Toxic Clothes: How Microplastics and Chemicals Are Disrupting Your Hormones
with Darin Olien
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast, where we talk about everything related to detox, anti-aging, bioenergetics, and so much more, so many different advanced health topics that you’re not going to hear about on other shows. Today I have Darin Olien on the show, and he’s going to be talking about all the different documentary work that he does educating people about how to dramatically improve their lives, improve their health, and really shines a spotlight on a lot of different issues, especially around toxicity. Today we’re going to focus on the toxicity in clothes, the dark, dirty secrets of the clothing industry, the cheap throwaway clothes, the toxic dyes that are in clothes, how so many clothes we’re buying from the big corporate brands are full of petroleum and plastics and forever chemicals like PFOS and how those being on your skin for 24 hours a day, especially if you’re sweating and working out like a lot of the athletic clothes, how these like microplastics are soaking in through into your body through your skin.
I think it’s something that I have not explored on the podcast before, but Darin has actually shot a documentary about this. So, we’re going to talk about that in depth. He has a lot of expertise. He has been on the ground as a foot soldier talking to different clothing manufacturers and the pollution that is caused by the clothing industry and how the second biggest polluter on the earth is the clothing industry, that is the clothes and landfills, et cetera. So, we’ll deep dive on that today.
Our guest today, Darin Olien, is the co-host of the Emmy award winning number one Netflix docuseries called Down to Earth with Zach Efron. It’s really good. You got to check that out. Spending nearly 20 years exploring the planet discovering new and underutilized exotic foods and medicinal plants, a super food hunter, Darin Olean developed Shakeology grossing over 4 billion in sales since 2008 for Beachbody. He also created a plant-based Ultimate Reset 21-Day Detoxification Program for the company as well. From his years of experience in the health space, he wrote his New York Times best-selling book, Super Life, and it’s about the five fixes that will keep you healthy, fit, and eternally awesome, as well as his new book, Fatal Conveniences. As host of the widely popular podcast, the Darin Olien Show, Darin curiously explores people, solutions, and health, as well as life’s fatal conveniences. He also does a segment of the show uncovering modern-day flaws and challenges that might be undermining our health and environment. Darin is also the founder of Barucas, the most nutrient-dense nut in the world, coming from the Savannah Cerrado of Brazil. Through sustainable business practices, the company’s committed to supporting this important biome by planting 20 million brazita trees, while getting one of the most delicious nuts on the planet. You can check out Darin’s website at darinolien.com. He’s changing that to superlife.com. Both sites will get you to check out more of his work. Darin, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Darin Olien
Wendy. It’s great to be here.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, actually last weekend I was watching your show on Netflix. It is called Down to Earth. You co-hosted that with Zac Efron. I watched the first three episodes. It was really, really interesting. Can you tell the audience what that show is exactly and why you created that?
Darin Olien
That came by way of actually not quite on a napkin, but I had an idea. I had been exploring the world from a botanical standpoint and formulating. I had seen a lot of things going on in the world with lack of water and food and the environmental issues firsthand. So, I started kind of thinking that there’s a lot of great information that could be shown that people just don’t know much about. I’d written this idea of like, let’s touch base on blue zones. Let’s talk about water. Let’s talk about agriculture. Let’s bring in this whole thing but also make it entertaining. I had kind of put that in the side and then from a podcast I had been on, Zach had heard it and then through back-channel friends of friends, he had reached out and we kind of developed a friendship from there. And then just like happenstance, we learned about what each other were doing. He asked me one day, what else are you up to? I said, I have this idea of a show and I wasn’t pitching it to him at all. It was just something that kind of caught him as to something he was interested in and bringing about.
The show Down to Earth is really pretty simple. It’s the idea that there are great people in the world dedicated to solutions on this planet of things that could be better. It’s highlighting great people doing great things. It just so happens that we’re traveling around the world doing it. So, he loved it so much that he kind of walked that directly into Netflix and away we went. We did a couple of seasons of that. We won some Emmys, which were pinch yourself moments. He’s focused on his career now and other things. I’m currently right in the middle of developing a whole new show, where we’re amplifying that and so much more now. So, I love the medium and I love the creativity. I love putting good messages out for really about solutions. That’s where the center point of my career starts and stops. It is about trying to help people as much as possible and relaying things that maybe people just don’t know about and that also is helpful because that’s hopeful, right? So yeah, that’s how that happened.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about the project you’re working on right now?
Darin Olien
I can’t get into much detail because we’re right in the pre-production and stuff, but it’s six other countries. These countries are opening up the treasure chest of what they’re involved in and what they’re up to, both from a quality-of-life standpoint and environmental. And so, with this time, we have the full support of countries. That’s really credited, and we’ve got some Academy Award winning directors involved. Like I said, we’re right in the middle of that, and we will probably start principal filming in October.
Dr. Wendy Myers
On this show, we talk a lot about toxins and detoxification and what toxins are doing to our health. Can you touch on that a little bit? Because like in your work, I see on social media, you’ve got so many followers and I hear you talk a lot about toxins in our environment and how they’re affecting us. Can you touch on that?
Darin Olien
Yeah, that’s a big one. I became more aware of this in the nineties when my father was suffering from chemical sensitivity. It was this idea that foreign chemicals, whether they’re in our clothing, carpet, materials, personal care, or beauty products. There’s 60 to 80, 000 toxins that are created every year that are just put in our environment. Of that, very, very little are tested. And certainly, none of them are tested as safe as they interact with our bodies. That’s what my dad was suffering from. It was a strange kind of understanding to see your father suffering from something invisible. He would get off gassing t-shirts. He would get off gassing of colognes, perfumes, and laundry detergents, all of this stuff. It would fog him out. Essentially, his neurological system would just get hijacked. This is a high functioning person. So, the origin of me starting to understand that there are a lot of untested, unregulated chemicals spewing in our environment was all the way back to the nineties.
I decided to write a book on this and dug really deeply into it with about 15 researchers and looking at everything from electromagnetic fields, that’s from Wi-fi routers to millimeter waves and cell phone towers and electromagnetic pollution of all sorts, from gaming devices and laptops, you name it. We’re adding more and more of this type of pollution on us, and it’s actually quite dangerous. That was a chapter on personal care, beauty, clothing, and on average, a t-shirt. A regular t-shirt that you buy is typically under some sort of slave labor because the cost is not correct, based on truly growing cotton in this example to then preparing it, weaving it, creating it, and selling it. So, with all of that, it takes about 8, 000 chemicals, literally, to create one t-shirt and the chemicals to spray on the highly toxified cotton fields, one of the most highly toxic pesticide and herbicide ridden agricultural industries in the world. And then transforming that, bleaching that with formaldehydes and crazy dyes, and that type of process, and then weaving it with petroleum-based materials.
Most of our clothing has some sort of petroleum weave. It’s either elastane or some PFOS, which is a fluorine chemical that’s stain resistant, water proof, heat resistant, and you might know it as the godfather of that was the Teflon pan. So now this PFOS has proliferated throughout our planet. It’s confirmed that 99 percent of the population has PFOS in their blood and it’s highly carcinogenic. It’s linked to metabolic disorders, diabetes, high cholesterol, overall and various forms of cancers. This is a bio-accumulator. It’s a forever chemical. These are just one class of chemicals in an array of parabens, phthalates, dyes, fragrances, and all of that stuff that’s undisclosed, untested, unregulated, and people might be listening to this going no way. And I get it. It is that shocking. It is that alarming and it is what’s happening.
I just finished a film on the clothing industry called Let Them Be Naked with a good friend of mine, Jeff Garner, who’s been a pioneer in the clean fashion world for the greater part of 20 years. We dug in. We went into the facilities. We had materials tested. We were doing things to see. We saw where the discharge of this stuff was. So now in terms of clothing, you’re putting petroleum, you’re putting chemicals, you’re putting it on your body. It’s like wearing a water bottle. It’s plastic. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of if you walk down your aisle and your grocery stores that on the face of it, you think that some organization, has deemed that safe and has been tested and proven as safe when in fact, the majority of those haven’t been proven safe or been tested.
So, the products that we are being sold to, from even food, obviously, with the overuse of pesticides, herbicides, atrazine, glyphosate, you name it, that’s not on the label of a grape, not on the label of rice. This is a world that’s invisible to us, and if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t push back on this, then it stays invisible and it stays in the corners. The problem is, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the shift in our metabolic disorders. Over 70 percent of our population has two or more core morbidities, like things that you’re starting to die from, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, you name it, because we’ve offloaded fresh whole food, clean water, and we’ve offloaded it to hundreds of chemicals reoriented and reconstituted themselves and put back together to create ultra processed food. We’ve processed our food into food when it actually is not food anymore. It’s mostly chemicals. This whole thing is so in our face that my first book called Super Life is like, hey, eat fresh fruits and vegetables and drink good water and support your microbiome.
It’s tried and true, but there’s a second big problem. The elephant in the room of our society is these fatal conveniences. These things, these chemicals, these electromagnetic fields, these products that are absolutely not beneficial to us, and in fact, very detrimental. It’s not one smoking gun. It’s not one thing. It’s many things added up and when you keep slathering lotion on with fragrances and parabens and phthalates, it’s not that you’re dying from the one application. You’re harming your endocrine system over time. And then next thing you know, a year of using that fragrance filled, petroleum-based phthalate filled lotion becomes the undercut of your entire operating system. That operating system is hormones that are there to regulate your body. So, these endocrine system modulators are chemically induced and change the fabric of our fertility on the planet. So, it’s heavy.
The warriors of us out there that want to do something different, that want to take our health into our hands, that want to take our sovereignty back, we have to be aware of the world that we were born into. I’m not saying one person or one thing is bad. It’s a system that has gone unchecked for a very long time and we all become the victim of that unless we awaken our awareness to see what’s going on. That’s you filtering your water, changing out your aluminum based, fragrance filled deodorants for a healthier version, changing out your laundry detergent, changing out this one thing over time to regain that strength again and reclaim those parts of us that get undercut by this kind of a crazy corporate profit centered focused point. And again, there are great people in some of these corporations trying to do the right thing. But I think the power of us knowing more about it, we can do things today. We can choose. I went on a little rant there, but that’s what’s going on and that’s why I wrote that book.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, we have to vote with our dollars. We have to make better choices and there are a lot of things that you can do to turn this ship around with our health. That’s what I talked about in my heavy docuseries. It is all these different major health issues that have heavy metals and chemicals as an underlying root cause. I don’t think people realize how many of their health issues are caused by heavy metals and toxins. Something I haven’t really touched on very much is the toxins in clothing. I don’t think I’ve ever done a show about that. So, can you expand on that a little bit because there’s a lot of health enthusiasts out there wearing their Lululemons and wearing their Nikes and wearing all these different clothing products that have the round and the elastin and they’re essentially petroleum-based plastics all day long, 24/7 on their skin. The food you’re exposed to, three times a day, can you expand on that a little bit?
Darin Olien
Yeah, this is a big one and people don’t grok this fully. So you first have to understand that what goes on your skin has a high likelihood of going in your body, and then in your blood. And now, as we are being able to test further and further, and our tests are getting more sensitive. We realize we have plastics everywhere in our body. From our heart, to our sexual organs, to you name it. Plastics and petroleum are floating around in our bodies. So, where’s all this coming from? Again, there’s not one smoking gun, but clothing is this thing where you don’t register. When you see a plastic water bottle, you go, yeah, that’s probably not the best. Hopefully a bunch of your listeners are keenly aware that those who put that water bottle are chelating and leaching into that water. So the squishier that plastic those are phthalates. It makes it squishier. So that means it’s more and more permeable to enter the water. Think of that noW because that’s petroleum based.
Most of your clothes are petroleum-based. Every elastic yoga pants and stretchy shirt, all of it is a form of petroleum-based toxic material. The worst scenario ever is athletic wear. You’re sweating in that. Your pores are opening to it and you’re breathing in through your skin, not only the material that is 100 percent synthetic of these petroleum, nylons, rayons, all this stuff, as well as the huge amount of toxic dyes that are used to create the colors. So, you are bringing in a huge amount of toxic load. Think about the sensitive areas. The sexual organs, the underwear. If you take anything away from this part of the conversation, change your underwear, change your bras. They did tests, Victoria’s secret a long time ago. They had 300 different lawsuits against them at any one time. In the documentary, Let Them Be Naked, we did a test where a breastfeeding mom wore a sports bra, was going to take it off to breastfeed, and they swabbed the nipple full of petroleum and PFOS. PFOS is that forever chemical I was referring to. So now, your beautiful baby, you want to breastfeed, but it’s compromised, not to mention that placental border that we thought in the seventies, fifties, sixties, we thought was an impenetrable barrier to the outside world, when in fact, now over 200 chemicals are already in the umbilical cord of most children being born today. So, the chemical soup that we are in is already affecting unborn children as it relates to these things all in us and around us.
Clothing is not only toxic to your environment, endocrine disrupting, potentially carcinogenic with whatever the materials, bleaches, or the dyes have been used. But at the same time, the other flip is within, so without as it’s toxic to your environment, It’s also extremely toxic to create it. What do they do with the water that they’ve permanently changed? They discharge it. You go to Malaysia, Southeast Asia, China. There’s a satellite shot in China when they are dyeing blue jeans. They used to actually use natural indigo. Well, they don’t use that anymore. You can actually see when they’re dyeing blue jeans with the toxic blue from the satellite. You can see it in the river. This is the point. If you want to be an environmental activist, think of the environment as pollution. If you are polluting yourself, you are polluting your environment. You will not be as effective. You will be compromised unless you change it. You can change your environment, make it less hospitable to disease, breakdown, aging, you name it, and like you said, the layer of voting with your dollars is that I stop giving money to this toxic download of how they’re creating this stupid shirt that I thought I needed to work out in.
I said, no. There are multiple things going on by me saying no and not putting it on my body. I’m no longer toxified in this way. I’m also no longer purchasing from a toxic manufacturing process. I’m no longer participating in essentially slave labor. There’s a lot going on. The more conversation we have, the more people know, the more people we have. We always have the numbers from a few percent of the people making those choices. We have billions, but we need the economies of scale to match that cheap and easy to make toxic material. So, we lose the sense of what the true cost of anything is. Therein lies a tricky situation where people that can’t afford it, can’t afford it. They’ve been oppressed in that scenario. So, people like us can start to afford, do it because it’s good for you. It’s good for the larger world also if we change the economy. We changed our purchasing habits, then that economy will then filter down to the people that maybe couldn’t afford it then and can’t afford it later. Clothing is the second largest polluter on the planet. From the gross pollution stand, it’s the second largest polluter and you could argue it’s polluting you every day too by wearing that shit.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and then on top of that with the disposable clothing companies like shine and some other ones people just wear and they throw it away and it’s completely filling all the landfills. People are just throwing the clothes away. There’s just not enough landfills for all these clothes
Darin Olien
Yeah, and they can’t discard them. Again, the disconnect is close. You don’t think of it as toxic. You don’t think of it as a petroleum plastic nightmare. There are no mechanisms to repurpose any of that stuff. Recycling doesn’t work. Plus, you don’t want to recycle. It’s toxic then and it still will be toxic. So, you want to change the stuff. You want to change the material. You want to change the chemicals into chemicals that are beneficial. For example, I know companies at scale that have created a better version of PFOS using algae. So, it’s non-toxic to humans, but it performs as good as this PFOS chemical, this forever chemical that’s in the blood of 99 percent of the population. I am not making that up. That’s real. They’ve been playing with PFOS since the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties is when we realized it was in the blood of everybody. And they were saying it’s benign. It’s non-toxic. They lied. They played plausible deniability. So, if they don’t test their own product, they’re not liable. So, they don’t test. That’s the game. It’s a tobacco game. The tobacco industry created the game. Now everyone uses it and they just kick that same electromagnetic field. It’s dangerous to the human body. It’s dangerous.
Proximity and duration of electromagnetic fields are dangerous to the body. It creates free radical damage. A cell phone up to your head over time opens up the blood brain barrier, allowing for albumin and other proteins to enter the brain. That’s a pinball machine of inflammation and other downrange problems and free radical damage goes up. Motility, fertility, both male and female, again, cell phone in a pocket, cell phone on the breast tissue, all of that stuff is hundreds and hundreds of research articles showing the dangers. Yes, we need more studies. Yes, we need to. But again, these companies aren’t doing the studies because if they did the studies, any hint at it being dangerous, they threw it away. They threw some of the first studies away in 1993 when the EPA’s job was to prove the safety of electromagnetic radiation from cell phones and cell phone towers. All these electromagnetic fields, as soon as they got a hint that it was dangerous, the funding left for the EPA and the safety standards went to the FCC and the FCC didn’t even mention anything about safety. So, this is a game and we are the victims of the game.
So, from a cell phone perspective, Don’t put it up to your head, ever. Don’t leave it on your body when it’s on. Turn it off, turn on airplane mode. Turn off your Wi-Fi router at night, at the least. Don’t let children hold these things. Don’t put laptops on your lap. The science is very scary. If you’re willing to look at this, don’t even take my word for it, look at the research. Go to PubMed, start reading a bunch of the research. Inform yourself. Don’t take what I’m saying as the truth. Find out for yourself. That’s what I did.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I love that you’ve been doing this for so many decades and researching this, like really going out and talking to the manufacturers. You develop food products and supplements. You’re just having your hands in so many different things, really researching a lot about this. I want to talk about some solutions. Majority of clothes you’re buying are toxic from these large corporate brands. So, what kind of clothes should people be looking for if they want to avoid this 24-hour onslaught of just absorbing all these chemicals in their plastic clothes?
Darin Olien
You want to look for companies using 100 percent just from a food perspective, all foods, things like that. You want whole ingredients. You want a hundred percent organic cotton. You want a hundred percent hemp. You want a hundred percent silk. You want a hundred percent linen, things like that. You really want plant dyed clothing. The clothing I’m wearing now is a company owned by three Argentinian brothers who I now know very well, and it’s called Industry of All Nations. There’s no dot. There are no toxic dyes we don’t eat. They don’t use plastic for their buttons. It’s like no plastics, no dyes, works directly with the manufacturers and in Peru and India and everything else. Those are the types of companies that we need to support and women, I get it. Those yoga pants, they seem like they want them and they fit. Well, just switch it up and find companies doing a hundred percent organic plant diet. I wish there were more and more of them, but they are starting to pop up here and there. I put a bunch of companies in the book at the end of the section of my Fatal Conveniences book. I put in a ton of stuff. I have solutions on my website, darinolien.com. So, there’s a bunch of things that we can do.
The big chasm is we have our habits and I’m wickedly focused on habits right now because habits are the chasm of changing. If I’m used to a deodorant, the chasm of change is my habit. But if I’m willing to have a different cue, it’s important to have a cue. My cue now is people listening to this going. I never thought that my clothing was toxic. Now I have a different cue now. You have an opportunity after that cue to change out the mechanism. Let’s just start with underwear. Let’s find clean organic underwear and let’s start there. The things that are proximal to the body. Those are the places. Maybe find a better t-shirt. A T-shirt is one of the most bought pieces of clothing on the planet, right? So, you don’t want to buy the next t-shirt with 8, 000 chemicals. You want to buy clothing that’s gifting to your life, not taking away.
It’s the same thing with ultra processed food, as opposed to, why would I eat an apple flavored gummy bear when I can eat an apple? That’s the solution. You want the OG of fast food. I had a watermelon. You know how fast I ate that watermelon? I cut it, put it in a bowl, and I ate it. Within 20 seconds of holding that watermelon. That’s fast food. Eat whole food. It’s fast. It’s life giving. It’s giving you what you want. We all want the same thing except that you’re being hijacked. We all have to realize the places where someone has taken advantage of us. They know how to put money into making you addicted to their food, to their smells, to the flickering cell phone. They know exactly what they’re doing. They want your time. They want your energy. They want your money. So, we have to break that in order to break that. We need to be aware that’s a different cue and then we need to replace it with something else and then we need to act on it and then all of a sudden within a period of time you now have a new habit and you actually get freed up of energy.
The challenge that people have is oh my god I don’t have time to change. You can’t afford not to. You can’t justify that moment of time of changing the habit. Sometimes it’s a little bit of a pain in the ass but you have to realize your biggest reason for doing it. What do you want? What do you want your life to be? Do you want a victim hood life? Okay, some people choose who am I to say like, okay, that’s your contract in this world. I don’t know but for those of us that want a little more to want the energy and the life and the opportunity you got to be an aware man. If you’re not aware, you don’t have a choice and that’s the point. Having these hard conversations, I wish you and I, Wendy, didn’t have to have this conversation. I wish companies were not putting dyes in beverages that harm children. I wish they weren’t. They ban it in most of the European countries and for some reason keep it in ours. I wish we didn’t have to have this conversation. I wish it wasn’t happening, but it is happening. So, let’s base it so that we can change it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I want to know what your detox routine looks like because I know you’ve got a really sophisticated routine going. So, what is it? What are you doing on a daily or weekly basis to remove all this garbage from your body?
Darin Olien
Well, over time you have less garbage. That’s the big thing, right? Lessen your exposure. One of the most powerful things you can detox is not adding more toxins. And one thing, when you open your mouth. and you drink your water, you want to make sure that you’re ridding yourself of the toxins. Even though we have on demand water, the municipalities have not caught up to the amount of chemicals that are in your water. So, you have to filter your water. Filter with reverse osmosis or distillation seems to be the best. They’re cheaper. You don’t have to and it’s not a price thing. You can easily reverse osmosis, strip the water of these dangerous chemicals and then I would say, add a pinch of unrefined crystal salt back so that you have electrolytes and one of my favorites I’ve tested this. I’ve talked to the company extensively, Redmond salt out of Utah. A pinch per glass boom now, and then use a glass bottle. So now all of a sudden, you’ve detoxed. No more plastic drinking out of improperly filtered water.
You’re not taking in more and now you’re actually drinking in clean water. So that alone saved you tons of chemical exposure. Then, of course, ultra processed food. Reach for the food that is not compromised, that is not processed. The majority of your food you want fresh, like I said, before this podcast, I just sat down and ate a half of a big watermelon. I just couldn’t stop myself. It was so freaking good. It’s so satisfying that why would I let, why would I give that away to some hyper palatable, horrible food?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Do a ding dong.
Darin Olien
I don’t crave that anymore because I haven’t given that away. If I started to eat it, I would start craving it because it’s happening on a microbiota system. It’s happening in my gut. Your gut microbes now are changing. If I had an ultra- processed food eating person sitting right next to me right now, we could eat. If we had a bowl of fruit and we both ate the same thing right now, I would extract more nutrients out of that food than that person because their microbiome is totally compromised because it’s not the food that you’re uptaking. It’s the food for your microbiome and your microbiome is uptaking so that your body can use it. That’s what people don’t realize. Your microbiome is your medium to extract the nutrients from food. There’s so much going on in the adjustment of eating whole food and cleaning up your beverages and then you kind of can go from there.
You can go like, don’t put that lotion on, don’t put that fragrance on and my shampoos and my conditioners. My world is filled full of discipline and habits that I also don’t even think about anymore. It’s now opened up all my energy. It’s my body energy and other little habits I do because we live in this world and whatever’s raining down on us is constantly hitting us like chlorophyll twice a day. Chlorophyll in my water, Shilajit and another water, a little pinch of baking soda in another glass of water. Like these are just regimented little things cleaning my blood, uptaking my testosterone and other optimizing endocrine systems adjusting through Shilajit, which is an ancient Ayurvedic tonic. There’s all this stuff, man, that is right there. Then of course I am always including things like xandra, astragalus, ashwagandha, chaga as adaptogenic herbs because those adaptogenic herbs are tonics to help regulate the stressors in our environment. All of these and so much more. I don’t wear toxic clothes anymore. I also don’t have that. all of this stuff and I don’t wear lotions.
I love castor oil on my face. It’s so deeply nourishing and like these kinds of things, my laundry, I don’t toxify that. I used borax, organic vinegar, essential oil, and lemon in there. My clothes come out smelling actually uplifting me rather than taking me down. So, I look at detoxification as stopping, turning off the proverbial faucet and doing these small things. Don’t try to do all of them. Start with your water. Start with your food, improving on those kinds of things. Eat more whole food. And then as you, you can start stacking habits. I got to drink more water because water is the great tonifier, the great tonic, the great detoxifier right in front of us, right? It’s water. So, when you’re taking in fresh, clean, electrolyte filled water, that’s detoxing. That’s your best detox. You’re getting hydrated. 70 percent of all Americans don’t even drink an ounce of water a day. 70 to 80 percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated every day, all day.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s hard to imagine. I’m like, and we wonder why people are so sick.
Darin Olien
And then you’re dehydrated and inflammation goes up. You can’t get out the metabolites. Natural part of metabolism has free radicals. It’s a natural part of it. You can’t stay on top of it. And then you’re adding chemicals onto it. It’s impossible, but one thing added up over time, just take one thing that I mentioned that resonates with you right now and take action. And then when I say stacking habits, so if I wanted to get hydrated, maybe a technique I would use is, okay, I wake up. I may go feed the dogs or my pets. Let me stack that. By stacking it, I say after I feed the dogs or the cats or my pets or whatever, the idea is, I then stack the habit of right after I finished feeding, I drink eight ounces of water. Then I stack again. Right before I brush my teeth, before I go out in the world, I drink that water again. And so then I stack another. I keep stacking those habits. The next day I know I now live a life of hydration.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, this water bottle is always with me no matter where I go. I can’t leave it. I get nauseated if I don’t drink water.
Darin Olien
Right, because you’ve trained yourself to actually understand hydration, the hypothalamus will turn off your desire for water, because if you’ve trained it to literally live in the desert, it doesn’t know the difference, because it would spend so much of your energy focused on the water that you couldn’t do anything else. So, we train ourselves and the body is so resilient. If you’re not drinking water, the body goes, we don’t have water. I got to stay as sharp as I can. We can train ourselves out of this stuff. Then you’re used to it going, I’m not thirsty. You, on the other hand, have trained it so that water is available. So now instead of just being a necessity to keep your central nervous system, your blood, all of your organs are tuned in as a can with hydration.
Now you have trained your body to receive more water. So now skin, hair, nails, energy, by the way, you’ll have more energy when you’re hydrated. Number one cause of dehydration is lack of energy. People reach for the wrong beverage at that point. They reach for a coffee. They reach for a stimulant. Instead, they should start reaching for water. These are things that we can do to reorient ourselves, to turn back on our instincts, our common sense. On the other side of the habit is a world of difference. You don’t even know you’re dehydrated. What would you feel like, be like, and operate like if you were hydrated? And this is one example of one fatal convenience. Again, this is a life. I’m speaking from a lifetime, from decades of being professionally in this space. I have stacked habits all over the place and people are like, wow, you’re so disciplined. Those are habits. I’m working on new things to become disciplined in other ways because I have now preserved the energy, but every day it’s good to learn to optimize yourself. Learn something.
Today I started a new book. Actually, it was yesterday. Now all of a sudden I’m in this habit of these moments of time, like, okay, I can read then, and I can read then, and I can read that in a week I’ll be done with this book. So, it’s where you are now. Don’t compare yourself to others. Start here right now. What can you improve on?
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, for me, I never imagined I’d be living the lifestyle I am right now, say 15 years ago when I first started my detox journey and all the different things that I’m doing and they just become second nature to you. You don’t have to think. I know a lot of people are like, Oh my God, I don’t have time to do that. I don’t have time to do infrared saunas. I’m so busy right now, but you know what? You just learn the art of saying no, and you make different choices. You spend your time doing different things because if you don’t spend that time and energy money now on your health, you’re going to spend that time, energy and money recovering your health or doctors, medications, nursing homes. You can make a different choice today to prevent that down the line.
Darin Olien
We’re silly humans in that way, aren’t we? We’re so silly that I don’t have time, and then when the door shuts and that chronic issue becomes a real big issue, all of your time will go to solve that problem that was preventable. Eating that food that created the chronic inflammatory conditions to start the fire of diabetes and heart disease and cancer, largely was preventable. Alzheimer’s, dementia, whatever name you want to call it, but you started the fire. We are silly humans in that way, because then all of a sudden, we all know people that all of a sudden had a heart attack. But if you reverse engineer their life, you’re going, yeah, it wasn’t all of a sudden.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It wasn’t all of a sudden,
Darin Olien
It wasn’t all of a sudden. The body is so good at doing the very best it can. Here’s the secret. Our bodies are designed to thrive. They’re designed to heal. They’re designed to kick some ass. They’re designed by nature herself, by this miracle. But if you have a Ferrari and you decide to pour mud with very little gasoline in it and do that every day or maybe you start with a little dirty fuel, and then you just keep adding literal mud in your fuel and mud, what’s going to happen to the car? It may run for a little bit and then it’s not. So, the dual side of this life is we have an incredibly resilient organism of a body. It’s so powerful because it’s nature herself running through us. Give her a chance. But you’ve so identified and so become addicted to thinking that’s all you are, that you’ve allowed the hijacking to occur. I’m here to say you’re hijacked. So now that we know that the food quality isn’t that great and electromagnetic fields are not that great, that the clothing is toxic and the social media algorithms are geared to keep us absolutely addicted, let’s construct our environment differently. Let’s create the world to lessen the offloading we’re giving to other things and other people and gain and garner the sovereignty back again.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I love that. I know that’s what you expand on so much in your book, Fatal Conveniences, because we are dying from the fast food and the quick fixes and the cheap clothes and all the things that so many people are addicted to. They want to buy the cheapest food and the cheapest clothes. They just don’t realize what a huge long term negative impact that these conveniences have on us.
Darin Olien
The can of worms there too is there’s something potentially weirdly planned by that, too. Make the cheapest food the worst food and then let’s put economic pressure on everybody. Let’s drive up inflation. Let’s do all these things. That is putting a thumb down on people in a big way. There’s a lot of mechanisms. I don’t like to use the terms evil and all of that stuff. I think there’s just a massive amount of power and greed that goes unchecked and then it’s death by a thousand cuts. Think about the industrial revolution. We had some really good ideas to try to break out of the challenges of even World War One and World War Two and the depression. We got to do something different. I think a lot of the systems were built not out of the desire 20, 30, 40 years later to enslave people by the chemical exposure. I think these people got so addicted themselves to profit and the GDP became the god that we worshiped rather than health and safety. We just kicked that to the curb. I do believe in common sense. I do believe that ultimately, most people have the wherewithal to know what right and wrong is. These corporations just got a little over time. It’s not just one choice. It’s a lot of choices that have added up and we find ourselves in this unique place and time right now. My main message is you can do a lot right now about it. You can make other choices right now. Just to do things healthier doesn’t always mean it’s more expensive.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. It doesn’t always mean that. Very true.
Darin Olien
My laundry detergent right now is cheaper. For example, I can sprout broccoli sprouts with them are the most nutrient dense anti-cancer food on the planet. I can sprout those in five to seven days, a whole mason jar full of sprouts and be eating that for 23 cents. So, it’s the will that we have to have. Maybe not everything, but a lot we can do. I always go, don’t become a victim. Know that you can make some choices, make those choices, and then keep going because when you also command your own spirit to change, you enact the very nature to make change. We underestimate our power as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Darin, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so good. I was so looking forward to interviewing you and you did not disappoint whatsoever. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about where you want people to learn more about you, definitely go check out Down to Earth on Netflix. Really good, really engaging, interesting, and you learn a lot too. Why don’t you tell us where we can find your work?
Darin Olien
Yeah, so website darinolein.com or we’re changing the brand of super life but darinolein.com will bring you there. Superlife.com, social media, superlife.com, sign up for the newsletter. I put a lot of great information. I have a marketplace where people can find vetted, clean products, which takes a lot of work to dig into companies and really realize that they’re doing the right thing. So yeah, people can find me. I’m around.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. Well Darin, thanks so much for coming on the show. Everyone, I’m Dr Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning into the Myers Detox Podcast where we bring experts from around the world. Talking about the health issues around different toxins, how to detox, anti-aging and bioenergetics is one of my big passions. So, thanks for tuning in. I’ll talk to you guys soon.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of the information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests’ qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
