Transcript #508 How to Overcome the Effects of Environmental Toxins and Mold with Dr. Jill Carnahan

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1. Hear about our guest, Dr. Jill Carnahan.
2. Learn about different toxicities and the importance of detox in recovery.
3. Explore how mold can be the root trigger of so many ailments and the role trauma can play in your body’s response.
4. Understand how the limbic system reacts to toxins and can cause cytokine reactions.
5. Hear how mold can cause greater gut permeability, leading to heartburn, diarrhea, and gut damage.
6. Learn what role emotions play in disease and the critical need to listen to your body.
7. Listen to Dr. Callahan talk about her memoir, “Unexpected”.
8. Discover many ways to detoxify your body.
9. Find out where you can learn more about the work of Dr. Callanan and how to get her book, “Unexpected”.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Hello, everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. Today, I have a very special treat for you. I have Dr. Jill Carnahan on the show, and she is an expert in so many things detoxification, environmental toxins, mold toxicity, and so many other things that we’re going to talk about today on the show. She also has a new book called Unexpected, and she goes into her own health journey, and all the trials, tribulations, and things that she did that worked for her that she uses today with her patients and in her work:

She has an amazing website and amazing blog, and she’s got a new documentary coming out that’s in the film festivals right now. Just a lot of stuff, a lot of work that Jill is doing to show up in the world to help get the message out about health and natural healing. I know, you guys listening to the show, you’re concerned about your body’s burden of toxins, and I created a quiz you can check out at heavymetalsquiz.com. It only takes a couple of seconds, and you get an amazing free video series about how to detox your body after taking the quiz, so check it out, heavymetalsquiz.com.

 So our guest today, Dr. Jill Carnahan, is known as your functional medicine expert, and she’s been featured in Shape Magazine, Parade, Forbes, Mindbodygreen, First For Women, The Townsend Newsletter, and The Huffington Post as well as been seen on NBC News and health segments with Joan Lunden. She’s a prominent global keynote speaker and a prolific writer sharing her knowledge on stage and podcasts. With over a decade of producing popular content, her articles can be found in journals, newsletters, books, and social media posts. She’s the Medical Director of Flatiron Functional Medicine, a widely sought-after practice with a broad range of clinical services including functional medicine protocols, nutritional consultations, chiropractic therapy, naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, massage therapy, and then she attracts A-list, celebrities and athletes.

 A survivor of breast cancer, Crohn’s disease, and mold toxicity, she routinely treats patients who come to her for solutions to their medical mysteries that haven’t been solved. Her YouTube channel and podcast features interviews with the healthcare world’s most respected names in medicine, science, and functional medicine, and she co-authored the Personalized and Precision Integrative Cardiovascular Medicine textbook and is set to release her prescriptive memoir through Forefront Publishing in 2023 called Unexpected. You can learn more about Dr. Jill and her work at jillcarnahan.com. So, Dr. Carnahan, thank you so much for joining the show.

Dr. Jill Carnahan: You’re welcome. Glad to be here with you, Wendy.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. So I absolutely love your work, and I interviewed you recently for the Heavy docuseries. You’re an expert on toxins and environmental toxins, and so a lot of your work reflects that in a lot of the articles that you publish, and you recently published a new book called Unexpected. So can you tell us a little bit about your background and also, why you wanted to write this book?

Dr. Jill Carnahan: Sure, and thanks for having me. I am so excited to be here and love your platform and your work as well. I love how we all collaborate and support one another. So good. So important. I always learn. That’s a great thing, right? All these things I learned from you and everybody out there. So I’m in Boulder, Colorado. I do functional medicine consulting. I’m a medical doctor, an MD, but I really have a larger toolbox than just drugs and surgery, which we definitely need in the world of detox because drugs can be one of the toxins. Again, there’s a place for those. I still prescribe and do all of that, but I just have a much larger toolbox now to use for people who are sick with chronic illness and the book. So interesting. This is a lot of my story, 25-year-old in medical school pursuing my dream of becoming a doctor when I was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. So, all of a sudden, I had to face my own mortality and really, where the rubber meets the road.

Even though I was in allopathic medical school training to become a classical physician, I still always had a holistic mindset. I grew up on a farm in Central Illinois. My mother was a retired nurse. I was one of five children. That’s why she retired, took care of the kids, and we had a garden of organic produce. Instead of running to the doctor for every little scratch and thing, she would often have teas, tinctures, herbal remedies, or food. So I learned very early that there were other ways than just prescription medication and grew up that way with a mindset that the body has the potential to heal.

So I had a great foundation, and it wasn’t like we didn’t go to the doctor. I mean, we had normal doctor-pediatrician appointments, but it was just a mindset of, “What else could we do before we run to get an antibiotic?” But even so, as a child, I was incredibly sick with allergies and infections, and probably, by the time I was 10 years old, I had at least 10, or 20 courses of antibiotics. So I was a sick child. Of course, what do you do when you’re 25? You’re faced with this life-threatening illness. You believe in holistic medicine, but you have to decide.

So I ended up choosing very aggressive three-drug chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, like the whole works conventionally. This is a key for listeners, and I love to share this. At that time, you don’t know what the right choice is, and you think a medicine is black and white, and it’s not. It’s full of gray. There are no absolutes in medicine even in the best clinics or the best places. So I had to decide what I was going to do, and what I did was this very, very aggressive therapy.

At that moment, with the information I had, I had to take that and make the best decision, and I’ve never looked back. Even though the breast cancer was easy, I overcame that within nine months, and I was considered in remission. It’s never coming back, and I’m over 20 years out. But what happened is the therapy that I chose caused immune deficiency and gut dysfunction, and six months after I finished my treatment for the breast cancer, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and it’s absolutely connected because one of the drugs that I got from my chemotherapy creates a massive leaky gut or permeability. That’s part of how it fights the cancer because that’s dumping into the immune system. It creates an immune reaction that fights cancer.

So, all good. It saved my life. No regrets, but I literally understand now that you have to really think about this thing as a whole because now I’m living 20 years out and still dealing with some of the effects from that choice back then, even though it saved my life. So you find the best of both worlds. I did, during that time, see a naturopath, and prayer meditation. So I still did all the integrative therapies. Later on, you look at this, and toxicity has been a huge theme as well.

So we can dive into that, but all that to say is my book is my memoir, my story, and even though I was told, “Unless you’re very, very famous, you can’t write a memoir,” I felt the connective tissue between us as humans is a story. So I felt very strongly that my story, number one, creates meaning and purpose for me when I share it and all the stuff I’ve been through. But even more so, the patients, the people reading, the clinicians, whoever, all of us can relate to one another through story. So my hope is in the book, people see their own lives and their own journeys and are encouraged and inspired just because I can show them. Well, at least for me, this is how I overcame some pretty awful things in my life.

Dr. Wendy Myers:  Yeah, and you talk a lot about detoxification and the importance of that. Can you talk about that, the role of detoxification in your recovery and your health journey?

Dr. Jill Carnahan: Absolutely. This is like the core, and there’s a chapter six called Transforming Toxicity. It’s a lot about my experience later on with mold-related illness, but toxicity goes way deeper. Before we got on, we were talking, you and I, about how it’s environmental toxicity. When I first thought about the book idea years ago, I thought, “Oh, it’s just going to be environmental toxicity.” But then, we go through relational toxicity. I went through a divorce and some very unhealthy relationships, and I realized, “Oh, there’s relational toxicity, and if you’re with the wrong person, and you’re not healthy, and you’re not engaging in a healthy way, that’s toxic to our immune system and our bodies as well.” Then, emotional toxicity, these patterns of thinking, old programming from our childhood that we’re still thinking about, and even childhood trauma. Whether that’s trauma with a big T or little T, the stuff that we all have, it’s all of this is environmental toxic load.

I really believe the thing that we’re seeing that’s creating so much illness and so much dysfunction among almost anyone with autoimmunity, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and any of these complex chronic things that we’re seeing is related to the elephant in the room, which is our environmental toxic load that is exponentially increasing every year as we throw into untested chemicals in the environment, and they act in synergistic ways that we don’t even understand. We’re all literally drowning in this load of toxicity, and unless we’re aware of it. We used to be able to do a spa once a year. 20 years ago, you had your 21 days at the spa. I’d do a detox, or I would go to Switzerland and do a liver gallbladder refresh or retreat. Nowadays, and we’ll talk about some of this, you must incorporate daily habits that are keeping you in detox mode.

I know you’re a fan of that, too. We can talk about specifics, but I’m such a fan of not just doing this in January when we’re feeling guilty, but literally choosing every day, “What am I doing to breathe clean air, drink clean water, eat clean food, and put inputs, and then keep that bucket level of toxic water level down?” I always use the analogy of a bucket level. We’re all born with that bucket, and as the water level fills up over our lifetime and spills over the top, it presents with the things I mentioned: cancer, autoimmunity, neurodegeneration, and really, all the complex chronicity in some ways related to our environmental toxic load.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I mean, I just can’t stress this enough. Everyone that comes on this podcast is talking about how these toxins are affecting our metabolism, our gut, and our immune system. You spoke on my Heavy docuseries about how these environmental toxins are affecting us with our weight, weight loss resistance, diabetes, and hormone issues. I mean, you name it. It doesn’t matter what the body system is, these toxins are affecting us in so many different ways. So you also talk a lot about mold toxicity. Can you talk a little about that and how that is a problem for so many people?

Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yeah. So this is the thing that if you just ask. So I have lots of patients come into my office in person nowadays, and they’ll be like, “I have this issue. I have new thyroiditis. I have a new MS.” Whatever it is, they may have cognitive issues where they’re afraid they’re going to get Alzheimer’s, a journey of memory, brain fog, or just fatigue and migraines. All of these things are super common, and mold can be at the root of so many of these complex chronic things because mold can hit any part of the system. It can be immunotoxic, so causes immune suppression, and old viruses, tick-borne infections, or other things that were dormant start to activate because your immune system can’t keep them in check. It can cause autoimmunity. It can cause, as you mentioned, weight gain, leptin resistance, diabetes, obesity, sleep issues, and mood issues. I could go on, and on, and on. You name a system, and I could tell you how mold affects it.

So the patients are walking into the office saying, “I have chronic migraines. I have chronic heartburn or histamine issues. I have mast cell activation syndrome. I have new onset thyroiditis, lupus.” Whatever it is, or even cancers, or other kinds of very, very serious illnesses. What they may not put together is that mold could be a root trigger to all of these things, and that’s counterintuitive because, in medical school, we are taught, “Oh, this one disease and one cause,” and we weren’t taught about the multifactorial issues in the environment.

At the core, I explained it very simply, almost everyone that I see has two things going on, toxic load and infectious burden. It’s where those two things interplay because as the toxicity increases and the water in your bucket level rises when it spills at the tops, we have overcome our capacity. We’re created as detox machines, so we have it in us to be able to dump the water out of the bucket and create margin, which gives us backspace to do what we need to do and live healthy. But if we’re not actively conscious about that, that water creeps up and pours over the top. Like I said, then we present with illness.

So, back to mold. Patients are walking in the office and saying brain fog, migraines, fibromyalgia, you name it, and they have no idea that at the root was mold as one or more of the triggers. So how do you know? So if I just say, “Do you have mold in your house?” 99% of people are like, “No,” or, “Oh, I had an inspection. It was fine,” because people don’t realize that that fridge leak that they took care of and maybe didn’t dry out completely could cause mold. That tiny little leak under their sink. One day they went over for the weekend to the mountains, they came back, there was a little bit of flood under their sink. That water damage to porous materials is a breeding ground for mold. So it doesn’t matter how small, or your kids splashing in the bathtub, and every single night, they throw the water over the edge of the tub, your tile isn’t sealed well, or your grout is not waterproof, which many people don’t know.

One little pearl here I’ll throw in because I mentioned the fridge. I will never, ever again hook up my waterline to my fridge to water. I just unhooked it and capped it because I’ve seen so many people, including myself, in my neighbor’s condo. The waterline flooded my place, and Chaetomium and mold grew here. So there are simple things. Not that you all have to forgo the fridge line, but it’s not a big deal to me. I’d rather just make my own ice, and it’s so worth it to not have that risk of mold. Washer, dryer, sinks. I mean, we have so many water sources, and people are like, “Oh, well, I live in a brand new house,” or, “It’s brand new construction.” That is no guarantee.

In fact, most of the people I find that have issues are in very, very nice, sometimes multimillion-dollar homes, sometimes new builds, and it doesn’t matter because construction nowadays is much more porous materials like particle board and drywall. We have construction right next door to my condo here, and they’re out in the snow, in the rain, in the sleet, and they’re not finished. So all of that wood is getting soaked, and if later on, there’s any sort of water source, it’s a nidus for mold growth.

So these kinds of questions, “Is there intrusion into your windows? Has there been any roof leaks? Has there been any issues with the attic space or the crawl spaces? Has your sump pump ever flooded?” Then, when you start asking these questions, patients are like, “Oh, yeah. My basement flooded, and we dried it out with a fan.” Well, that’s not good enough because it’s likely that mold is growing, and what we don’t know about mold, or I’ll tell you about it. Right behind this wall, we could have a factory of mold. It’s invisible. I don’t see it. I may even feel okay initially, and that mold produces mycotoxins.

Mycotoxins are the problem. These are 2.5 microns and smaller, which means they’re as small as the COVID-19 virus. So unless you have an air filter or something taking those very, very fine particulates, we call them VOCs, Volatile Organic Compounds, out of your air, literally, we breathe in, they go straight into the alveoli, do not pass/go. They’re so small, they can go right into the bloodstream. Within five seconds of breathing the smoke from the factory of mold in my wall, without me knowing it, I’m going to have brain fog symptoms, and I don’t know where it’s from. So, often, I have to be the detective to help patients connect the dots from moving to a new home, or from a flood, or from water damage, or from something to their current symptoms and say, “Do you think it maybe could be connected?” Then, we’ll do the testing to find out.

Dr. Wendy Myers: One thing with mold that has always really perplexed me is that everyone is exposed to mold. So I live here in Mexico, and you just leave the house for a couple of days, and the house reeks of mold. I’m surrounded by mold, and most people are as well. So why are some people really affected by mold, and others seem to not be bothered by it?

Dr. Jill Carnahan: Okay. Love this question. So there’s a couple answers. Number one is there is an old connection to the limbic system. So we talked just briefly about trauma, and so there is a connection. First of all, we know, and I did the research to write about it in my book, that just inhalation of a chemical can literally cause HPA axis triggering of the amygdala and the fight-or-flight response. So, literally, just a chemical. Say you’re going down an aisle of a chemical store in a farm implement store, or something for chemicals, or pesticides, or whatever. Sometimes those kinds of chemicals can literally trigger the physiological trauma response, and mold is no different.

This is why even if you’ve done your emotional work, you’ve seen a therapist, you’re really, really healthy, mold can still be a very traumatic limbic trigger to the best of us no matter who you are, or what you do. It’s definitely worse if you’ve had an undealt with trauma because your limbic system is already ready for the next thing to be triggered. So there’s a definite triggering, and I would say almost 100% of patients that get well from mold-related illness and no longer have severe reactions like myself, we’ve done the work. So you have to do a limbic piece of it to really uncouple that fear response.

Again, you can be like, “Oh, I’m fine. It’s moldy again. I know I’ll be okay.” But if you haven’t dealt with that kind of hypothalamic automatic response, the limbic system is absolutely involved. So that’s a piece of the puzzle, and then genetics are the second part of the puzzle because about one in four patients has difficulty with the innate immune system tagging these things as problems. So our body has to tag a bacteria, a virus, a mold toxin, and say, “This is not supposed to be here,” and then escort it out through the detox pathways. However some people are unable to tag these mycotoxins, so they accumulate in the tissues, and they start to create dysfunction on a cytokine level.

So what happens is they poke the immune system. The immune system, when it’s poked or thinks there’s a dangerous stranger, will start to produce IL-6, IL-2, all the cytokines we learned about during COVID, and those cytokines will cause damage to the body. So it’s literally our own immune system that is triggered by an invader that it can’t get rid of and causes collateral damage, but it’s not even always the mold. It’s literally sometimes our own immune system. In those patients that can’t tag that and eliminate it, it’s a vicious cycle internally of inflammation and chronic activation of the immune system, and this is what really causes some of the most long-term damage.

Dr. Wendy Myers: It seems like people that have gut issues, also, they’re going to have their immune system is going to be overloaded, and it just can’t take, again, one more thing, the stranger danger, all these toxins, and then add the mold on top of that. It’s just that people can’t handle it.

Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yeah, and mold is a perfect storm with the gut because, number one, it triggers more permeability. We know the data. It will often lower MSH, Melanocyte Stimulating Hormone, and in rat studies, lower MSH then link to, number one, leaky gut, for sure. Number two, even Crohn’s and colitis. So this lower MSH decreases gut barrier integrity. You have just Swiss cheese for the gut. So, all of a sudden, all the stuff you’re eating, all the bacteria, all the coatings, all the stuff, even if it’s like food, leaks into the bloodstream, and the body is like, “What the heck is this doing here? This is a corn piece. It shouldn’t be here,” or, “This is a piece of bacteria, a coating called LPS,” which is another trigger, and then all of a sudden, that immune system and the body gets completely overloaded. So mold makes that permeability worse. It also activates histamine release and the gut is a huge place for histamine release. This can cause more permeability, more symptoms, heartburn, diarrhea, and damage to the gut, and mucosa, and all of this perpetuates that cycle and the gut is absolutely involved in mold.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, and so let’s also talk about emotional trauma because certainly, with any cancer, there’s going to be an emotional trauma component, and I believe most physical health issues have an emotional trauma component as well. So tell us about that in your journey and how you talk about that in your book as well.

Dr. Jill Carnahan: So I talk a lot about this in the last chapter because it’s like tying everything together and realizing this may be the most important thing. I will talk about a couple of things. Gabor Maté, one of my favorite authors, has a new book out, Myth of Normal. A great, great resource, and it puts a lot of his other work together, but he talks about breast cancer in particular being this is a disease of our nurturing organs. It’s how we feed our babies and feed the next generation with nourishment. The metaphor of breast cancer is a woman who is nourishing the world, pouring out, loving people, sacrificing herself, but not taking care of herself. It’s funny because I grew up in that tradition of your sacrifice, you love, you serve, but I didn’t understand how to love myself.

Then, we go to autoimmune disease and the metaphor there is it’s literally your own immune system attacking your own tissues. So thyroiditis, your body attacks the thyroid. MS attacks the neurons and neuromuscular junctions. Lupus might attack the skin or other organs. So there’s all these, and you can name any autoimmune disease, and the same thing, it attacks some part of the body. So, metaphorically, autoimmune disease is an attack of the self. Self-hatred, self-loathing, “I’m not worthy,” those messages. So this stuff is very relevant not only to me but to other women, other men, and people out there. I know we can relate.

For me, I met my ex-husband at 19. I got married at 21, just starting medical school, three children, and stepchildren. So I was in medical school with three stepchildren, totally taking care of all of them and my ex-husband. It seemed normal for me, but I look back, I’m like, “How did she do it? She put aside her needs.” Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s this loving, giving heart. We want to be self-sacrificial and loving, but if we do it at the expense of ourselves, my body is raising its hand and saying, “Um, excuse me, Jill. If you don’t start taking care of us, we’re going to get your attention, and we’re going to use autoimmunity. I had celiac, Crohn’s, thyroiditis, and cancer to get your attention.” Granted there are physiological genetic reasons I got those diseases, but there is no doubt in my mind that part of this was the self-denial, the self-hatred, that it’s not even loving myself. That was a piece of the puzzle of me getting ill.

One of the most profound healings that I realized was, number one, we need to love ourselves, and this is not wrong. Again, I grew up in a very conservative culture where you don’t love yourself, you love others, but I realized that’s not true. That’s not right. But even more than that. I lived up here in the analytical mind, and that was reinforced in medical school like, “Don’t trust your heart. Don’t trust your intuition. It’s all here.” After the age of 40, I started going back into my body, becoming embodied, less dissociated, and actually feeling and understanding truth from a heart level, not a mind level.

When I did that, I started being able to trust that my body was giving sleep. You ignore your body. You’re taught to literally dissociate and ignore your physiological needs. It’s actually reinforced. So I had to relearn to get in touch with my body, and that was part of the healing. But in order to do that, you have to trust that the signals like, “Oh, I have a stomach ache. Oh, am I upset with someone? Am I angry? Is it the food that I ate?” It could be any one of those things, but you start to get in touch with the signals.

Our body is designed to give us feedback and tell us what direction to go, what to eat, what to do, and how to live, but we so often dissociate from the pain or the symptoms because we feel like, “Oh, in our society, pain is bad. Cover it up.” Right? But that’s just a way of ignoring the body’s signals that say, “Help me, please. Please help me. I’m telling you what to do.” So in order to love myself, I had to literally get back in touch with my body and say, “What are you telling me? What do you need?”

When I first started working with a therapist almost a decade ago she’d say, “What do you need?” I’d almost panic because I didn’t know. I had no concept of having a need and asking for it to be met, and I literally had to start with. She’d say, “Okay. What do you need?” “Okay. I need a drink of water.” I would just pick up a glass and take a sip of water, just reinforcing that something as simple as I need a sip of water that I could provide for my own body, and that was part of the healing.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I think there are so many women and men listening to this that can absolutely identify this. There are a lot of very smart people listening to this podcast, and I think a lot of us do go into that intellectualism, and as a trauma response, that perfectionism to not feel things and to repress things, forget about things, not wanting to feel things that are unpleasant, and process them, and without realizing at all. That definitely translates into a lot of different health issues and lots of conventional medical research to show the connection between emotional trauma and physical health issues. So let’s talk more about your book. What are some of the other things that people will learn in your book?

Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yeah. So it’s a very unique book because what I wanted to do is write a memoir and not because I wanted everybody to read my story. It’s because my true desire is that as you, the reader, would read, you would see your reflection and your story in mind because we’re all human. We all have common suffering, and joys, and strengths, and weaknesses. When we tell a story, the reason for that is a connection because we can understand through the story, we can relate. So my goal in telling the story was that people would see their reflection, and then I talk literally about forgiveness or loving ourselves, or these things. I literally, in some of the chapters, stop and say, “Is there anyone you need to forgive?” or, “Are you loving yourself? Here’s some tools.” But then, I also wanted, like all my colleagues’ books out here, the how-to guide like 30 Days to Lose Weight or How to Fix Autoimmune Disease.

So I struggled long and hard, and really put a lot of effort into how to combine this in this how-to manual, but actually, a story. I wanted people to be able to sit at night. I have some of those books that I can flip through in an hour or so and get the main ideas by reading chapter headings, sidebars, and things, but it’s not really something I’d want to sit down with a comfortable blanket and a cup of hot chocolate, and nourishing. Then, there’s the books that are the novels, or the little tidbit stories, or like Anne Lamott, or any of these people that are great authors. I was like, “I want that kind of book where people feel like they’re having coffee with me or sitting down and getting a glimpse into my life.”

So I did that. I have the memoir, but what we did is in each chapter, there are sidebars on how to know if you have mold in your home, what to do if you have mold, what kind of testing to do if you have mold, how to be self-compassionate to yourself in this process, what are the benefits of raising your children without toxins, and just on, and on, and on. So I feel like we’ve got both, and if you want to read the memoir, ignore the sidebars. You can get just the story. If you want to just flip through the sidebars and grab those tidbits, you got that, but it’s all in one, and it starts with my journey growing up on the farm and realizing when I got breast cancer. I had this idyllic life on the farm, right? Five children, mother and father who loved us and loved one another, a very wholesome upbringing, but unbeknownst to me, that farm, the chemicals, that well water was killing me slowly.

So I had to really learn and understand, and I tell the story of that, and then the story of I had this wonderful family. There was no awful, terrible abuse or anything, but I was this highly sensitive, delicate, creative child in a family of stoic, German, Swiss, hard, pulled by the bootstraps, don’t complain, don’t be afraid, all these things, and I learned to be put on this mask to show up and be strong like my brothers. But underneath was this little girl who was really scared sometimes and also more sensitive. As I re-parented that little girl, I came alive, and I healed so many things.

I think what you said earlier was so key. I realized in the telling that some of my relationship toxicity, the choice of the wrong men, wrong partners, even abusive partners were based on a 5 or 8-year-old little girl that had wounds that were unhealed, and I talked through. So not only the mold-related illness, the biotoxin and detox. All that is in there, but I go way, way deeper and share on a personal level because as you said earlier, there are women and men, but many people out there that have successful businesses. They have it all together. They look on the outside like they are the epitome of success, and yet, they’re still in a toxic relationship or a toxic marriage, or they don’t know how to parent, or they don’t know how to be with their parents, or whatever relationships they’re having. They’re not healthy, and we don’t talk about that because there’s shame around. We think we have to have it all together. We think we have to present this thing to the world.

I’m a mess, and I’m okay. A hot mess or not even one, not even a very hot one, but all to say I try to really go to that level of being so vulnerable to say, “I’m here with you. We are all in this together. We just don’t always talk about it. You may look at me. I have a practice, all these things. I speak around the world, but I still have issues, and I’m willing to share those with you because I bet you do, too. Let’s, together, try to work on this and show up the best that we can, and here are the things I’ve learned.”

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I love that because it’s so true that so many of us. People listening to this show are intuitive, empaths, are very highly sensitive people, and we do tend to attract less desirable partners, narcissists, or people we want to save, or just, “That was one of my favorite projects, so I’m going to help them with their trauma, and save them, and whatnot.” It’s incredibly draining and incredibly stressful, and we get addicted to these stress chemicals, and the high, and then this cycle of whatever kind of relationship that we get into, but yeah, it’s a huge contributing factor to people’s stress levels and lack of recovery, and contributing to their physical health issues as well.

Dr. Jill Carnahan: So true. In fact, I have more, and more, and more. I mean, I’m all about the functionalists rather than the biochemistry, but more and more, I’m like, “Oh, the real healing is somatic behavioral therapy, getting embodied.” All the things we’re talking about at this level, having healthy relationships, those are actually more powerful healers than any of those supplements, or the IVs, or any of the other stuff.

Dr. Wendy Myers: It really does boil down to self-love. Is it when you don’t love yourself, or you self-abandon, or you have these emotional traumas like fear of loneliness, survival, fear, self-hatred, and self-worth issues? You’re going to attract someone that reflects that inner voice, essentially. Well, Jill, thanks so much for coming on the show. You’re an expert in detoxification. Can you just, I guess, in parting, give us some of your favorite detox tips?

Dr. Jill Carnahan: You got it. So detox can happen through the skin, through the liver, through the kidneys. All of our body, all of our organs help, but the biggest part of this is probably our bio-transformation in the liver and gallbladder. Let’s just take mold, for example, this will work for many toxins, not just mold, but it’s a great example because it’s a common one, and it’s probably one of the harder ones to detox. What you really want to do is do something to enhance glutathione production. Most people tolerate liposomal oral, IV, intranasal, inhaled glutathione. You can do almost any form. Get it in your body, in your tissues, and liposomal tends to work well because it bypasses the gut and the breakdown in the gut, but any form of those will work.

There is a small percentage of people that have very bad reactive oxygen in their body that have oxidative stress. This could be determined by high lipid peroxides in the urine. If that’s the case, some people will oxidize glutathione very quickly. They can’t reduce it, and so they actually do worse in the beginning. If you’re like, “Oh, I should be taking glutathione, but I feel horrible when I take it,” you might be one of those, and you might need to wait until you’re a little less toxic to take glutathione.

So if you can’t take glutathione, what can you do? You can do precursors like N-acetyl cysteine, alpha-lipoic acid, and two-rate limiting amino acids like glycine and glutamine. Selenium is a cofactor of vitamin C. For my first part of mold-related illness, I couldn’t take glutathione for about a year. I did all these other things. So that’s glutathione production. Glutathione is the main driver of phase one, phase two in the liver, and that’s where you take things from your tissues, like say these mycotoxins, fat-soluble, have accumulated in your body and your tissues. You need to mobilize them into the bloodstream, and then have your liver and your kidneys filter them, and then you need to excrete them through the bowels, through the sweat, through the urine, or whatever, and so mobilization, glutathione.

The second thing would be anything to support the liver itself. My favorite is milk thistle. Super simple. It grows wild out here as I’m walking along the streets. Milk thistle is huge, also called silymarin, but you could also use NAC, ALA, or any other liver support. Are things that allow your body to secrete bile better. Bile is where is stored after it’s excreted from phase one, phase two into a water-soluble form into the bile that’s held in that gallbladder, which is a sack that holds the bile, and then squirted out into your gut.

Our bodies are about 95% efficient in reabsorbing that bile. So if you don’t intervene with a binder, you can just reabsorb the toxins. So the last thing here is binders. I use clay. I use charcoal. I use glycogen and chlorella, zeolite, and there are many, many more. There are charts in places now where you can look up different types of toxins and the best binder, but I find because they’re slightly differently charged, it’s best to just combine. In my history, plain old charcoal worked amazingly for a lot of my Texas diet. You can buy it over the counter almost everywhere. So you don’t have to be expensive or complicated here, but I do love some of the new products with lots of combinations. Zeolite, clay, and charcoal are some of my favorites, and that is a core. But like I said, that’s mobilizing, excreting. You want to make sure the bowels are moving. Keep mag citrate or buffered vitamin C there to keep the bowels going. You want to make sure you’re mobilizing from tissues. That would be like coffee enemas packed over your liver or an infrared sauna is a huge piece of that as well.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes. Absolutely. So thank you so much for that, Dr. Carnahan. Again, thanks so much for coming on the Myers Detox Podcast and for being a speaker on the Heavy docuseries, which is coming out at the end of 2023. I’m really excited for that. So tell us where we can learn more about your work and get your book Unexpected.

Dr. Jill Carnahan: Thank you, Wendy. As always, thanks for having me. So you can find everything on my website, jillcarnahan.com. Free blogs, and podcasts. The book is there. If you click there, you can get a signed copy of that. I also have a documentary coming out, so if you want to stay tuned. It’s a film festival, so it’s not distributed yet. But if you want to see the trailer or just see what’s coming out, it’s just doctorpatientmovie.com.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. Fantastic. I can’t wait for that. I know you’re talking about toxins in that documentary as well. So, everyone, thanks so much for joining again for this hour of the Myers Detox Podcast. We’re coming up on the 500th episode. I’ve been doing this podcast for almost 10 years, and I’ll have a lot more to talk about and a lot more years of doing this show. I just really appreciate you tuning in every week and joining in. So talk to you guys next week.