Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, practitioner of functional medicine and doctor of non-force chiropractic.
My purpose is to educate you on how to take better care of yourself by doing things that
I recommend on this show and if necessary, not necessarily, but if necessary, coming
in to see me to get some blood tests or other diagnostic tests to identify whether or not
your body is functioning normally.
So most doctors only test you to see if you have a disease.
Right now, do you need medical care for diabetes, for hypothyroidism, for high blood pressure,
for high cholesterol?
Do you need surgery for a herniated disc?
Do you need some kind of medical procedure referral to a specialist?
Do you have a disease condition that requires medical care?
That is the practice of medicine and that is what medical insurance pays for.
There's no such thing as health insurance.
Health insurance is medical insurance.
It doesn't pay for anything.
To make you healthier, it pays for medical care.
It pays for medical treatment for a disease condition, which is way too late.
If you want to be healthy, then you don't want to wait until you need medical care.
Hopefully that's why you're listening to this show.
But the unfortunate part of that is everyone pays a lot of money for air quotes health
insurance.
Please always insert the air quotes because there's no such thing as health insurance.
Health insurance does not pay for anything to make you healthier.
It will not pay for you to take better care of yourself.
It will not pay for your gym membership.
Health insurance is medical insurance.
It pays for like car insurance.
Car insurance pays when you crash your car.
It doesn't pay for oil changes or to keep your car in good condition.
Health insurance is medical insurance.
It doesn't pay to keep you healthy.
It pays for medical care when you need it.
It's frustrating when you pay all this money for air quotes health insurance and you go
to your doctor and your doctor says, oh, you're fine.
There's nothing wrong with you.
Well, where does your doctor, where do all these doctors, so many doctors that don't
do, people ask me all the time, why doesn't every doctor do functional medicine?
Why don't all doctors want to keep you healthy?
Because they're busy.
They're busy treating people that wait too long and need medical care.
There's nothing wrong with medical doctors spending all their time providing medical
care for people that need treatment for medical conditions.
That's a lot that most people wait till it's too late.
My goal is to sort of reduce the numbers of those people that wait till it's too late.
So the point of this episode of this show is to give you some information about why
is it that most doctors only focus on, or at least apparently ignore this other information.
People have the experience.
They go into their doctor and they say, oh, I heard about this or that thing that might
make me healthier.
What do you think about that?
And they usually just ignore it or say something that doesn't give a satisfactory answer.
And so part of the reason for the opinions that are expressed by those doctors is the
information that they get.
A lot of information, most medical information is available online now.
In the old days, you had to subscribe to medical journals for each one of them for hundreds
of dollars a year.
Now fortunately, everything is online and synopses, abbreviations of all the latest
research comes out, is emailed to every doctor in America.
In the world, I get several of them, so many of them, too many of them.
I think, I don't know, dozens of them every week, sometimes 10 or 12 a day, it seems.
It's ridiculous.
But anyway, I do it because I want to keep abreast of the latest research.
Most of it is pharmaceutical information about the latest development in drugs that I want
to know about, but I'm not that interested in, so I skim through it unless it's important.
But I am always interested in research that documents the effects of damaging chemicals
and toxins, because a lot of people are just not aware of this.
You don't know unless you test to identify the effects of chemicals.
So the headline is, Common Household Chemicals Tied to Brain Cell Damage.
This is a little technical, but it's really important.
So the article begins on Medscape.
Two classes of chemicals present in common household products may impair the development
of oligodendrocytes, the myelinating cells of the central nervous system.
So basically, it means that what they're saying is two classes of common chemicals that people
are exposed to all the time, which are critical to brain development and function, are impaired
by exposure to these chemicals, quaternary ammonium compounds.
I took a lot of chemistry classes in school, but you'll be forgiven if you don't know
what a quaternary ammonium compound is.
I don't know exactly what that is either.
But they are, according to this article, ubiquitous in disinfecting agents and personal care products
and organophosphate flame retardants.
So organophosphates are common pesticides that are really bad, and they're found in
household items such as furniture and electronics, and have surprising effects, quotes.
This article, Dr. Paul Tassar, professor and director of the Institute for Glial Sciences.
Glial means brain tissue.
Glial cells are a special form of brain cells.
So this man, this doctor, PhD professor at the University of Western Reserve University
School of Medicine at Cleveland, Ohio, told Medscape News that common household chemicals
and common household items such as furniture and electronics had, quote, surprising effects
specifically on the non-nerve cells of the brain.
And so what does that mean?
The brain is filled mostly with nerve cells, but it's also filled actually more by weight
and volume.
More of the actual physical structure of your brain is filled with fat and water.
So the glial cells, G-L-I-A-L, glial cells, are these fat cells that support your brain.
They're often, they're one of the most susceptible forms, one of the most susceptible cells for
brain cancer.
So a lot of times if people get brain cancer, it is a cancer of these fat cells in the brain.
This is also, while we're talking about it, important to understand why it's so important
to consume omega-3 fatty acids, because these glial cells, these fat cells in your brain,
are composed more than anything else.
The main ingredient is docosahexaenoic acid, D-H-A, an omega-3 fatty acid that you can
only get from fish, from the ocean, or from algae.
If you're a vegan, you can get D-H-A, docosahexaenoic acid, from algae.
And eventually, people, there are industries that make biofuel from algae.
So it makes no sense to me right now, and hopefully this will eventually change.
But don't buy, I tell people all the time, there are some things that some nutrients,
some supplemental nutrients that you can buy wherever you want.
Vitamin C is the classic example.
Ascorbic acid is the same wherever you buy it, buy it at Costco, buy it at Trader Joe's,
buy it from any store, it doesn't matter, as long as your stomach isn't irritated by
the acidic effects of ascorbic acid.
Vitamin C is, vitamin D, D is in dog, the most important nutrient for your immune system,
along with vitamin C. Vitamin D is sort of in between.
I get a lot of people that buy cheap vitamin D from stores, and my rough estimate from
testing thousands of people is that it's roughly 15% less effective.
How do I come to that number?
The healthy level of vitamin D, D is in dog, the sunshine vitamin, the healthy level of
vitamin D is 50 to 90.
If you want your immune system to work, you need your serum level of vitamin D to be between
50 and 90.
Most doctors now, it didn't used to be the case, but now if you ask, if you go to your
routine physical and ask your doctor to add the vitamin D test, you usually still need
to ask or they won't do it.
If you ask, they will add the vitamin D test.
The medical range, the clinical range, the broad stretch your arms out as far as you
can side to side, broad range for vitamin D is 30 to 100.
Well, 30 nanograms per milliliter, the standard range, is enough to prevent, reduce your risk
of, not prevent, not prevent at all, but reduce your risk of osteoporosis, and it will help
your immune system to work a little better than if it's below that, but it's ridiculous.
The healthy range, the functional range of vitamin D is one of the most important distinctions
between healthy ranges and the standard medical range that most doctors use.
So you want, everyone should get their vitamin D blood test and you want, and don't ask your
doctor if it's good or not because they'll say it's fine if it's above 30 and that's
recent.
That's a recent change.
They used to say, I think it was about five years ago that the medical clinical range
on the form that comes back, the results from lab core request, whatever lab your hospital
was 20 to 100.
But the point is, it's not enough.
That's barely enough to prevent rickets, to prevent your bones from collapsing, and it
will not even dramatically reduce your risk of osteoporosis, which, so the main things
that people are concerned about for vitamin D, there's many more things that people should
be concerned about for vitamin D because vitamin D affects every single part of your body.
And you want, if you want to be healthy, if you want your immune system, especially if
you want your immune system to function at its peak, it is totally dependent.
It will not work.
Your immune system cannot do its job unless you provide it with adequate amounts of vitamin
D. And adequate amounts are a serum level in your blood, the blood test, 50 to 90.
So I got a little bit off track there talking about vitamin D, but that's never bad because
no one ever knows enough about how important vitamin, most people don't know enough about
how important vitamin D is. 5,000 units a day is the standard dose for most adults.
If you're a white woman that weighs less than 120 pounds, then 4,000 might be enough.
I've tested thousands of patients.
The only way you know whether or not you have adequate vitamin D is to get a blood test.
But I promise you, if you weigh more than 120 pounds, or if your skin is darker than
a white person like me, then you need to take at least 5,000 units a day.
And if you haven't been taking 5,000 units of vitamin D supplementally a day for at least
a year, even then, if I test your blood, the vitamin D test costs 25 bucks.
It's inexpensive.
Everyone should know about this.
Everyone should get that test.
Ask your doctor if you're going in for any routine blood work.
They will do it now because they know it's important.
They just don't know what range is important.
Just ask them to do the test or come into me.
I'll order it for you, 25 bucks.
The main thing is to know if your immune system has adequate vitamin D to make it work properly.
So, I got a little bit off track.
We were talking about results published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience about motor
dysfunction from exposure to various chemicals in the environment that impair brain development
and can destroy nerves.
Oligodendrocytes, which form the electrical insulation around the axons of central nervous
system cells.
It's a little technical.
But basically, your nerves are wires that communicate messages from your brain to the
rest of your body.
And these cells have connective tissue coverings and an extra coating around them that protects
them but also the nerves are a little weird.
They're a little different.
They're not exactly wires.
The analogy for a wire kind of breaks down because, you know, like a telephone wire is
usually metal wrapped in a plastic coating, something like that.
The wires for your nervous system are living tissue, obviously, and they're coating.
The signals are actually the transference of the transmission of the signals from your
brain to the other parts of the body actually occurs not just along the wire but also through
the coating.
So that's a little bit, I'm trying to make this as simple as possible to understand.
It's very complex.
But the coating around your nerves is involved in the transmission of nerve signals.
So when the coating around your nerves has any kind of disease or impairment like multiple
sclerosis, multiple sclerosis is a sclerotic effect on this coating around the nerves and
it's devastating.
So just as we're talking about household chemicals and lots of other chemicals that people are
exposed to can damage this coating around your nerves.
So in the journal Nature Neuroscience published March 12th, March 25th this year, damage was
caused to the coating around the nerves.
They analyzed the effects of 1823 chemicals and identified 292 that caused cells, nerve
cells to die.
And 292 chemicals caused these coating oligodendrocytes, this coating the nerve, the tissue that protects
the nerves, caused them, 292 chemicals caused the cells to die and 47 chemicals that caused
them that inhibited their regeneration.
And even that is often significant if these cells can't, they're degenerating all the
time.
That's why we get Alzheimer's as we get older, nerve tissue and the coatings around our nerves
are degenerating just from age.
So it's really important to not have them degenerate.
It's really important to minimize exposure to chemicals that causes them to degenerate.
So what chemicals are we talking about?
So one of the main ones, the main categories is flame retardants, flame retardants in fabrics
and other things, furniture, curtains, things that, you know, it seems like a good idea
to make things less likely to catch on fire if somebody knocks over a candle or drops
a cigarette.
But these things are super, super toxic.
Children with concentrations of these chemicals had significantly increased odds of damage
to their motor neurons, the nerves that control their muscles.
These results, quote in this article, it says, these results suggest that they identify chemicals
that are hazardous to human health.
And we want to be clear that more studies are needed, but people should start to pay
attention to this.
So future studies are needed, but the results that are out now are scary and theoretically
could contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders as well as adult conditions like multiple
sclerosis and later cognitive defects.
So it's be careful, try to avoid exposure to any kind of toxic chemicals.
What is that?
How do you know a chemical is toxic?
Well, I can't off the top of my head think of the brand names of toxic household chemicals
that people use because I don't use them anymore and I've kind of forgotten.
But basically, you can clean almost anything in your house with vinegar or lemon.
These are great or baking soda.
So anything else is probably toxic.
And if you have questions about that, please email me or you can also go to EWG, the environmental
working group, EWG.org.
They have EWG.org has an excellent website where you can research the toxicity of anything,
any household chemical, pesticide, cosmetic, anything that you're going to put in or on
your body.
And you want to know the research about the toxic potential or actual documented toxic
effects of any of those chemicals, go to EWG.org.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
I always like to include a specific case about the topic that I'm talking about.
And I'm sorry I don't have someone that's immediately coming to mind.
I've had so many though.
I do test people for chemical toxins, for mold toxins, for heavy metal toxins.
I'm going to talk about this more in upcoming episodes because it's really, really important.
People have no idea.
Oh, how do I know if I'm exposed to toxins?
They're everywhere.
Everyone is exposed to chemical toxins from fertilizers, pesticides, and the air and the
food we eat and the water we drink.
There's plastic.
If you drink bottled water, there's plastics, heavy metals and fillings, silver fillings
in your teeth.
If you eat fish, tuna, tuna especially, there's so many.
I'm going to do a whole episode on this, probably the next one.
We're all, you and I, are constantly exposed to toxins.
The only way to know if they...
The thing, the triggers, the signs I look for if someone comes to me with a mood disorder,
any kind of brain issue, a mood disorder like anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, neurodegenerative
to condition, any brain condition, anything that affects the brain, the red flag goes
up in my mind for potential toxin exposure because the brain is the most sensitive organ
to any toxic exposure from lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, uranium, aluminum, pesticides,
et cetera.
Any autoimmune condition that causes your immune system to overreact and quote unquote,
air quotes, attack healthy cells, your immune system doesn't attack healthy cells for no
reason.
Your immune system is not over reactive.
Your immune system, when you have an autoimmune condition like multiple sclerosis or lupus
or Hashimoto's thyroiditis or any other ulcerative colitis, any autoimmune condition, your immune
system is not randomly attacking healthy cells, it's attacking diseased cells and your healthy
cells get caught in the crossfire.
The reason that your immune system is hyper activated is almost always because of toxic
material that has leaked into your bloodstream or become stored in some part of your body
and your healthy cells get caught in the crossfire.
Your immune system is not, there's nothing wrong with your immune system, it's reacting
normally.
It sees something foreign, the toxins that you've ingested that cause no symptoms.
You don't know, you don't have no idea.
These things are ubiquitous in the environment.
When I do these tests, they're always positive.
No one is immune.
We're all exposed.
What matters is how much and which things are you exposed to the most and then we can
do a protocol to help your body flush those things out a little better.
That's really important for so many conditions.
Any autoimmune condition almost always involves the exposure to toxins that you have no idea
about.
Standard medical tests never look for exposure to toxins.
These are usually hair tests for heavy metals or urine tests for heavy metals and chemicals.
All of these tests, none of the exposure to chemicals tests, none of these are blood tests.
There are blood tests for lead or other toxins, but they're stupid.
They're pointless.
If you have any level of lead in your blood, then you're really screwed.
The point is, so many doctors test blood to see if you're exposed to lead and if it's
not in your blood, then you're fine.
No, that's not true.
Your body will excrete an exposure to lead like the people who had lead pipes and drinking
the horrible water with lead in it or just any exposure to lead.
We're all exposed to these chemicals all the time from pesticides and other things in the
air, in our food, in our water, and we excrete them or your body will excrete them as efficiently
as it can through the kidneys, through the colon, but what it can't excrete will be
shoved into fat cells for storage to get it out of your bloodstream.
So there it remains forever.
So the only way to know for sure is to get proper testing because chemicals are stored
in your fat cells.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
Thank you for listening.
We're about out of time.
Tune in next week at 4 p.m.
I look forward to your questions.
Email me anytime.
Have a fabulous weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.