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017 Dr Jenny Goodman: ecological medicine
96 Plays5 years ago
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Introduction to Wellness and Sustainability
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 17 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we take a deep dive into the themes of wellness and sustainability in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, and this time we're in conversation with Dr.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Jenny Goodman
00:00:29
Speaker
Jenny Goodman, an expert in ecological medicine and author of the newly released book entitled Staying Alive in Toxic Times.
00:00:38
Speaker
Jenny is a truly sparkly conversationalist on a mission to raise awareness of how to stay healthy in an increasingly toxic modern world. She combines environmental medicine, so exploring what toxins in the built environment can affect us, with nutritional advice to, as she puts it, put the good stuff back in.
00:00:59
Speaker
All the links to Jenny's website and social media presence are in the show notes. If you enjoy this type of content please hit subscribe. Nada mas. It's over to Dr Jenny Goodman.
What is Ecological Medicine?
00:01:11
Speaker
Dr. Jenny Goodman, thank you so much for joining us today. Perhaps I could start with a question that's really prompted by having read your book over the last week or so. But we have this wonderful concept of ecological medicine, perhaps for someone who's not familiar with it. How would you distinguish between ecological medicine and what might be broadly classed as say Western science-based medicine on one side and then traditional forms of say Eastern medicine on the other?
Body as an Ecosystem
00:01:38
Speaker
Okay, so it is similar to conventional Western medicine in that it is based on science, it's based on the physiology and biochemistry of our bodies, but it is different in that it doesn't atomize, it doesn't split the body up into lots of different bits and study each of them as a separate speciality.
00:02:01
Speaker
So for example, you'll know that if you've got pain in your joints, you go to a rheumatologist. And if you've got difficulties with your lungs, you'll go to a chest physician, heart problems, a cardiologist, the skin rash, the dermatologist, and so on. It's all divided up into bits. What ecological medicine is doing?
00:02:19
Speaker
is viewing the whole of the human body as one joined up ecosystem. So each bit is connected with each other bit, which is actually common sense, but it's common sense that has been lost as Western medicine has divided and divided everything up.
00:02:35
Speaker
So if as an ecological physician, I see a patient with problems in three or four different body systems, they might have a problem with the kidneys and a problem with the gut and another problem, I will assume that as all these problems are occurring in one body, in one person, they must be interlinked. So it's ecological in that it's finding the connections within the body, but it's also ecological in another sense.
Connection Between Human and Earth's Health
00:03:02
Speaker
which is that it sees the body as part of the wider ecosystem of planet Earth that we are part of and we are inextricably linked with it and with the animals, the plants and the rocks and the seas and everything because if we put poison into our oceans it finds its way into the
00:03:22
Speaker
algae, which finds its way into the fish, which finds its way into us. If we pollute the air with car fumes and factory emissions, that finds its way into the air and therefore into our lungs and into our bodies and brains and so on. And if we put artificial fertilizers and pesticides on the farms, on the land, that gets into the food and that gets into us. So we cannot separate ourselves from the planet.
00:03:49
Speaker
And I've summed this up actually in the heading to the seventh chapter of my book, which is called Tox Detox. And the subtitle is, you can't poison the planet without poisoning the people. And this is the essence of it.
Ecological vs. Traditional Medicine
00:04:06
Speaker
In that sense, you ask about how it connects with Eastern medicine. Certainly traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda, also see the body as a joined up whole. And they would also assume that all the symptoms a person has are connected with each other.
00:04:24
Speaker
and with their nutrition and with their environment but the difference is what ecological medicine does it combines that holistic perspective with science and so I'm using biochemistry all the time but I'm applying it in a way that your GP might not when they're simply writing your prescription for one symptom and not asking themselves
00:04:46
Speaker
I wonder why this person's got a migraine. They didn't have a migraine last year. What's happened? So the fundamental principles of ecological medicine are to think about causes, not just treat what's in front of you.
Health Issues and Environmental Awareness
00:05:01
Speaker
So when I began medical school a million years ago in 1976, I thought I was going to learn not just how to heal the sick, but about the causes of disease and therefore prevention.
00:05:13
Speaker
But I've had to learn that in the past 20 years because it wasn't taught at medical school. And the reason it's so vital is that if you look around the planet now, you will see we're suffering from many pandemics. Covid is the most dramatic, but cancer is also a pandemic. Heart disease, diabetes, dementia and autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis. All of these things are at
00:05:43
Speaker
huge levels, very high levels, and many of them were completely unknown before the Industrial Revolution. So we have to join those dots. You know, since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, 250 years ago, depending where you are, we have synthesized, we've made something like 80,000 to 100,000 synthetic chemicals, which have no place in the human body.
Toxins and Nutrition Balance
00:06:08
Speaker
And we've also dug out of the Earth
00:06:11
Speaker
metals like cadmium and nickel and mercury and lead which belong in the crust of the earth and when we take them out and incorporate them into things we make again we're taking a big risk so it's about
00:06:26
Speaker
nutrition, but it's also about the environment. What is out there that's getting into you? And in practice there are two halves. The environmental medicine is finding out what are the toxins that have got into you, how can you avoid them, and how can we get them out of you, and the other half is nutrition.
00:06:44
Speaker
and putting the good stuff back in. And you can't separate them because many toxins do their damage precisely by pushing nutrients out of the body. And many nutrients do good by pushing the toxins out. It's fascinating to see how you describe that relationship between, yeah, as you said, what's happening outside and what's happening inside the body. And I think your book does a wonderful job of balancing those two perspectives.
00:07:13
Speaker
And I think encouraging people to think about the environment that they're in, particularly the indoor environment. There were a lot of points you just mentioned, but I wanted to dig into one, obviously. But that relationship between pollution, between car fumes in cities, and for example, I know in your book, you mentioned things like pollen and hay fever. What are the tangible impacts? Because we all know pollution is bad. We're in a city. We're living in a dense urban environment. What are the day-to-day effects that that can have on our health?
00:07:42
Speaker
Okay so the air pollution primarily from traffic fumes is damaging the whole body but most of all it's damaging the lungs and the brain and there are lots of studies now showing brain damage even in little kids, well particularly in little kids because their noses are about the same height as the exhaust pipe of a car.
00:08:01
Speaker
and so it is doing damage in that immediate way but unfortunately we can't say well let's just move to the countryside and live surrounded by fields because you will get rid of that type of pollution but unless you're living high up a mountain right by the sea or on an organic farm unfortunately in the countryside you are exposed to
00:08:26
Speaker
what we call biocide and that means pesticides herbicides fungicides insecticides all the chemicals we've been making since the second world war to kill the bugs that we don't want to be there or kill the plants that we don't want to be there and we've created this mono crop agricultural scene where
00:08:46
Speaker
We've killed a lot of the good things along the way, and the bad things which don't get eliminated grow back in massive amounts. So there are healthy places to live, but it's about making more and more of the farms organic. And it's also about putting the good stuff into your system that can help combat that.
00:09:06
Speaker
So for example, I've seen many people from farming communities who are exposed to pesticides, but the ones who eat badly are far more impacted by those pesticides.
00:09:17
Speaker
And we can understand that by understanding what pesticides are. They're toxins that are very hard to destroy and they are fat soluble. The technical term is lipophilic. And that means they like fatty substances. They dissolve in fat. Now the brain is, all the brain cells are coated in fat. All the nerves in our body are coated in fat. That's why the impact is primarily on the brain and nervous system, although it's also on the reproductive system and the immune system.
00:09:46
Speaker
But if you're eating lots of really good healthy fats like avocado, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish, if it's from clean waters and so on, then you've got already some of the nutrients that will help to get rid of those things.
How to Detoxify the Body
00:10:00
Speaker
Now it's not enough and we can talk about detoxification methods because there are simple things that I get my patients doing that will clear most of the pesticides out of their system within about six months.
00:10:15
Speaker
And that would be a nutrition-based strategy that tackles... It's not just nutrition. It is nutrition, as I've described, the healthy fats, lots and lots of fresh vegetables and some fruit, because when they're raw, they've got the antioxidants that every detox process requires. But I describe in chapter seven of my book seven different methods that people can use.
00:10:37
Speaker
And one that's particularly good at getting these fat soluble toxins like pesticides out of the system is saunas. But saunas need to be done in, of course we haven't been able to do that for a year, but saunas need to be done in a very particular way to be effective. It has to be a dry sauna, not steam, and there are all sorts of caveats and little tips I give about how to do it.
00:10:59
Speaker
but there's a thin layer of fat just under the skin. In some of us, it's not so thin. The pesticides that are stored in that fatty layer can come out in the sauna, but they'll just be reabsorbed again if you don't wipe them off quickly with a dry towel. So that's a technique.
00:11:16
Speaker
And there are others, the most important one for any kind of detox, whether it's pesticides or anything else in your system. The most important is vegetable juicing. So long as it's organic vegetables that you juice, so you're not concealing more pesticides. There's Epsom salts baths, which have a particular use that I described in the book, colonic hydrotherapy, again, very specific.
00:11:40
Speaker
A vitamin C at high doses in a controlled way is brilliant for getting most toxins out of the body but particularly heavy metals. So mercury from metal amalgam fillings in our teeth and so on.
Water Quality and Health Risks
00:11:54
Speaker
There are many other methods but you're concerned particularly with the indoor environment. That was going to be my next question because the toxic heavy metals appear to be
00:12:03
Speaker
that come from living in an industrial world are a particular threat in our homes and our workplaces where we're spending eight, 12 longer hours each day. So for someone who's perhaps unfamiliar with how they could manifest themselves, where would you typically expect to find those kind of heavy metals within our indoor environments?
00:12:26
Speaker
Well actually heavy metals are more of an issue outside because their nickel for example is in car fumes and so on. In the home one of the risks is wrapping food in aluminium foil particularly if you're squeezing some lemon juice on it or you're cooking with tomato sauce because the acid will leach the aluminium out and that will get into your system but actually far more significant hazards in the home are chlorine
00:12:51
Speaker
and fluoride. Okay so chlorine is put into all our tap water in order to kill any bugs, microorganisms, bacteria that might be in there. Now I'm not saying they're all to do that but I think it's a shame that they then don't filter out the chlorine once it's done its job.
00:13:11
Speaker
because what chlorine does is it pushes iodine out of our bodies. Now many parts of the body need iodine, particularly the breast tissue in women and the thyroid gland in everybody. And if you push out the iodine by too much chlorine when you're drinking it, you're inhaling it when you're showering in it,
00:13:32
Speaker
You're cooking in it so it's absorbed into the food if it's rice or pasta or something like that. Then you have a risk of thyroid disease or breast disease. Now we do have an epidemic of thyroid disease and most doctors just put somebody on thyroid replacement therapy. They replace the thyroid hormone. I wouldn't rule out doing that but first I always check the iodine level and I find it vanishingly low. Vanishingly low. The only food sources are seaweed or fish.
00:14:01
Speaker
So if you're vegetarian or vegan, you've got to eat your seaweed. We need iodine. It's from the sea and we evolved from the sea. So chlorine coming out of your tap water, there is an easy solution. You fit a water filter. Now you can buy jug filters that you put on the counter. It's better than nothing. A plumbed in water filter means you don't have to faff. You don't have to think about that.
00:14:25
Speaker
You know that when you're getting the water out of your kitchen tap you can make a cup of tea, you can boil rice with it, you can have a drink and the chlorine and many other things like pesticide residues are gone. And in the book I recommend a couple of companies that make really good reliable water filters. Now in parts of the UK
00:14:45
Speaker
That's not the only toxic halogen that's coming out of your tap. In the West Midlands, Birmingham, they put fluoride in the water. They add artificial fluoride. And now they're doing it in more and more parts of the UK. They also do it in the Republic of Ireland.
Recognizing Toxins in Household Products
00:15:03
Speaker
Interestingly, most European countries don't do it, and Scandinavia never has. And the problem with fluoride is it damages the ovaries, the testes, the brain, the thyroid, again by the same mechanism, pushing out the iodine that the thyroid needs.
00:15:20
Speaker
and the kidneys and the bones, particularly the bones. Now, dentists love it because they say it stops children getting tooth decay. But if you look at the decline in decay in children's teeth over the past 40, 50 years, it goes down at a slow and steady rate in every country in Europe, those with fluoride in the water and those without fluoride in the water. It makes no difference. Brushing your teeth and avoiding sugar is what strengthens the teeth.
00:15:48
Speaker
So if you live in the West Midlands or another part of the UK where they put fluoride in the water, it's doubly crucial to filter your water. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than buying bottled water. And just to add something else into the mix, the problem with bottled water is if it's stored in plastic and if it's in a plastic bottle and if it's left somewhere warm, like a window sill in the sun or on a radiator or in your car on a warm day,
00:16:16
Speaker
The plasticizer chemicals are getting into that water. And everything that I said earlier about pesticides also applies to plasticizers. And they mess with the hormones. They mess with women's and men's hormones because they are estrogen mimics. So I've seen an astounding number of young boys with breast development. And when I test them, they've got pesticides in their fatty tissue. So they are estrogen mimics. So in your home,
00:16:46
Speaker
As well as what's coming out of the tap, it's really useful to go and look at the ingredients list on everything under the sink in your kitchen cupboard and everything that's in your bathroom cabinet. And I seriously advise getting a magnifying glass for this purpose. Now, you need to read the ingredients list on foods, but also sadly on cosmetics.
00:17:11
Speaker
And if you've bought your cosmetics or your shampoo, conditioner, your oven cleaner, stain remover, carpet cleaning spray, furniture polish, whatever it is, whether it's for cleaning your house or looking after yourself, if you've bought that from the chemist or a supermarket, it will have an ingredients list as long as you're on. So get a magnifying glass,
00:17:35
Speaker
read it and simply put into a search engine the name of any chemical whose name you don't recognise. If it says lavender oil, fine, but if it says something with a long Latin name, look it up, because for every one of these 100,000 artificial substances, there is a data sheet that's available for the public to look at.
00:17:56
Speaker
And some of what you see there is quite shocking. But what you need to be aware of is mostly when they talk about the side effects of these things, like the bleach that you might use to clean your kitchen.
Long-term Chemical Exposure and Health
00:18:09
Speaker
It will all be about acute toxicity, so there will be a list of things that might happen if you unfortunately swallow it. Who goes around swallowing bleach and who leaves these cupboards unlocked when they've got toddlers? But anyway, they're describing what happens if you swallow it, and that's a disaster and you rush to casualty and A&E and so on.
00:18:28
Speaker
But what we're concerned with in ecological medicine is the evidence that damage is also done by the drip, drip, drip of low exposure many, many times a day over many years. And I think this is highly connected with the very high rates we're seeing of cancer, supposedly one in two of us will die of cancer, rare disease 100 years ago. Because if you look up most of these substances, they are on the WHO's list of carcinogens. They're carcinogenic.
00:18:58
Speaker
they cause cancer and anything that causes cancer is messing with your DNA and anything that messes with your DNA is going to affect your ability to have healthy babies. So one of my my biggest speciality really is preconception care, looking after babies. So any young couple that are wanting to have a baby, the first thing I'd say is right open your kitchen cupboard, open your bathroom cupboard and wiggle it down to what you really need. So you need soap to wash
00:19:27
Speaker
And you can get really pure soap from good health food shops. And I don't mean the chain health food shops. I mean the independent ones that stock many brands. Even there, you might want your magnifying glass. But Summa, for example, that's S-U-M-A. Summa make fantastic soaps with really nothing bad in them at all, just natural essential oils, which you can use for perfume. So if you like to smell beautiful,
00:19:53
Speaker
You can get natural essential oils, lavender, rose, rosemary, jasmine, orange flower, geranium. These are a wonderful scents and they don't last all day because nothing natural does. You need to renew them. But you can use those to scent your home environment. You can use them to scent yourself. So there are safe, natural version versions of toothpaste with no fluoride and no detergent in it.
00:20:19
Speaker
Think about the foaming that happens with most conventional toothpastes. That's you rinsing your mouth out with detergent and you will swallow some of it. And the stomach gets very unhappy sometimes with swallowing detergent a tiny bit every time you break your teeth.
Benefits of Natural Products
00:20:33
Speaker
You have that sort of distinction then between this almost inbuilt irony between a cleaning product that may in fact be bringing toxic chemicals into your home. It sort of feels like that doesn't sound right. But then you've used the terms natural. I wonder if
00:20:49
Speaker
You know, we often find eco-cleaning products. For you, is an eco-cleaning product different to a natural cleaner? What are we looking for? It is usually better because what they've done is they've missed out the chemicals that damage the environment and they have forgotten to add that if it damages the environment, it's damaging every living thing in the environment, including us.
00:21:10
Speaker
So everything, though, these days is claiming to be eco and claiming to be green. So you do have to be a bit careful. And as I say, stage one is to go to a good independent health food shop, not to the chemist or the supermarket. And stage two is to use your magnifying glass. Just because it's got herbal extracts in it doesn't mean it hasn't got junk as well. You don't have to be purist or fanatical about it. You know, if you have to clean your oven with something horrible, then open the windows.
00:21:38
Speaker
Don't just open the windows, let the chemicals out. So if you're buying a new sofa, for example, or a new mattress, they often have fire retardants in them. Now, one of the main ingredients of the fire retardant is bromine, which is in the same group with chlorine and fluoride that we mentioned earlier.
00:21:58
Speaker
So if you can get a secondhand sofa that's great, you don't want a secondhand mattress though, you want an organic mattress and again I give recommendations in the book
00:22:10
Speaker
There's one firm mentioned in the hardback, but in the paperback that comes out on March 11th, I've mentioned two different firms from which you can get a really good organic mattress. And this matters so much because if you're lying on it for eight hours a day and your nose is quite close to it, the synthetic chemicals they put in there, including these brominated flame retardants, are going in through your skin and they're certainly going in through your nose.
00:22:35
Speaker
And some very chemically sensitive patients can smell it with a new mattress and it makes them feel ill. But they're the lucky ones because they know to avoid it. Most of us aren't that sensitive and it just goes into us year on year. So if you're buying and you can get an organic mattress, it's much harder to get an organic sofa or settee.
Improving Indoor Air Quality
00:22:56
Speaker
So what do you do?
00:22:57
Speaker
If you can't get it second hand, buy it in April or May when you can have the windows open for six months and it will do what's called outgassing and the chemicals will go out of the window.
00:23:09
Speaker
It's something I come across quite a lot when I'm working with, say, a corporate client on an office side. And you can imagine there it's almost scaled up the number of pieces of furniture that are going in. And we have to talk about healthy materials that don't off-gas or give off VOCs. So that's more about the materials, not just what's inside, but also the fabrics or the treatments that have been applied to those fabrics.
00:23:32
Speaker
And they off gas, as you say, VOC is a volatile organic compound. And it means it's going to out gas, which is a problem because it gets into your air and your lungs, but is a plus in that within a year or two, it will be gone. And what I wish these companies would do, if they won't actually leave out the chemicals, is manufacture these pieces of furniture and leave them in a warm warehouse with the windows open for a year, and then they'd be safe.
00:24:00
Speaker
then they'd be safe. So you can try going into one of these furniture shops and saying, I want the display copy. I want the one that's been sitting here for six months, even though lots of people have sat on it because it no longer smells. And I've had patients who've been trying to buy a mattress or a sofa and they sniff it and they say, that's okay because that's the display copy. But when they get theirs brand new and wrapped in layers of plastic, the smell that comes off it is awful.
00:24:29
Speaker
But as I say, there are healthy alternatives in virtually every case, and I outline them in the book. And if you follow the nutrition guidance in the book, and you keep your windows open, and you don't live on a really busy main road, because that's one thing that nutrition can't solve for you. If you're living next to the A1 motorway,
00:24:52
Speaker
have got a problem and the younger you are the worse the effect. But everything else we can do plenty about both in terms of avoidance and detoxification and substituting for example you know for cleaning your windows you don't need window cleaner chemicals you can just use water or vinegar. It works just as well. So we're thinking then about
00:25:16
Speaker
what's happening outside of our environment. We then have the issue of ventilation to ventilate, to not ventilate a space, allow the outdoor area in or not. There must be at some point, there's almost a tipping point where it's either a good idea or a bad idea to open the doors, let the outside area in.
00:25:33
Speaker
I think it depends on the nature of the outside air, but unless you live on a really polluted, busy road, it is good to open the windows. For people who are stuck living on a very busy, smelly road, there are air purifiers that you can get from firms like The Healthy House. But for the majority of us, it's better to have the window open. Now, that is easier to say in a Southern climate, in a Mediterranean climate, than it is in the UK. You've got an issue in the UK in the winter.
00:26:03
Speaker
because people will say, when they come into your house, when they are allowed to come into your house again, they will say, what is going on? You've got the heating on and the windows open. This is ecologically appalling, the heat's going out of the window, to which the reply is twofold. One, yes, it is, but so are the toxic chemicals. And two, I've been planting trees to make up for the carbon footprint.
00:26:29
Speaker
And actually, I think this is what we need to do because many people with lung problems and joint problems and other health issues like chronic fatigue are sensitive not only to the artificial chemicals we've been discussing, but also to toxins given off by molds. They're called mycotoxins, M-Y-C-O, mycotoxins.
00:26:51
Speaker
And in the British climate, there is always mould indoors because it's damp and it's cold, but particularly it's damp. And the only way to prevent mould is to try and replicate the Mediterranean climate, which is warmer and drier. And that means the heating on the windows open. And I feel terrible saying that because it is using up more energy. But if you calculate it and plant double the number of trees to make up for it, you are at least conserving your own health.
00:27:21
Speaker
And if you stay healthy, then you can fight the ecological battle on every other front. So that is a dilemma. And it is the only instance I have come across where it is not the case that what's good for the person is good for the planet. In almost every other situation, what's good for you is good for the planet. What's good for the planet is good for you.
00:27:43
Speaker
I think that's a point worth mentioning because you know like I say I've read the book from front to back and it really the one of the messages that came through most clearly for me was this idea of yeah often what's natural is better for us and better for the planet and the further we go away from that the further
00:28:01
Speaker
that disconnect, that gap between one and the other becomes the more health risks there are.
Impact of Antibiotics and Non-organic Foods
00:28:07
Speaker
So 99% of your philosophy is based on that in a sense. That's right. And there is a very precise analogy between what we're doing to our fields
00:28:17
Speaker
and what we're doing to our gut. So because of spraying all the pesticides and artificial fertilizers on our fields, we've lost the biodiversity. We've just got the one crop that the farmer has decided is profitable and there's no more animals living there, the soil is sterile, you've got rid of even the good fungi that live in the earth and help put nutrients from the soil into the roots, you've got rid of all the little birds that used to wander around and
00:28:42
Speaker
poo on the fields, and that was natural fertiliser. Same's happened in our gut. We've had so many courses of antibiotics, not just from the doctor, also from eating non-organic meat and dairy that's been fed antibiotics. And in the case of women, we've taken the pill, we've been under huge stress. For whatever reason, all the good bugs in our gut have been killed.
00:29:04
Speaker
So it's like a sterile farmer's field in which the most unfriendly creatures, the most unpleasant bacteria are the ones that will reproduce because you've killed the competition. They have the field to themselves. So in the human, we get what we call gut dysbiosis.
00:29:20
Speaker
and you know small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, irritable bowel syndrome, ultimately inflammatory bowel disease, we get all this because we've killed the good bugs and the same in the fields and it's a vicious circle because in the field they'll get one nasty creature overgrowing and then they'll use yet another pesticide to kill it and in the human yet another antibiotic so it's it's a toxic cascade
00:29:46
Speaker
And how would you then place that within the perspective of what we're living through at the moment, where clearly there is a huge amount of attention being paid to hygiene, to antibacterial surfaces, to cleanliness? How do we navigate that minefield, given what you've just
Nutrition and Immunity
00:30:03
Speaker
said?
00:30:03
Speaker
It's a very, very difficult one. And you will have read the bit in the spring or summer chapter, I think. I think it's in the spring chapter about, you know, what do you do when your kids come in from playing in the park and in the garden? You know, is that good, healthy dirt or is it potentially toxic bacteria? And up until COVID, I would have certainly said,
00:30:26
Speaker
Yeah, they've been playing in the garden, so long as they haven't touched dog poo or cat poo, and so long as this is not an area of grass that has been sprayed with insecticides, then they shouldn't wash their hands, because they'll get the good bugs on their hands when they eat their food, which our hunter-gatherer ancestors always had. They didn't wash their carrots, they ate them as they were, and that gives us a lot of the healthy bacteria that we need.
00:30:50
Speaker
okay so rewind is that still the case yeah if you've been playing in the garden that still applies if you've been on public transport or you've been you know in a shop
00:31:01
Speaker
in the bank, on a bus, on a train, you wash your hands very thoroughly with soap when you get home with soap and water, but that's not just because of the potential viral contamination, that's also because the trains and buses particularly, and the cars, are full of particulate matter, right, the solid particulate pollution, which is, you know, from the fossil fuels, it's from the petrol and the diesel, that particulate matter,
00:31:29
Speaker
is very definitely implicated in cancer and Alzheimer's and all sorts of neurological problems in children so that's why you would wash your hands anyway if you've been on public transport or even if you've been in your car because when you shut your car door you're touching the handle which is exposed to all that pollution.
00:31:48
Speaker
particulate matters, PM, and there's talk of PM 10 and PM 2.5, which are the more granular types, which is the second sort of airborne. Yeah, the tinier the particle size, the more it gets into your lungs. And it's interesting that people are now walking around wearing masks, even outdoors. Well, I've been doing that for years in central London because of the pollution, right? I don't think we need to wear masks outdoors because of the virus, but we might because of the pollution.
00:32:16
Speaker
You know, so it is a different situation, but what I would say is the ecological medicine perspective on Covid is, well, what do we do about vulnerability?
Designing for Health and Wellbeing
00:32:28
Speaker
We've heard a lot about people being vulnerable and it's discussed as though that vulnerability is set in stone and can never be changed.
00:32:37
Speaker
But actually, with really good nutrition, you can make yourself less vulnerable. So it's the immune system that fights back against the virus, whether you catch it naturally or you've had the vaccine already. The immune system needs really good doses of vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, and other nutrients to do its job properly. And so if you're getting the right nutrients in, and of course, you minimize your viral load by the precautions we're all still taking,
00:33:08
Speaker
then you increase your chances of remaining completely healthy. I'm just joining the dots a little bit here between what you're saying and some of the work that I'm involved in when you know we have these healthy building certifications out there in the world now and there's also a chapter on nourishment and nutrition and I've always felt that it was somehow
00:33:28
Speaker
like a loose limb that didn't quite connect with the talk of air quality or healthy building materials and so on. But hearing the way you're describing the role of nutrition, it really now feels like a cohesive part of an overall strategy in terms of keeping the people inside your residential building or your office building healthy, right? If you're not encouraging the nutritional aspect in a way, perhaps all these other steps that we're taking at a more building level might fall flat.
00:33:55
Speaker
No, it's about adding in as many pieces as possible, right? So you are paying attention to the quality of the air.
00:34:03
Speaker
you're paying attention to the quality of the tactile surfaces, you're paying attention to the visual impact, and nutrition is one more thing. So the way you design your building determines what goes in through people's noses and through their lungs, but what they're eating affects what goes in through their gut. But whether it goes in through the digestive tract or through the respiratory system, it's still ending up in the bloodstream.
00:34:27
Speaker
and in all the cells and organs in the brain. So nutrition is simply a part of the package. I think the reason it has a more prominent role is we have to eat, most of us, three times a day. We have to shop, we have to cook, we can't not think about it. Whereas with the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch,
00:34:47
Speaker
you think about it while you're making it but the people don't think about it after they're living in it but it's all equally important. Fascinating. One final question then if I may, you touched on it the idea of the seasonality and it's something I'm really connected with largely through my fitness practice where I'll often think about how I might move or do different times of activity at different times of year where I try to stay connected to
00:35:12
Speaker
that seasons the environment that's going on around
Living in Harmony with Seasons
00:35:15
Speaker
me. How do you see that? I mean, in your book, you almost sort of divide things up by season. So it's obviously fundamental to your view of things. Okay, so this is more about light than it is about heat. So, you know, in a temperate zone,
00:35:30
Speaker
It is dark almost all of the time in January and December. So it makes sense to stay indoors, to hunker down, not try and do huge projects when nature is telling you to hibernate. However, we do need some daylight. So in terms of exercise, the crucial time to do your exercise in December and January, the darkest time of year, is in that narrow window when it's light.
00:35:55
Speaker
So get out there at 10 in the morning and go for a good walk and go out again at 3 o'clock just before it gets dark because your brain and your body needs to know this is light, this is dark, this is day, that's night. And don't stay up as late in the winter as you would in the summer, you know, the dark is telling you to go to bed. We have a pineal gland in the brain that responds to this.
00:36:19
Speaker
And it's meant to be dark for several hours before we go to bed because then the pineal gland will make melatonin, which is the hormone that helps us sleep. If you're looking at a bright blue screen at 9 or 10 o'clock at night, you're not going to be able to sleep very well.
00:36:35
Speaker
So in the summer, by contrast, nature is inviting us to party and to play and to stay up all hours and to go for much longer walks and do much more vigorous exercise outdoors. And I think we need to allow ourselves to respond to that. We've lost touch with it ever since we had electric lighting, but we've lost touch with it much more profoundly since we started having computers and telephones and televisions. And in this past year,
00:37:03
Speaker
Young people have lost touch with that rhythm even more because they're living through their screens. And you know, the blue of a screen is mimicking the blue of the sky and it tells the body to wake up. And if you're giving it that message at midnight, it's bad news.
00:37:19
Speaker
So yeah, the sun is our most precious resource. And you've probably heard of a SAD, seasonal affective disorder. It's literally the winter making you sad. And there are two reasons it happens. One is that you're not getting enough actual sunlight daylight into your eyes. And that happens even if it's a cloudy day. It doesn't have to be a bright sunny day. There is plenty of sunlight out there behind the clouds. Otherwise it would be pitched up. So lack of that.
00:37:49
Speaker
is one factor in seasonal affective disorder or the winter blues. The other factor is vitamin D. If we don't get enough sunshine on the skin, we don't get enough vitamin D. And it has to be said that when the pandemic hit us in Britain, it was at the end of a British winter when everybody's vitamin D, unless they were supplementing, would have been at rock bottom level. And of course, the darker your skin, the worse that is.
00:38:16
Speaker
I do think it's really significant that, you know, the first 10 doctors to die of this virus were Black or South Asian.
00:38:27
Speaker
And if you've got that dark skin, you need more sunshine and more sunshine hours to make the same amount of vitamin D. And so these people should be supplementing, we should all be supplementing, but when it is sunny, we should get out there and roll our sleeves up and wear shorts or a short skirt and get sun on the skin because that's how nature designed us, to be healthy and also to be cheerful.
00:38:52
Speaker
Dr. Jenny, thank you
Resources for Further Information
00:38:53
Speaker
so much. It's a wonderful philosophy and a worldview that you have. And I encourage everyone to go and have a look for staying alive in toxic times. How can, obviously, the book itself, how can people follow you or your social media? So I now have the full works going. I have a website, which I think we have the details of. It's drjennygoodman.com. And I'm Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. What's the other one? LinkedIn. I'm doing all that.
00:39:22
Speaker
But the website tells you all the outlets you can buy the book, which is any outlet, basically. And the paperback comes out on the 11th of March. But I would also, for your interest, mention another book called Cleaning Yourself to Death by Pat Thomas. You might want to have a look at that because she has got a whole book of alternative substances you can buy or make for cleaning your interior space completely safely.
00:39:48
Speaker
Wonderful. Listen, thank you so much for all your tips and suggestions. It's really meaningful work. You're very welcome. Good to talk with you.