first.

[00:07:38] Dr. Aly Cohen: I look at the biggest offenders are pretty much the ones that have the highest load into the body.

[00:07:44] Dr. Aly Cohen: So when you think about that, you think about food, which we have to eat, and drinking water, which we have to drink ’cause our bodies are made up of what? 85% water? Those are the two. Biggies. And within those, you can start to think of where we get the most in terms of quantity. So for instance, when it comes to food, we think of food chemicals like processed and ultra processed foods.

[00:08:06] Dr. Aly Cohen: Those food additives, there are about 1200 at least, I’m sorry, 12,000 of them. That have been grandfathered in, especially under a certain loophole in the food regulation system of the generally recognized as safe or grass, which, you know, hopefully that’ll, it’s not, yeah, it, it, it really has grandfathered in so many chemicals and none of them have required testing before going into our food.

[00:08:29] Dr. Aly Cohen: But if you switch, even, you know, the quality of your food from say processed or ultra processed to Whole Foods, and then you go one step. Even further and you take away pesticides and or, you know, genetically modified ingredients going with USDA organic whenever you can, that is taking off layers and layers of toxic chemicals out of your exposure on a daily basis.

[00:08:52] Dr. Aly Cohen: When you look at drinking water, again, very high yield, high, you know, changes you can make filtering our water because that too is poorly regulated. Still follows the Safe Drinking Act. Uh, safe drinking, uh, safe Drinking Water Act from 1970, uh, four, which really only covered 91 chemicals back then and still only covers 91 chemicals at all of the.

[00:09:16] Dr. Aly Cohen: Wastewater treatment plants, there’s 160,000 across the US that serve 85% of the population. So, um, for drinking water. So the idea is if you can filter your water when it gets to your home or choose better water from even bottled water choices, um, and how you carry your water, how you carry your food, and what your food quality is, you’re right then and there.

[00:09:37] Dr. Aly Cohen: You’re taking away literally thousands of harmful chemicals to the human body.

[00:09:42] JJ: Yeah. ’cause you look at it and, and as you were talking about this, I was like, okay, I wanna ask you about some specific ones. But then you think about it and you go, well, if there’s a specific thing, let’s say an artificial sweetener or a seed oil.

[00:09:54] JJ: But then it’s really, how does that one interact with other things? Then how does that accumulate in your body? Then what about what else you have going on? And it’s just this, it is so hard to

[00:10:04] Dr. Aly Cohen: unpack,

[00:10:06] JJ: but I do have to ask some specific ones. ’cause Yeah,

[00:10:08] Dr. Aly Cohen: please. I mean, I, you, it’s hard to unpack, but the idea that you’re alluding to is.

[00:10:12] Dr. Aly Cohen: You know, should we be testing and should we be freaking out? Because in fact, what we wanna do is not be a toxicologist, not overwhelm ourselves with the minutia of all these thousands is what do we do no matter what our daily exposure is from whatever products or air quality or food quality we come in contact with.

[00:10:30] Dr. Aly Cohen: That’s really the goal.

[00:10:32] JJ: Yeah. ’cause I mean, the reality is, even if you were to test, like I just did a microplastics test, but, and I’ve done some toxin tests. In the past, but then are they looking at all the different toxins? Like if there’s 12,000 different chemicals, are they looking at everything they need to look at?

[00:10:49] JJ: And you know, so how would you even know? But some basic things. So basic ones like artificial sweeteners, because this is such an argument online and just, to me, it just doesn’t make sense that these would be a good idea.

[00:11:06] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah, and and artificial sweeteners are in fact artificial and really should be thought of as not natural to the human body or even to the evolution of human beings.

[00:11:16] Dr. Aly Cohen: I mean, I bring anthropology in quite a bit to what I talk about because I think we lose sight of the fact that we really have been here for millions of years, 4.5 million years, and it’s really only the last 75 years of human existence. That has brought in around 95,000 chemicals, not just the 12,000 in food.

[00:11:36] Dr. Aly Cohen: So we have to be thinking, you know, if it’s such a short period of time and we’re having so many of these health issues. In terms of chemicals, like food, like, uh, you know, uh, synthetic sugars, we have to be thinking what is natural, what is helpful to the body and what is hurtful to the body. There’s no question that there are chemical components to some of these sweeteners.

[00:11:56] Dr. Aly Cohen: Um, we know they changed the gut microbiome for sure. There’s lots of really great studies. I talk about them in the book. Um, and that. Really since the gut microbiome is the first thing that these foods and food additives do, and they hit the body, they’re going into your belly, your gut, that is the kind of thing where you wanna be thinking, how do I clean this up?

[00:12:16] Dr. Aly Cohen: Because some of them actually turn into formaldehyde. Some of them knock off good bacteria. The, the, you know, the non-pathological. Bugs that protect us and protect that lining. And once you start eroding the gut microbiome with any number of chemicals, and I can think of more like chlorinated drinking water or BPA in canned foods, which is the plastic lining in all of our canned foods or, um, you know, any, any other components of plastics that affect our food quality from storage.

[00:12:45] Dr. Aly Cohen: All of those things are taking a hit on the gut microbiome. And so you have many effects. Cellularly, but you also have that direct, um, you know, microbiome hits and that affects our immune system and, uh, and our health because the gut is so important to that.

[00:12:58] JJ: It’s interesting, there is a very, uh, a new protein bar out and some big names are promoting it and it’s got sucralose in it.

[00:13:07] JJ: Mm. And I’m like, it’s got sucralose in it. And they, they cite the studies that show that diet sodas and, and artificial sweeteners help with weight loss. And I’m like, okay, well if you looked at that one metric. Short term looks three months, but you’re not looking at all the other things. Oh, for sure.

[00:13:26] JJ: Before that one thing, I mean, come on. You

[00:13:28] Dr. Aly Cohen: frame a lot around product sales for sure. I mean, you know, you have xlo xylitol, which are the alcohol sugars. You have sucralose, you even have regular sugar that could be broken up. You know, glucose, fructose, all of those breakdown products. Look, it’s better not to have any sugar, and I’ll tell you it’s a real problem ’cause I love sugar.

[00:13:44] Dr. Aly Cohen: But if you’re going to have sugar, not only should you consider. That are something more along the lines of something that’s less processed, less synthetic. But then again, thinking about that USDA organic, uh, designation because it does actually matter in the food system. I will say that it’s not the only thing, but it certainly is the most.

[00:14:03] Dr. Aly Cohen: Important thing when it comes to reducing pesticides and other, um, you know, uh, chemicals within our food system. We don’t have much in the way of regulation. Let’s be clear. We have the FDA for drugs and then we have USDA organic for food. There’s nothing else. I mean, even the Safe Drinking Water Act, I think is worthless pretty much.

[00:14:21] Dr. Aly Cohen: Wow. So, um, you know, that says a lot that we don’t have enough to protect our water systems from being, you know, pretty toxic.

[00:14:30] JJ: And as far as the USDA organic. Is it just that it has to be grown in a place with no PEs, like no pesticides, that types of things used. However, if it’s next door to a farm that is.

[00:14:46] JJ: I mean, that’s what, that’s, I’m still gonna always choose organic whenever possible, right? However, I always look at that and go, gosh, what I really wanna know is this, this next door to a, to a farm that’s not organic, because there’s no way that. The water isn’t getting over into the soil. Like then seeds are blowing and all the stuff.

[00:15:07] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah, for sure. I mean, and a lot of people do raised beds, so they can control that process, you know, but that’s, you know, in terms of big farms, it’s not as easy to do raised beds where you can separate soil. But soil is definitely part of the USDA criteria. It took 10 years to come up. You know, it was from the 1990s to 2000, I think it took 10 years to get USDA organic designation into, um, you know, the law books of the United States Food Industry.

[00:15:32] Dr. Aly Cohen: And, you know, so I, I think we, it’s now been 20 years and it does have a little bit of a lift. I mean, people have to pay money into organic farming to get that designation. There’s yearly, um, oversight and you know, it, it is a lift. Um, there are people that can certainly do non-organic produce, um, and use baking soda, and I have all of those do it yourself cleaners, you know, like vinegar and water.

[00:15:56] Dr. Aly Cohen: A combination is wonderful. Um, baking soda can do it. USDA organic frozens are remarkable in the sense that they have such nutritional, um, you know, uh, content because they’re flash frozen and they also don’t have pesticides and genetic, but they’re

[00:16:11] JJ: in plastic bags. Any issues with that?

[00:16:14] Dr. Aly Cohen: Oh, certainly issues.

[00:16:15] Dr. Aly Cohen: But I, you know, here’s the thing. My whole world is about sharing with people. As I sit here with colored hair and my kids are playing lacrosse on a toxic, you know, lacrosse turf. Well,

[00:16:25] JJ: that’s the reality. I love that. I mean it because that is the real, like, the reality is, okay, I got my nails done and I’ve got.

[00:16:31] JJ: There’s no

[00:16:32] Dr. Aly Cohen: perfection here. It’s about, it’s, I’m, I’m a realist, not a purist. And the way I like to teach and the light and write and share with people is that, listen, maybe it’s my own excuse to not being perfect, which I’ll never be, and no one will be in this topic. The idea is that you do the best you can with what we have available.

[00:16:51] Dr. Aly Cohen: And you suss out where are the tricks, where are the hacks that make the most sense? And that took 15 years for me to put together for this book so that people can really be savvy about what they put in on and around their bodies. And also as the four, A’s you know, I have the four A’s the first A is assess.

[00:17:10] Dr. Aly Cohen: The second is, um, avoid and swap, which makes sense. The third is adding in nutrition and things that offset harm. Um, sweating, sauna, exercise, stress reduction, um, cruciferous vegetables and detoxifying support. And then the fourth, a believe it or not, is allow, and that’s what we’re talking about. It’s allowing life to happen.

[00:17:32] Dr. Aly Cohen: It’s birthday parties travel, it’s hair, it’s nails if you want, but thinking about where else you wanna make. Reductions in terms of exposures in a reasonable way.

[00:17:42] JJ: So you mentioned BPA and you said, now I know there’s the BPA free cans. Are they really BPA free?

[00:17:51] Dr. Aly Cohen: Great question. You teed up a great answer.

[00:17:53] Dr. Aly Cohen: So I, you know, the, here’s the thing. BPA is one of only, I would say, about a dozen chemicals that have ever in any way, shape or form been taken off the market in some way. In the US we’ve had DDT, we’ve had PCBs, I’m just naming some his. Historical chemicals that have been taken out some parts of asbestos.

[00:18:13] Dr. Aly Cohen: But BPA, um, was really bisphenol a is a class of chemicals called bisphenols. They have a lot of, you know, uh, effect in, in plastics. They really do make plastics hard, whereas phthalates tend, as a, as a class, tend to make things squishy plastic. Right. But BPA was taken out of. Baby bottles. Plastic baby bottles.

[00:18:33] Dr. Aly Cohen: In 2012, um, actually with the help of my co-author for the last two books, Dr. F Fred Baum Sa Remarkable guy and his colleagues and him really discovered how BPA works, it works to mimic estrogens at very, very low. Amounts. Parts per million parts per billion parts per trillion. And you know, the thing is, is that it was such a lift to get that out of plastic baby bottles, which by the way, if they’re harmful enough to do that, we should be really considering other components of our health, of our food system, meaning canned foods.

[00:19:06] Dr. Aly Cohen: But it was such an industry issue. It was never taken out from canned foods, um, and other areas where BPA is utilized. Um, so there’s also, you know, when it says BPA free, it’s often a regrettable substitution is what it’s now called, which is B-P-S-B-P-S-I-P. And there’s dozens of bi bisphenols that have taken the place of BPA, um, to do a lot of the same function, but have turned out to be just as harmful on studies like BPS, for instance, in terms of its.

[00:19:37] Dr. Aly Cohen: Comparison to BPA. So the answer, stick to glass and stainless steel, try to swap out from canned foods. There’s lots of different options to get away from BPA and it’s, it’s substitutions.

[00:19:48] JJ: I know we have been carefully swapping everything in our kitchen and it was funny today, we had a Instacart order come in and Tim’s my husband, was like, I wanted that other rice.

[00:19:59] JJ: I go, honey, I read the rice ingredients and there were these seed oils that were in there with some other suspect stuff. So you. No. He’s like, oh. And so I know seed oils have been just, it’s like this back and forth fight online. Yeah. I had Dr. Kate Shanahan on who explained that it was the pro, like for me, I was looking at going, well, is it, ’cause we’re getting too many Omega six, if she goes, that’s not the issue.

[00:20:24] JJ: Uh, what’s your thought on those?

[00:20:27] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah, I know the argument is pretty, pretty, um, pervasive, but you know, it is a lot of the manufacturing, if you understand how food is manufactured and, and look, most people aren’t growing their own food. Not, not even because they don’t have the land or the time or the interest, but it’s just, it’s just not what modern humans are capable of doing in, in the us.

[00:20:45] Dr. Aly Cohen: Usually, um, I applaud people who can pull it off. I think it’s great to have your own garden and to really make, and, you know, prioritize this. Um, but manufacturing chemicals are real. I mean, we saw this in dark chocolate. One of my favorite topics and my favorite, oh God,

[00:20:59] JJ: don’t, don’t. Don’t do it with dark chocolate with

[00:21:02] Dr. Aly Cohen: me.

[00:21:02] Dr. Aly Cohen: No, but I wanna give people, I wanna give people information that’s positive. So, I mean,

[00:21:06] JJ: I’m, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. This is, oh, okay. Okay. We’re in the avoid and swap now. So this is, if we could do the biggest needle movers of avoid and Swap and as long as we have a swap for dark chocolate. Yeah. Yeah, we’re gonna, yeah, we’ll

[00:21:17] Dr. Aly Cohen: look for quality.

[00:21:18] Dr. Aly Cohen: But when it comes to manufacturing, it turns out that the smaller manufacturers actually tested lower when it comes to contaminants like heavy metals. So these smaller operations, if you can find them, if you research, are really doing really great work.

[00:21:31] JJ: Do you have a couple names you love?

[00:21:32] Dr. Aly Cohen: Um, I don’t have off the top of my head, but I also don’t share brands in terms of the academic work.

[00:21:38] Dr. Aly Cohen: Um hmm. But, but consumer Reports, I’ll give you a heads up. Consumer Reports did a great study on this, um, I think it was a year or two years ago. Um, if you look up Consumer Reports chocolate, it’s actually, you don’t have to get a subscription. And it’s just a really great study that they did looking at a bunch of chocolate companies and what they found, um.

[00:21:54] Dr. Aly Cohen: But you know, the high yield stuff is going to be things that are in food packaging by volume is like BPA and plastic containers never microwave and plastic. I think a lot of people already get that already, not just for the chemicals that are actually interested in going into the food, which is, you know, much more likely if there’s fatty foods because many of these chemicals, um, that I talk about in the book, they are lipophilic.

[00:22:17] Dr. Aly Cohen: They like fat. By the way, they like fat tissue, they like breast tissue. So I think we should be thinking along those lines as well. Um, that when you reduce these chemicals, it’s not just to make you feel better. And I talk about fatigue and autoimmune and rheumatoid and all that, but also, you know, certain other things we should be thinking of long term like cardiovascular disease and cancers.

[00:22:37] Dr. Aly Cohen: Of course,

[00:22:38] JJ: you are one of the first people that I heard say this, and it’s been something that to me is so. Clear and obvious, but no one talks about it is, and I think especially in the age of Ozempic, it’s very important is, you just mentioned that toxins love, fat. And I remember looking at something from NHANES where they were looking at diabetes and obesity because everybody thought, oh, if you’ve got more fat, you’re more likely to have DBE diabetes.

[00:23:06] JJ: But they’re like, it wasn’t that. It was the toxins in the fat creating the diabetes and, and the big issue of, okay, if you’re starting to. To free up fat in the body. What you’re really doing is freeing up toxins, and if you are not offloading those toxins, this could be more problematic. So what do you say about that?

[00:23:27] JJ: Do you have advice for people as they’re starting to use, do things to help them lose body fat, to help them get rid of the toxins? Do you think this should be a part of these? Fat loss programs.

[00:23:38] Dr. Aly Cohen: Oh, I think it’s a wonderful thing to mention because, you know, we have as human beings this remarkable ability to store problems, right?

[00:23:45] Dr. Aly Cohen: We store, you know, for instance, mercury loves to live in muscle, um, lead likes to live in bone, which is why when I was hearing all about bone broth, I was very concerned because we boil bone and we have to think about what’s released when we, we boil bone.

[00:23:59] JJ: Ooh, hold. Have they been testing bone broth? To see if some

[00:24:03] Dr. Aly Cohen: companies do.

[00:24:04] Dr. Aly Cohen: Um, as far as I’m aware, some companies do, but again, it’s a moving market. But I think when people are aware, you know, they might think about the quality of their bone broth a little more deeply because of the way it’s processed. Um, but when it comes to, you know, it’s interesting, many of these chemicals, as I’ve written about in other books and also in this, you know, we don’t think of chemicals as part of the weight.

[00:24:24] Dr. Aly Cohen: Problem, the weight loss issue or the inability to lose weight problem. We know that certain chemicals, um, have the ability they call an obesogens, not only to make fat cells larger, but to make stem cells that come out of our bones, our long bones turn into fat cells, so we have a problem from that perspective making us heavy or keeping us from losing weight.

[00:24:46] Dr. Aly Cohen: And then we have. Like you said, we have bo parts of our bodies that are storing some of these toxic chemicals to actually protect us in many ways. You could argue to sequester them, but I think when you start to detoxify, as my book says, but really thinking about how do we just. Start now to move out of the habits that feed this chemicals continuously in our body.

[00:25:10] Dr. Aly Cohen: That’s when you’re gonna start having the bigger gains, which is getting them out of your body to begin with, and trying not to let them back in. And I think that’s kind of like the way to think about it. It’s not to worry about what’s released when you lose weight. It’s how to get them outta your system.

[00:25:25] Dr. Aly Cohen: To begin with and then keep that positive process going.

[00:25:29] JJ: Okay. Before we get to that piece, I just wanna address one other one and it came up the other day, someone pinged me on social about replacing their Lululemons, and I’m like, oh yeah. Oh boy. Um, you know, ’cause we think. Obviously we’ve all thought about deodorant.

[00:25:44] JJ: ’cause you sh you, you know, shave your underarms and then put on deodorant. So you’re like, okay, what am I putting on, um, and makeup and all of these skincare products. But what about clothing?

[00:25:57] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. So out of, and, and it’s, it kind of is interesting how people prioritize sort of one thing that hits the, the, the media versus something else.

[00:26:06] Dr. Aly Cohen: I mean, these are really sexy topics, you know? Um, you know, black, you know, plastic, uh, food utensils was up there for a while. Now we have microplastics. They’re all pretty worrisome and. To some degree, and there is science behind many of these headlines, but what I would like people to think about instead of overwhelm yourself with, with smaller, uh, ticket items, go for big ticket items first and make this, as you said, you were tiptoeing through changes.

[00:26:32] Dr. Aly Cohen: I think you mentioned with Tim, you were like, trying to say that over time, you’re, that’s exactly what we should all be thinking about. Do this over time in a way that sticks. It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. It’s a way of looking through, you know, the world around you and what hits your body in, on and around it, and working that way through.

[00:26:52] Dr. Aly Cohen: Now to be honest, dermal exposure dermal. Absorption is what? Lululemon and all these, you know, PFAS chemicals that make it, you know, sweat proof. That’s, those are the kind of chemicals that are added to these fibers, um, for textiles is what we’re talking about. But the idea is that skin, although it is incredibly absorbent, we, we think about that with cosmetics.

[00:27:15] Dr. Aly Cohen: You can do things at the same time. You can change out when your next pair gets old and you wanna switch out to new cleaner, maybe cotton based USDA car. You know, there’s plenty of different, different choices. There’s even testing companies that are testing for these clothes options, but you can also be doing a hundred other things to where your energy.

[00:27:35] Dr. Aly Cohen: It doesn’t have to be focused on just one item because again, I get my hair colored, I get this, I go to that. You know, you wanna do things with the big ticket items, food, water, cosmetics, feminine care products. I often tell women, especially women who have. Young people in their lives that tampons and feminine care products going, you know, intravaginal absorption is something we don’t often think about, but is something as women we really should be thinking about in terms of the repetitive nature of, of our menstrual periods and our products.

[00:28:05] JJ: Okay, so the biggies, this makes me happy ’cause I’m like, oh my gosh, my like Lulu collection, come on. The biggies would be food, water, and what we put on our body. That’s like in more skincare, not necessarily clothing as much.

[00:28:21] Dr. Aly Cohen: For sure. Yeah, and also the things I call these are sort of like, you know, high yield light, but not really light is really.

[00:28:28] Dr. Aly Cohen: The junk we bring into our homes that are for air fresheners, candles, you know, stuff that we make a choice at the store, which we can do better as, you know, there’s plenty of resources, but we can do better on what we even bring in if we need to bring in anything at all when it comes to the air that we breathe.

[00:28:44] Dr. Aly Cohen: And I think those are much lower, um, you know, lifts when it comes to making decisions. Either not buying them to begin with or just simply going with things that don’t have synthetic chemicals to, uh, you know, with fragrance and perfume or.

[00:28:57] JJ: Those are so gross. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, ugh, God, it’s just like when you go get your car washed and they want to use those.

[00:29:03] JJ: Those air freshers, I’m like, oh, no. Trapped.

[00:29:06] Dr. Aly Cohen: Trapped, right. Hotels. I walk into hotels. I just was in visiting, uh, you know, Los Angeles. My hotel had so much spraying of perfumes in the lobby, and it was remarkable. I couldn’t even breathe. I mean, and when you’ve done this long enough where you try to Yeah.

[00:29:22] Dr. Aly Cohen: Long enough it becomes even more sensitive to you. You know? So,

[00:29:26] JJ: you know, it was amazing. We, we went to, um, Iceland back before the pandemic, and I remember walking into this hotel. It was this most amazing hotel called the Retreat Hotel built into the Blue Lagoon with this incredible spot. I mean, it’s one of my top 10 life experiences and we are just gonna spend the night and we walk in and I go this place, I mean it, they.

[00:29:48] JJ: Everything was organic.

[00:29:50] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah.

[00:29:50] JJ: Everything. And you just, I was like, I never wanna leave here. I feel absolutely Fanta, you realize, and especially hotels are so problematic. There’s one hotel chain, I’m not gonna blow ’em up here, but you immediately walk in and you’re like, we’ve had to stop having events there because they use so much perfume that our, our members are like, we can’t be here.

[00:30:10] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah. And it is, it has become such an issue that even in California, you know, back in the day we used to have ma uh, magazines that you would open up and have perfume back when I was growing up.

[00:30:20] JJ: Oh yeah, I remember those.

[00:30:21] Dr. Aly Cohen: Do that anymore. And in California, under the American Disabilities Act, you can’t actually wear, wear perfume in certain workplaces because you could be sued because it’s such a disruption to people’s senses.

[00:30:31] Dr. Aly Cohen: So, you know, we know that that smell is becoming a lot more of an issue. Air quality is getting a lot of attention, not just from the fires in la, but I mean it’s really making a lot of noise in terms of particulate matter and how much that affects human health for sure. Starting with your home, starting with your workplace, like here I have, yeah.

[00:30:52] Dr. Aly Cohen: My cleaning guy, um, he came in and he gets all my cleaning stuff. I buy it so that I know what he’s spraying and using. He doesn’t mind and he’s lovely. And the idea is that the more you can control in the worlds that you walk through, that’s great. And what you can control, you can’t control. And you, you know, you, you less worry about that and more about, you know, what you can do.

[00:31:14] JJ: Well, let’s talk about some of the things we can add, add in, since we look at the big, the big ones that you swap out. And we have been doing it that way. We’re like, God, a couple years ago I was actually drinking from plastic water bottles. Now I look at that go. I would never drink from a plastic water bottle.

[00:31:32] JJ: You know, I’d have to be, it would have to be either I’m going to drop from dehydration or drink this plastic water bottle. We just never do it. Um, what are some of the things that we should be adding in?

[00:31:43] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah, for sure. So, so adding in is, there’s a lots of things that we wanna start with. First, we wanna start with adding in, as I mentioned, clean water and clean food, because those are fuel and they also detoxify us.

[00:31:57] Dr. Aly Cohen: If we have working kidneys and liver and skin and sweat and lymphatic system, we’re adding in the water. That helps those detoxified better. We’re adding in the food, which by the way, there’s even more nutritious components to, to certain foods that offset chemical. Epigenetic changes, so we know there’s actually food as medicine.

[00:32:17] Dr. Aly Cohen: Ideas like, um, you know, Omega-3 fatty acids when they’re clean and done well, when you have, you know, green leafy vegetables, folic acid benign, when you have quercetin vitamin C, um, when you’re sufficient with iron and vitamin C, like you’re just nutritionally sufficient as I call it in the book, you’re actually better able to handle the world around you that you may not be able to control.

[00:32:39] Dr. Aly Cohen: So you’re adding in the things that at the cellular level make our bodies work better, and even our. Organs work better. Um, when you add in sweat and exercise movement, um, when you add in even weights and muscle, you, you’re churning up a lot of the harmful things that are getting through your bloodstream and into your, into your organs and your muscles.

[00:33:01] Dr. Aly Cohen: So, you know, exercise, sweat, sauna. If you’re not able, in my rheumatology world, you’re not able to maybe bear weight and go for a run, then you would have chair exercises utilized. You know, conventional sauna is what I recommend. Um, stress reduction changes the pH of the gut. The gut would work better, be better immunologically if we can reduce stress in some ways.

[00:33:24] Dr. Aly Cohen: So you’re adding in and sleep, gosh, sleep is so important to the glymphatic system. So, I mean, that’s a lot of stuff. I don’t wanna overload you or your audience, but I mean, the idea is that we have so many options, not just to take away the triggers. For the immune system and the, you know, all the immune disrupting chemicals, but we have this add that’s the other part of this equation that really gets the job done too.

[00:33:48] JJ: Well, I love that you talk diet, exercise, ’cause however, the one I would like to dig into a little bit is sauna and your opinion between, ’cause we actually have both at the house, we have a hot sauna, it gets to 180. I just saw that Costco now has this one that you can put outside this big, big old. It would be like a shack.

[00:34:11] JJ: And I’m like, maybe we need that. But, and then we have a sunlight and, uh, near, medium and far infrared sauna. And it of course doesn’t get as hot. But the argument is, it penetrates deeper. I don’t know. I’m not a sauna expert. So what’s your, what are your opinions on saunas? What kind of protocol should someone be on for it?

[00:34:31] JJ: ’cause I think this is one of the most important things we can be doing.

[00:34:35] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah, I think saunas are great. I, I worry, you know, and when you dig in deeper, I certainly worry a little bit about infrared saunas to some degree. ’cause you can’t always control for the manufacturing and the makers of it. But what concerned me, and I wrote about it in the textbook a few years back, is that I read some studies about the penetration of some of this infrared, um, you know, uh, energy that goes deeper than the outer layer of the skin, which means I worry about.

[00:34:59] Dr. Aly Cohen: Skin cancers. I, as someone who has had multiple skin cancers in the past, wouldn’t necessarily know exactly how to vet out the manufacturer. You can certainly educate yourself, and again, it’s not to scare everyone away ’cause we do have some actually interesting studies on infrared. Sauna helping with rheumatologic conditions like renos and rheumatoid and Sjogren’s syndrome.

[00:35:19] Dr. Aly Cohen: They were just very short studies and it was almost like a hug. People felt very much warmed up in a hug, which I think you can recreate from other aspects, you know, even from just a warm conventional sauna or hands-on. Healing techniques. But the idea was that, you know, I, I just, I choose to go more with the conventional sweating mechanisms.

[00:35:40] Dr. Aly Cohen: ’cause sweating is really where you’re removing some of those chemicals you’re exposed to, to the skin surface where you can wash them off with clean water, hopefully. But, um, so. That’s where I lie. I like to do old fashioned conventional. I also want people to think about the kinds, if they’re going to go to a sauna or have a gym, which is great ’cause it’s big.

[00:36:01] Dr. Aly Cohen: I worry about, as you mentioned, some of these saunas where the wood is, um, created with, um, certain aspect of, um, cyanide and certain, there’s certain components of wood treatment that we worried about with playgrounds. With kids. Mm-hmm. But we can also think about that in terms of, you know, conventional, um, industrial saunas that you’d have to do your research on.

[00:36:24] Dr. Aly Cohen: We had one made in my house, which was tiny. I mean, it’s the size of my desk, but it took like, you know, whatever, 15 years to finally do it. Um, and it was made with nails instead of glue. It was made with untreated wood and it was made without EMF lighting and radiation because I thought. It was sort of counterintuitive if we didn’t kind of get that right.

[00:36:44] Dr. Aly Cohen: And we just asked a local, um, you know, uh, carpenter to put it together and it was a project, but it was fun and it was really educational. So, you know, there’s all different ways to do it. Just you might wanna be thoughtful about either making them or even buying them.

[00:36:59] JJ: Well, I’ve been thinking, so we have the fast heat one and I went to get in it one day after my husband was in it, and it was like, I was like, oh, gross.

[00:37:07] JJ: You know, it’s, it’s a fabric. One person thing and I’m like, I can’t get in this because now you have got all your G in here and this couldn’t possibly, I was like, honey, you gotta clean this. This couldn’t possibly be good ’cause you’re sweating out all this stuff. Then you, yeah, like there’s that problem too.

[00:37:24] JJ: Yeah. Uh, but you did mention EMFs, so yeah. Would like to address those as well because you are so reasonable, you know, uh, the challenge online is that. People get crazy about this. I like how reasonable and logical, and it’s like you are about walking through all of these things so people don’t. Get crazy and then they just give up.

[00:37:46] JJ: ’cause they can’t live their life.

[00:37:48] Dr. Aly Cohen: For sure. And I think that, that, that’s all about health coaching, right? You know, that a lot of people listening to, you know, that you have to meet people where they’re at. But I’m a realist in the sense that I don’t think there’s such a thing as perfection. Um, I just talked to, you know, what is it?

[00:38:02] Dr. Aly Cohen: 700 kids in my kids’ high school the other day, and I thought. What do I want these kids to come away with? I want them to come away with the idea of having agency over their body and to really do this as a journey like everyone’s doing. ’cause it is so overwhelming. But also be careful of the, the quick sell that we see on TikTok and all the marketing.

[00:38:23] Dr. Aly Cohen: Uh, it’s just, it’s overwhelming and I think if we just sat back and did the simplest things, we’d be far more effective in making sure that our exposures are lower and our health risks. Are improved. Then if we did things that were quick and, and had all these like shakes and things that are just like, you know, um.

[00:38:42] Dr. Aly Cohen: Anyway, I, you know, the idea is I like to be reasonable because I think that’s the only way to do things in a way that’s gonna be successful. And as you said, people get overwhelmed very quickly. I’m overwhelmed and I’ve been doing this 15 years, but I at least was able to spit it out into a book that I thought made the most sense in terms of the big picture.

[00:39:02] Dr. Aly Cohen: Um, it even has a 21 day plan, which is not to say you’re all gonna be without chemicals in 21 days, it’s saying. Do this Day one, do this day two. I mean, you don’t even have to put thought into it. You, you’ve read what you need to know. Here’s how you get started. And I think that’s what handholding people really need.

[00:39:20] Dr. Aly Cohen: At least I would’ve liked it.

[00:39:21] JJ: Yeah. And I think, I like the way you just framed the 21 days, these. These, like, you’re gonna do a seven day juice cleanse and be done. I’m like, what? You know, first of all, it’s not gonna get rid of the toxins, and second of all, you’re bombarded with toxins every day. You’re never done.

[00:39:35] JJ: Right. So that doesn’t make sense. But I love where you can take some focus time to just go, okay. Now I can just focus on one thing at a time and make some shifts. Yeah. That become consistent and permanent, which is really what we wanna see. Right. That’s, that’s where we make a difference. But you know, most of us aren’t gonna go through our house.

[00:39:55] JJ: I. And throw everything out, it’s, we need for that. Well, and

[00:39:59] Dr. Aly Cohen: I them too. Like it took me years to, even though I knew my couch had flame retardant chemicals, that’s a pretty expensive item. And it took a few good years with some expensive kids to decide when that was gonna be replaced. You know, you said your nails, you know, when I go to get nails done, which I like to do on occasion, um.

[00:40:16] Dr. Aly Cohen: I make sure that my base coat is A one on EWG or Healthy Living, or Clear Ya or Yuca or Think Dirty some of the wonderful apps that we have for free available to us to look these up. Why? Because whatever we put on our skin or our nail is gonna be the most important layer. So that’s just one more level.

[00:40:35] Dr. Aly Cohen: I bring it with me, you know? Thinking about how you walk through life really just makes, especially with habits that you enjoy. Tea and coffee, I use, you know, glass or, or porcelain. I use organic filtered water. I think about organic cream and sugar, the habits, the things you do the most. I. Put time into thinking about cleaning those up a little bit at a time.

[00:40:55] JJ: I love that. And I know you have a gift that we’re gonna put at jj virgin.com/aly a LY. And that is the household items you should throw away now. So like what’s the most important, I do have to ask you about that. ’cause you mentioned coffee and I went down this rabbit hole ’cause I saw Dr. Peter Attia had found the coffee maker that didn’t have plastic.

[00:41:17] JJ: And I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t even. Think of that piece of the thing, and it really is. It’s the things you do all the time. Yeah. That are the most important. So is that, ’cause we still have the very expensive, uh, coffee makers that I’m like, oh, my husband has

[00:41:34] Dr. Aly Cohen: one. You know, he, but he, he’s been going on and off between French presses.

[00:41:38] Dr. Aly Cohen: Every time he gets panicked, he starts doing, I

[00:41:40] JJ: just do not like the French, like French press. I have to drink it immediately. And then it’s, it’s, I’m a super taster and it’s too bitter. And then, but we have these. Two very expensive. We have a very expensive espresso make or another. And I was like, oh shoot.

[00:41:53] JJ: Then I saw the one, that

[00:41:54] Dr. Aly Cohen: perfect system and even a reverse osmosis, which is the water filter type. I like people to really consider ’cause it’s the most aggressive mechanism for cleaning water we have as consumers. Um, and very reasonable price points. Now I followed that. Um, any filtration is good filtration, but it’s not as good as reverse osmosis, which can do the most.

[00:42:14] Dr. Aly Cohen: But even that has plastic components to it. Yes. At least the one I’ve been using. So, so there’s never gonna be a perfect system. What we wanna think about is, does that ro filter get hot or cold at high temperatures, or is that pitcher in the high heat or ’cause heat and scratching is what makes, for instance, Tupperware become opaque from being clear when you buy it.

[00:42:34] Dr. Aly Cohen: Oh boy. It’s showing you that the material is a matrix that is, is, um, pliable and, and will leach into our food and water that it’s. That it’s carrying. So the idea is that if you don’t have extremes in temperature, um, it’s more likely that that plastic’s gonna stay more stable in general.

[00:42:52] JJ: Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, one of the first things we did obviously was replace all of our Tupperware, but then of course everything is plastic tops.

[00:43:00] JJ: But it’s like.

[00:43:02] Dr. Aly Cohen: Then, and then takeout food. I mean, everywhere you go is single serve plastics. Right, right, right. So, you know, there’s, there’s only in traveling, I mean, I, I come home from traveling and I’m like, I’m like, you know, ready to just purge. Right. I just fit

[00:43:15] JJ: in my sauna. I literally come home when I’m home.

[00:43:17] JJ: I’m in my sauna every single day. So I’m like, gosh. Get this out. It takes a

[00:43:21] Dr. Aly Cohen: week. It makes like a week for me to feel clean again. But you know, look, not everyone has the luxury of coming back to some environment like that. They might be living that life as a traveler. I talk about one of my patients in the book who’s a, who’s a pilot, and I.

[00:43:35] Dr. Aly Cohen: You know, he’s constantly living out of hotels, and yet, you know, we figured out a way to lower his plastic intake and increase his food quality and to make sure that he had more preparation involved that wasn’t over the top, and he was able to lower his chemical load, and he was able to feel better and actually lost a lot of weight.

[00:43:54] Dr. Aly Cohen: So there’s, there’s reasonable hacks even mm-hmm. With mm-hmm. Lifestyle, you just have to be a little bit more attuned to preparation.

[00:44:02] JJ: Well, I would love, I keep saying, I’m gonna let you go, but just give us a couple, just a couple travel hacks that could be good. Um, I mean, obviously one that I’ve now taken is taken a.

[00:44:14] JJ: Really great bottle with me. Yeah. A safe bottle with me for water, for coffee, for all of that. What else are a couple of them?

[00:44:22] Dr. Aly Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, stainless steel bottles kind of like this. One of the things I lost, I, I learned the hard way is that when you go to the security and it’s filled with WA liquid, they will actually steal your, take your bottle unless you empty it before you go through security.

[00:44:37] Dr. Aly Cohen: So that can be pricey and I’ve learned that. Mm-hmm. When I was in a rush and I couldn’t run back to empty it. Um, but here’s some of the hacks that I like to think about. So, for instance, um, they make, there’s bottles that are made with stainless steel that are three gallons. So for instance, you know, traveling to tournaments like we just did with my kids, or, um, any number of card trips you take, fill it up at home where you have the greatest amount of control over your water.

[00:45:02] Dr. Aly Cohen: Your quality, right? If you have a system at home, ro filters are 2 75. You can get ’em under your sink, on top of your counter. Plumbers are cheap. It’s, it’s honestly, something that I recommend is, is, is one of the highest deals thing you could do. ’cause then you’re filling up at home to take it with you with glass, stainless steel, or even a big container when you’re traveling in the airport.

[00:45:22] Dr. Aly Cohen: And I actually, you know, take videos of this all the time. You’re, say you’re, you know, left your bottle at home and you need plastic bottles to drink water and you can’t find any in glass. Look at the word ingredients on these plastic water bottles, because no one thinks that, that there’s an ingredients label, but it tells you how that water was cleaned before it was put into that package.

[00:45:43] Dr. Aly Cohen: So when it says distilled versus, you know, say, cleaned by reverse osmosis, I choose reverses osmosis. It’s not necessarily gonna cut down on your microplastics, but it certainly will cut down on some of the water quality issues that where the source was. Um, when I travel, I use this, my container for hot tea in the morning, or coffee in the hotels.

[00:46:04] Dr. Aly Cohen: Um, I often will bring water from, you know, uh, CVS or Walgreens or Whole Foods. Anywhere I can get my local hands on better choices of water, I will usually buy it. And bring it to, um, my hotel room. Um, glass or

[00:46:19] JJ: plastic?

[00:46:20] Dr. Aly Cohen: Well, I look for glass always, but that’s like, you know, uh, endangered species. In fact, I, I take videos of restaurants where they still serve glass and I’m like.

[00:46:30] Dr. Aly Cohen: Crying like I’m in tears at the restaurant. ’cause I can’t believe they’ve actually been able to do that. So, you know, I think we have to just, um, you know, manage our expectations. Um, don’t jump off the ledge here when it comes to having a particularly dirty couple of days, weeks, or whatever, that there’s always a chance to do better.

[00:46:49] Dr. Aly Cohen: We can always right the wrong by just doing better. And in fact, it certainly plays out when it comes to blood and urine testing. When this is done, we can see that when we change behaviors. The studies show organic foods less plastics. The studies show that behavior changes matter, product choices matter, and then that subsequently is going to change your risk for diseases, especially in my world, immune disorders.

[00:47:14] Dr. Aly Cohen: But really all, all diseases are really interconnected with the immune system. So you know, you change your destiny when you change your choices and you change your lifestyle for sure when it comes to health.

[00:47:25] JJ: Fantastic. Okay. Again, I’m gonna put your, um, all your information, your social handles, your books, your podcast, and also that, that sheet of all the [email protected] slash aly a y and detoxify is available everywhere.

[00:47:43] JJ: When? When’s it out? What’s the official date?

[00:47:45] Dr. Aly Cohen: May 6th and it’s available now for pre-order. Okay. But May 6th, the is my birthday, so

[00:47:51] JJ: Oh, wow. It’s really your birthday. No

[00:47:53] Dr. Aly Cohen: birthday of the book.

[00:47:55] JJ: Okay. I was like, wow. My son’s birthday is May 9th.

[00:47:58] Dr. Aly Cohen: This book? Yeah.

[00:47:59] JJ: Yeah. Okay. Yes. It’s the book birthday. I think of books like that too.

[00:48:03] JJ: It really is. Like for giving birth. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well thank you so much for doing all of this. This is, uh, quite an endeavor and I appreciate all of the amazing information you’ve shared.

[00:48:15] Dr. Aly Cohen: Thank you. And I also have courses if people ever wanna go to the smart human.com. The smart. Cool.

[00:48:20] JJ: We’ll link that too.

[00:48:21] JJ: So what are the courses real quick?

[00:48:23] Dr. Aly Cohen: So they’re tiny, they’re small, but they’re easy to chew off, you know, to bite off. They’re one’s on pesticides, one’s on EMF radiation if you wanna dive into that topic. Um, I think I have an integrative rheumatology talk. I do one for pharmacists ’cause I’m trying to hit all demographics with this information.

[00:48:38] Dr. Aly Cohen: Um, but I’ll be loading up more as I go, so hopefully people will check it out. Heavy metals, I. Another one. Yeah.

[00:48:44] JJ: Awesome. Thank you. Perfect. We’ll put all that the show notes. So again, jj virgin.com/aly and we will put everything there including the courses. Awesome.

[00:48:54] Dr. Aly Cohen: Thanks jj. I really appreciate you having me on and thanks to your community for, for listening.

[00:49:00] JJ: Alright. I wanna talk about some action items and we have been. Detoxifying. Now, I have been focused on toxins for years. However, I will tell you that like, if you’re not actively thinking about it, you don’t realize all the places they can sneak into your life. And so I’m, I’m on an active detoxifying journey, so I’m gonna put some of the things that I love the most into the show notes as well.

[00:49:26] JJ: I do have a sunlight and sauna. We also have a fast heat sauna from LA Relax. This is a one person sauna that Tim uses. I am kind of obsessed with my sunlight and sauna and, um, I really trust the founder, Connie. Zack. So I know that this is a high quality unit, not something you need to be afraid of. We also have an amazing water filtration system and an air purifier, so we actually have multiple air purifiers, so I’m gonna put all of those in the show notes for you.

[00:49:59] JJ: And I’m gonna look at the biggest things right now, like let’s talk about the biggest shifts that you can start to make. And I think number one shift is if you are still using Tupperware, switch that out to glass. You can get some really inexpensive glass storage units, um, from Amazon. That’s where I got mine.

[00:50:16] JJ: So that’s the first thing is let’s get rid of the plastic. So I got rid of the plastic. Um. Storage units. And I also got rid of like plastic cooking utensils. So those are the first things. Oh, and I also got rid of plastic cutting boards. I never, that was one that was like, oh yeah, plastic cutting boards.

[00:50:34] JJ: Duh. So I use all wood cutting boards. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, you know, we’ve been talking organic and so let’s, you know, continue that shifting towards organic. It’s easier now than ever. So organic. And the third thing is, what are you drinking your water out of? And I mean, full disclosure, I was, I got this big old plastic water jug a while back and I’m like looking and going, what, what on earth did I get this for?

[00:51:01] JJ: So I have all stainless steel now. Um. Water, water containers, coffee containers I travel with. And because you also wanna be careful if you’re getting a coffee at a coffee store and using that plastic. Cover on it and drinking through the plastic cover. So I’ve got now a coffee thing that I use for the coffee store that I bring with me when I travel, and I have my, my big stainless steel water bottles that I take to the gym.

[00:51:30] JJ: So those are those things alone. Major difference, major, major difference. And of course the skin and makeup getting cleaner, skin and makeup, um, as well. So I’m gonna challenge you with going to glass. I. Going to, um, purifying your air and water. I’ll share which different ones I have doing organic. Let’s try to get those biggest rocks first.

[00:51:57] JJ: And if you can get a sauna on board, I think that is one of the greatest things. And obviously you’re here and you’re exercising, right? So I’m betting you’re doing a lot of these things already. And what I would say is I’m just every day looking at how can I go get a little better? Where else can I remove some toxins out of my life?

[00:52:15] JJ: And uh, ’cause I know it’s not gonna be my. Hair color on my nails. I’m just, just saying it’s not happening. Maybe one day I doubt it. All right. That’s it for today’s show. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. And again, we’re gonna put all of the great information from Dr. [email protected] slash Aly, along with some of my favorite items that I use to help me on my detoxification journey.

[00:52:45] JJ: Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life. To ensure you look and feel great and are built to last, check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jj virgin.com. And make sure to follow my [email protected] so you don’t miss us.

[00:53:07] JJ: Single episode. And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you, to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

[00:53:34] JJ: Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 Podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information. That’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

[00:53:51] JJ: If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes, the use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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