SNP4: Detoxification Protocols [Preview]

**Danny Lennon** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. You're listening in to a special Quack Asylum episode of the podcast today. I am Danny Lennon, and of course, here beside me as usual, is Alan Flanagan, rejuvenated after a weekend in the Netherlands. I hope you are feeling fresh and good.

**Alan Flanagan** (0:35)
Yes, a weekend of reveling. So, yeah, I'm definitely mentally refreshed, if not necessarily the freshest in body, but that will come another few nights.

**Danny Lennon** (0:47)
Yeah, well, then today's episode is probably timely for you, if you're interested in detoxifying yourself after the weekend. Exactly.
It may be needed.

**Alan Flanagan** (0:56)
I did a Q&A on Monday, and I didn't get around to answering this one because it came in late, but I saw it the next day, it was like, you know, are there any tips or vitamins that I can take to recover after a festival? I was like, no.
So, yeah, believe me, I'd be doing it.

**Danny Lennon** (1:21)
So as a way to maybe introduce our topic, I thought I'd actually hand it over to one of our Quack Asylum favorites that we've maybe discussed before, and much of his claims will be discussed today. And this is from a segment of Dr. Mark Hyman's podcast, where he is talking to a member of his team that works at his clinic on how they deal with some of the detoxification issues we're going to talk through today. So I thought maybe as a way to introduce what we'll talk about, he can do a better job than I can.

**Mark Hyman** (1:50)
And today we're going to be talking about detoxification and toxicity and the burden of toxins in a world. Now, it doesn't relate to a specific condition because toxins can cause a whole range of problems, right? And we're going to get into the details of it.
But first, I want to welcome you to the doctor's pharmacy, Megan.

**Alan Flanagan** (2:09)
Thank you. I'm happy to be here and I'm excited about this topic. It's a really important one and one we see, you know, really impacting so many of the people we see here.

**Mark Hyman** (2:16)
It's really true. I mean, the two things that are just kind of blank spots in medical education are food is medicine, believe it or not, and the whole issue of toxins and health.
So when I was in medical school, we learned about acute toxicity. You know, took a drug overdose if you got an acute exposure to a pesticide or heavy metals. But we learned nothing about chronic low-grade toxicity from the 80,000 plus chemicals that have been brought into our environment since the turn of the last century, including pesticides, plastics, phthalates, BPA, flame retardants, you know, herbicides, glyphosate, I mean, you name it, we are just inundated with chemicals. And I remember when I was researching a book many, many years ago, I found this study that looked at fat biopsies.
So people got liposuction, or they had a breast reconstruction or a mastectomy. They would send the tissue to go be analyzed. And they found that every single person in the study was a toxic waste dump. And they had things like DDT, which isn't even out there anymore in the marketplace, and PCBs and heavy metals and dioxin and all these PCBs. I mean, just nasty stuff that is stored in all of us.

**Danny Lennon** (3:47)
So maybe quite a lot of cause for concern given that everyone is a toxic waste dump, and there's nasty stuff in all of us. We're going to investigate some of this, because as noted, there is maybe something to this. And of course, I'm sure it won't be lost on you that one of the... This is the second of two major blank spots in modern medicine, along with the lack of understanding that food is medicine. So let's think about what the argument we're actually talking about today is. So there's a number of things that people may see related to obviously quackish products like detox teas and so on. That's not really what we're discussing. We want to get into maybe a more deeper argument that has maybe some basis, and something along the lines of we are going to come into a lot of these different environmental toxins, and some of that is through the food that we're exposed to. Other things are in the environment, and these things can accumulate and compound in effect over time. And then the proposal is that this can cause a series of symptoms and then even chronic diseases. And so by having an ability to remove these toxins, that would leave us in better health. And this removal of toxins we could think of as a detox diet, a detoxification protocol, a detox plan. You'll see a whole host of different names. But it's the same idea that through a certain intervention that's typically centered around changes in food or nutrients or supplements, we can enhance this detoxification to get rid of these environmental toxins that are going to be problematic. So now, of course, as we just said, it's not just a case where we're talking about like a juice cleanse that someone's going to see on TikTok, which I think our audience is smart enough to know is obviously nonsense. But there is some areas where there might be some credence to this, right? In that we clearly know that there are these environmental toxins, these different chemicals that are in the environment.