Reducing Toxin Exposure

Reducing Toxin Exposure

Hi. I’m Doctor Emily Parke with your Functional Health Minute. Today, I’d like to talk about toxins and how toxins are everywhere. You don’t even think about most of them. You know, the average woman puts on about 85 chemicals on her body by the time she’s done getting ready, which is a pretty staggering statistic. Our skin really does absorb what we put on our body pretty quickly. Some statistics say even as fast as seven seconds, and a lot of the chemicals and toxins that we’re exposed to are what are called endocrine disruptors, meaning they disrupt our sex hormones, our estrogen, especially a lot of them are called Xenoestrogens, which mimic estrogen. So what do I really mean by toxins? Toxins come in many, many different forms. They can be in the air we breathe. They can be in the water we’re drinking. They can be on the food that we’re eating. They can be on our personal products, our household products, really anywhere.

Reducing Exposure

One of the things we can do to reduce our exposure to toxins is really eat organic food and that’s important because non organic food is sprayed with pesticides and the statistics on the diseases that the pesticides cause are pretty staggering. You also want to make sure you’re eating and drinking your food from either glass containers or stainless steel containers. You want to avoid, especially heating up food in plastics. That can be really toxic. There’s this craze about, “Oh, if you’re doing plastics, it’s okay because it’s BPA free.” Well, there’s really not a whole lot of data out there on the other alternatives to BPA, so I can’t say for sure if those plastics are “safe” for humans or not. I would just really recommend avoiding plastics whenever possible, especially when it comes to your food and water consumption.

Also, things you can do to reduce your exposure are looking at your personal care products, making sure you’re not putting on especially parabens and phthalates onto your skin. A big one for that is deodorants and lotion, make up that we put on. All of those things add up. When we talk about a big category of stress, stress on the body is stress of any kind, including the toxins that you bring in and put into your body and put on your body. This is Doctor Emily Parke with your health minute.