Microplastics: How They Are Damaging Your Gut
with Dr. Vincent Pedre
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello, welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and on this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metals and chemical toxicity and health issues caused by heavy metals and toxins. We also touch on bioenergetics, anti-aging, and advanced topics in health. Today, we have a great guest, Dr. Vincent Pedre, and he’s gonna be talking to us about hidden microplastics and how they’re hurting your gut. Dr. Pedre is an expert on gut health, and he’s gonna be talking to us about how microplastics are ever-pervasive in our environment and how they’re affecting your gut health, hormones, and overall wellness. They are also embedded in your brain, fat, and body tissues. This is a really big problem. These microplastics are shed from plastic in water containers, food packaging, and synthetic fabrics, including all your Lululemon that you’re wearing.
Microplastics have a big impact on gut health. Studies show that higher levels of microplastics are in the stool of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. These microplastics also cause dysbiosis and an imbalance of the gut bacteria and disrupt the gut’s mucus layer, lending itself an underlying root cause of leaky gut. The consequences of that include poor immunity, food sensitivities, insulin resistance, weight gain, increased risk of chronic disease, and just this whole domino effect of health issues that come from disrupting the microbiome and causing a leaky gut. We also talked about coffee and how single-use coffee cups are lined with plastic. K-cups and plastic coffee makers also all leach microplastics into the coffee, which you then drink. So, it’s really an interesting show today.
Our guest today, Dr. Vincent Pedre, is the medical Director of Pedre Integrative Health and founder of Dr. Pedre Wellness and CEO and founder of Happy Gut Life. He’s worked as a nutraceutical consultant and spokesperson for Nature MD and Orthomolecular Products. He is a functional medicine-certified practitioner with a concierge practice in New York City since 2004. He is the bestselling author of two books on the gut, and he believes the gut is the gateway to excellent health. His newest book is The Gut Smart Protocol, featuring a 14-day personalized gut healing plan based on the Gut Smart Quiz, and it’s the culmination of years of research and clinical experience as a functional gut health expert. His newest offering is called Happy Gut Coffee, and it’s a clean, toxin-free coffee that you can trust to keep your gut healthy. You can learn more at happygutcoffee.com. Vincent, thanks so much for joining us on the show.
Vincent Pedre
It’s so great to be back. Nice to see you, and I’m excited to have a whole new conversation with you about a topic that I think is becoming more and more important, and it’s something that’s just been under our noses. I think that from one day to the next, it has become a huge problem, and we need to do something about it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Definitely, we need some awareness around microplastics, and when you look at our food, even eating organic food, everything is in plastic. You go and get your vegetables, and you’re putting them into plastic, and it’s just pervasive. It’s just everywhere. You see, the pigs are being fed microplastics, ground-up garbage in their food, and it’s unbelievable. It’s in the fish. So, why don’t you just tell us, give us a little bit of background about microplastics and some of the issues surrounding that?
Vincent Pedre
Well, first of all, microplastics are sheared-off pieces of plastics that we’re getting exposed to through water containers, food containers, all sorts of things, even in fabric. Some of the more synthetic fabrics, like polyester, actually have microplastics in them. It’s funny because I was listening to NPR the other day, and they were talking about the worldwide plastic problem. The United Nations was trying to come out with a resolution that was being led by Rwanda to get more countries to mandate the recycling of plastics. There’s actually a push against recycling plastics. As you can imagine, plastic comes from the petroleum industry. It turns out that it’s actually in some ways, like you would think, that there’s been such pushes for recycling around the country.
Recycling is not cheaper than just producing new plastic, which is scary. So, only 30% of plastic gets recycled. The rest of the plastic just gets chucked. And then there’s a huge incentive, as you can imagine from the industry to not recycle, to just use new plastic, and the fact that it’s actually cheaper just for them to continue to produce plastic rather than recycle it. It’s really a scary proposition when you look at how much plastic is in the oceans and how microplastics are getting into fish. It’s actually quite sad. I grew up in Miami, and the water now seems a bit cleaner, but there are times when I go in the ocean and I see a piece of something that looks like it was maybe part of a bottle that’s now been ripped up into pieces. You just see a little piece of plastic floating in the ocean, and you can imagine that it’s getting into our seafood. So, these microplastics pose a huge problem, not just directly to us, but through our food chain like you were mentioning.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’ve read some things about how when you even wash your clothes, most of which are plastic now, they’re just made with plastic, petroleum-based threads, all those little pieces get washed into the water and then washed out into the oceans and the fish think that that’s their food and eat them. Our fish are horribly contaminated with plastics.
Vincent Pedre
There’s actually a new blood test that I just became aware of. The company reached out to me because they saw that I had been talking about plastics. There’s a test in development that started in universities and now is gonna become available to everyone, where you can check your plastic. You can do a finger stick to check for plastic exposure or microplastics in your bloodstream. I still have to sit down and look at the research and see how validated this is because there’s one thing to know about microplastics is that microplastics are endocrine disrupting chemicals, and because they are fat soluble, it’s very possible that our brains are getting full of microplastics, and our organs as well. I’m not even sure that if you find microplastics in circulation, a lot of times these types of toxins, it’s gonna tell you about ongoing exposure. It might just be the tip of the iceberg. It might not tell you how much is already in your body and is being retained by your body, and it’s doing things like scrambling your hormones, messing up your mitochondria, affecting your energy, your hormone balance, and leading to all sorts of things.
You wonder, why is there so much infertility in the world? Why do so many people now need IVF to have babies? What’s happening with our hormones, with our fertility, or even women going into menopause early on, like in their twenties and thirties? Why is all of this happening? We have to look at the toxicity in our environment as one major factor. I also being a gut health specialist, I want to tie it into the gut as well, because there’s some major things that are happening in the gut, not just the endocrine disrupting effects of these microplastics, but also harmful effects that are happening in the gut that have a ripple effect of health consequences throughout the entire body.
Ads 09:05
For anyone listening who really wants to detox their body, go to heavymetalsquiz.com. I created a quiz for you. It only takes a couple of seconds and it’s based on some lifestyle questions. You can get your toxicity score and get a free video series that answers all of your frequently asked questions about how to detox your body. Check it out at heavymetalsquiz.com.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You’re an expert on the gut. You’ve written a book on gut health. Talk to us about how these microplastics affect our gut and disrupt our gut microbiome.
Vincent Pedre
This is what the research is showing, there was a study done looking at patients with inflammatory bowel disease, and they were just asking the question, do PE patients with inflammatory bowel disease, which could be people with Crohn’s disease colitis, ulcerative colitis, do they have a different amount of microplastics in their stool compared to normal individuals that don’t have this? And the answer was, yes. People with inflammatory bowel disease have much higher levels of microplastics in their stool. Now you get into an argument like chicken or the egg, the microplastics, because they’re present there, are they causing inflammatory bowel disease? We don’t have that. We just have an association. We don’t have a cause-and-effect relationship, but we see these things and we start thinking, what could be going on here?
They’ve done other studies. They’ve looked at what happens to the gut of zebra fish when they’re exposed to microplastics, and they found that it causes shifts in their gut microbiome where certain bad bugs tend to propagate. It causes what we call a dysbiosis, which is an imbalance between the good and bad bugs in the gut, and also disrupts the mucus layer of the gut, which then leads to leaky gut. Once you have dysbiosis and you have leaky gut, then you have basically the floodgates for inflammation have opened up. Now, how is that relevant to us as humans? Well, if you have dysbiosis, if your gut is leaky, then a lot of inflammatory substances can get into your circulation from your gut. What that causes is insulin resistance, which can be pre-diabetes or it can turn into diabetes. It causes more fat accumulation in the middle.
So, you might be wondering like, what am I doing? I’m not doing anything different, but I just keep putting on weight and can’t seem to get it off. If that’s you, you have to think about, well, what’s happening in your gut? What could be the different factors like, and I think this is a big one because people are getting exposed to microplastics on a daily basis, and for the most part, they don’t even know or they’re not thinking about it because microplastics are infused into everyday behaviors that we consider to be normal. I hope that’s a glass water bottle.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It is glass. You can hear it. It’s glass.
Vincent Pedre
I don’t hear it. Speaking of microplastic and ways to avoid, one of the bigger exposures is drinking out of plastic water bottles, and if you just don’t know when that bottle that you’re picking up at the supermarket was made, how many temperature changes it went through before it got on that shelf and every time that bottle is heated up, their temperature is in the summertime, temperatures can be in the nineties, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the back of a UPS truck, or a FedEx, they get pretty hot or the back of any truck during the summer. They’re not air conditioned for the most part. And so, whenever the temperature rises, there’s gonna be more leaching of plastic particles into the water.
That’s not the biggest exposure that people get on a daily basis. I think one, probably one of the biggest exposure aside from like makeup and other products that have petroleum, the biggest exposure is really drinking coffee out of those two go cups that are lined plastic because if they weren’t, if they were just made out of paper, the liquid would just seep right through. So, they have to be protected on the inside. And when that hot liquid hits that plastic lining, it’s gonna release little shards of microplastics that then you’re drinking through the plastic lid that’s on top of it. I don’t know how much better this is, but they calculate that people’s exposure to microplastic is like eating a credit card per week.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. It’s crazy. They did new research on plastic water bottles and found that there’s a quarter million microplastics and nanoplastics in the water that you’re drinking. It’s incredible.
Vincent Pedre
It’s a bit disconcerting because when you think of it from the macro perspective of what’s happening to our health, how people are gaining more and more weight, more people are becoming diabetic. Two out of three children are at risk for diabetes and being overweight. You have to think like this is not just genetics, this is environmental. We’re exposing ourselves to these things.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And like you mentioned before that the microplastics are in our tissues and may not be readily detectable in the blood. It’s the same thing with heavy metals and chemicals. Same problem. A lot of it’s in our brain, fat, tissues, and not just readily available to be seen on a test. But you can do some indirect testing and get good info. Let’s talk about some of the long-term consequences of having these microplastics affecting our gut inflammation, possibly leaky gut. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Vincent Pedre
If you think about the domino effect that happens, and I talked about in my last book, the Gut Smart Protocol, anything that disrupts the gut microbiome basically disrupts the balance in the gut ecosystem. The ecosystem being the richest community of microbes in the body live inside our large intestine, up to a hundred trillion organisms and anywhere between a thousand to 2000 different species of microorganisms. When you go in there and you disrupt that and then create favorable conditions for pathogenic bacteria to grow, those bacteria are going to be producing things that increase inflammation in the body. On top of that, when you have dysbiosis, when you have this imbalance in the ecosystem, the next domino that falls is your gut border.
The gut border is just one cell layer thick. It’s connected by these tight junctions that keep the cells tightly connected together. And when you have insults like microplastics, antibiotics, stress, eating too much sugar, and eating too many processed foods, this leads to dysbiosis. The dysbiosis then is going to cause the tight junctions to separate. Then you get these tiny little holes in between the cells, and that’s what leaky gut is. Leaky gut is like an increase in the space between the cells that allows things that otherwise had to go through the gatekeeper, which is the cell now, can just basically get through and they get into the body. They increase inflammation. They activate through a toll-like receptor. It’s called TL four. It’s an inflammatory cascade that’s found in cells like fat cells, the pancreas, muscle tissue, and brain tissue. People think that they’re just getting old, like it’s just a normal part of aging, gaining weight, feeling mental fog, not being as sharp mentally, feeling more achy, and harder time recovering from workouts.
All of this coming from inflammation in the gut. It’s affecting your body’s ability to resolve inflammation. What does it lead to? It leads to weight gain over time. It leads to pre-diabetes, or what we call insulin resistance. Eventually it can lead to diabetes. It leads to basically a lot things that don’t necessarily kill you immediately, but they lower the quality of your life and they’re also shortening your lifespan and your health span at the same time.
Dr. Wendy Myers
When you have leaky gut, you are more prone to immune health issues, food sensitivities, not to mention that gut dysbiosis is dramatically impacting your immune system overall. You’re more prone to infections. You need your gut bacteria make neurotransmitters to make vitamins. There’s this domino effect of problems that are stemming in part from microplastics in the gut.
Vincent Pedre
Yeah, and the person doesn’t realize that, maybe also hormonal problems or even like perimenopause, hot flashes, imbalances in the ratio of estrogen to progesterone, because a lot of these substances, the microplastics, they’re estrogenic substances. They’re what we call xenoestrogens or estrogens that come from outside of the body, but they’re able to bind to that estrogen receptor and sometimes they bind to the estro receptor in a way that is stronger than our own estrogen. So, then we’re getting overstimulated and over estrogenized and that leads to a whole host of problems with the menstrual cycle, such as excessive bleeding and prolonged menstruation. And we’re seeing this in younger and younger women that we shouldn’t have been seeing this in. I think a lot of it has to do with these changes.
Microplastics is one piece of the puzzle of many other toxins that we’re getting exposed to, but I think it’s an important emerging one because it’s not going away. The industry keeps producing more and more plastic, and really the only way we can change this is by changing our buying behavior and just saying, we don’t want plastic or we wanna minimize our exposure to plastic, and there’s a lot of different strategies you can take. Take a few extra steps sometimes to think about like your purchasing behaviors or even just the way that you go to a coffee shop and get coffee. But if you make these changes, it can have such powerful effects on your overall health. It’s almost like the micro habits that we do every single day have this big impact on our health. And in the same token, the little changes that we can make on a daily basis can also have that big dramatic impact on improving our health.
Ads 20:47
This show is brought to you by Bon Charge, and I wanna take a minute to tell you about one of their amazing products that I’m absolutely in love with. There’s something I’ve been doing for about 10 minutes a day. It’s wearing a face mask, but it’s not just any face mask. It’s this Bon Charge red light face mask, and it’s essential to my nightly skincare routine now. Believe me, red light therapy really works. It’s well established in the research to improve the appearance of your skin. It does that by penetrating deep into the skin to boost collagen production. It reduces the size of your pores. It reduces inflammation, and it eases the signs of aging.
Bon Charge’s red-light face mask makes it so easy to take care of your skin. It’s like a mini spa session every night that I’m doing. It can be used easily at home. There’s no cord, so you can wear it while you’re doing other tasks. Plus, the mask is totally painless, and it doesn’t heat up, unlike some other beauty and anti-aging treatments. Bon Charge’s red light face mask has been a game-changer. It’s part of my everyday skincare routine now, and I’m seeing such great results already from using this mask.
My skin is more clear. It seems more plump, fresh, and juicy, and my redness and dark blemishes are fading. So, there’s a very special offer for all of my listeners right now. My listeners get 15% off when you order from boncharge.com and use my promo code, Wendy at checkout. This discount applies sitewide. That’s B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G e.com, and you’ll also get free shipping and a 12-month warranty. Go now to get this exclusive offer. That’s boncharge.com. With promo code, Wendy, you get 15% off. This is one of my secrets to super healthy, young-looking skin. I’m trying to reverse the clock. I’m trying to do everything I can to anti-age, and this is one of the secrets in my toolkit.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You mentioned before about the single-use coffee cups, and I want to go back to that for a second because so many millions of people every day are going to a coffee place and drinking the hot liquified plastic essentially from the hot coffee that’s going into their coffee cup. Can you talk a little bit about that? And there is the same problem with coffee pods and any kind of plastic coffee maker as well. There’s a lot of different problems that people need to troubleshoot that need to rethink their coffee habits.
Vincent Pedre
We’ve become a culture of convenience over health. It’s a little extra step, but carrying your own steel lined coffee Tumblr to go with you to the coffee shop. And actually, you pay a little bit less for the coffee when you have them make it in your own Tumblr rather than use one of their cups. That’s one way to reduce your exposure. A lot of people have K-cups or Nespresso machines at home. They love the convenience. The thing is that, one, you’re not getting the best quality coffee because the hot water is going through it really fast. So, it reduces the antioxidant extraction from the coffee bean. Also, these K-cups are aligned with plastic as well. So, it’s the same problem. If you really wanna get deep into it, then you have to think that the parts of the machine are also plastic lined and when the hot water is going through them, you’re also getting exposed to microplastics through there as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’m a coffee fanatic, so I’m very picky about my whole coffee routine every morning. And the same thing goes for the paper liners. Who knows what’s in those products. Certainly, non-organic cotton as well and wood, but yeah, you’re losing all the antioxidants as well and the oils that have all the antioxidants when you’re filtering through the paper filter and the plastic. I don’t get the whole plastic coffee makers either, the whole thing’s plastic and the hot waters and the plastic, and it’s not an ideal situation.
Vincent Pedre
How do you make your coffee? What’s your favorite way?
Dr. Wendy Myers
I just have a stainless steel French press. I use organic coffee and I have a
glass coffee mug. That’s what I do.
Vincent Pedre
French press is a great way to make coffee that augments the exposure to the oils and the antioxidants. There is some thought that, or there has been some research suggesting that for some people French press could raise cholesterol levels because of the exposure to certain types of terpenes in coffee, like kahweol and cafestol. Some people are sensitive to that. And in those cases, it’s better to use a pour over method with a filter because the filter’s actually gonna filter out those particular substances that can raise the cholesterol while still getting the benefit of the antioxidants. And certainly, you get better contact with the beans in a pour over method than with like a K-cup or a rapid production method.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I know, my dad used to have a chemic set up with like a little glass bottle, the filter and the catch below it. But he would use a stainless steel filter, which probably what’s not gonna filter out this cholesterol raising particles. I have that as like my little backup system as I inherited that from him. So, let’s talk a little bit more about coffee. Are there any issues with microplastics in coffee at all as far as you know?
Vincent Pedre
It’s really more the way you make the coffee. The biggest risk and exposure to microplastics is more the behaviors that go around like how you get your coffee if you’re picking up at a coffee shop, or how you’re making it at home with the K-cups. If you’re making it in the ways that we talked about like a French press and stainless steel French press, then you’re not getting exposed to those microplastics or anything that’s made out of glass. And those are great ways to, to make coffee. I think also you can make a better tasting cup of coffee at home than you can get at overall in at a coffee shop.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I can’t tolerate the coffees at Starbucks. They just take taste burnt to me. They are not very good quality at all and not organic, so that’s a problem as well. That’s a huge problem.
Vincent Pedre
We didn’t even mention that, but coffee is one of the top 10 most pesticide sprayed crops on the planet. So, even if you’re being good about it and you’re avoiding exposure to microplastics, you still have to worry about exposure to pesticides if you are not drinking organic coffee. And then on top of that mycotoxins or mold exposure from coffee beans that are lower grade, that have been sitting around for a while. You think like you’re saving money by buying a cheaper coffee, but you might actually be exchanging it for health problems down the road.
Dr. Wendy Myers
For sure you get what you pay for. And it’s so important, like you mentioned, to drink organic coffee, because it’s just really shocking when you realize how much pesticides are sprayed on coffee and how much of those pesticides that affect your hormones. Those are the pesticides are also estrogenic. So you’re just getting neurotoxins
Vincent Pedre
They’re endocrine disrupting. The other thing is that a lot of pesticides act as antimicrobial agents. They’re going in and they’re disrupting your gut microbiome. So, everything we just talked about, just remember the domino effect. The first domino is once your ecosystem is messed up, that domino falls. The next domino is your gut permeability. You get leaky gut, and the next domino is inflammation in the body. And the next domino is insulin resistance, then weight gain, then pre-diabetes, and then the cycle just repeats itself, and that becomes the source of all chronic disease on the planet.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think people don’t realize how problematic their little morning cup of coffee is. I thought it was really interesting when we were talking about doing the show that you had created your own line of coffee called Happy Gut Coffee. Can you talk a little about that and why you’re super excited about it?
Vincent Pedre
One of the biggest issues I had growing up and partly what got me into so fascinated with gut health was not only that I had IBS, but for long periods as a teenager and into my twenties, I suffered from acid reflux. And whenever I drank coffee, it just made it worse depending on how I drank it, an empty stomach or not empty stomach. But coffee just in general would make my stomach symptoms much worse or my IBS. Coffee is part of our culture, and it was part of my culture growing up as Cuban-American. It’s very big in our culture. I just thought like I’ve always wanted to have something that would be a food-based product that would be good for people, that would be good for the gut. I had the opportunity to work with my co-packer with coffee and worked with small farmers in South America that are using organic farming practices to create a non-toxic bean that’s free of pesticides.
We also tested it for heavy metals and we had it tested it for mold mycotoxins, all free of that. And then micro roasted and like you said, certain commercial brands burn their beans. Once you burn something, you’re generating what we call ages, advanced constellation end products that actually cause cellular aging. So we have a micro roasting facility that micro roasted in the lower Hudson Valley here in New York, and they roast it to perfection. We get a dark roast. The dark roast actually does two things. It lowers the acidity of the beans. It actually takes away a lot of the bitterness because a lot of people who have tried the coffee, when I serve it just plain black, ask me if I added sweetener to the coffee and I don’t. It’s just the plain coffee. But when you don’t have the bitterness, the sweet tones can come through.
A lot of times, if you think about it, if you are putting sugar in your coffee, it’s because it’s so bitter. You’re putting the sweetener to hide the bitterness. One great thing is that it lowers the bitterness, lowers the acidity, makes it much more gut friendly for anybody who suffers from heartburn or acid reflux. So many people in this country, like 60 million people, Americans, suffer from acid reflux and take acid lowering medications on a daily basis and still continue drinking the coffee that upsets their stomach. I wanted to come out with an option that is healthier on all those fronts, but also USDA organic, free of all types of toxins, rich in polyphenols, and just really great for the gut.
And that’s the story behind Happy Gut Coffee, which officially launched with a Kickstarter campaign that we successfully funded at the end of November. We’re super excited to get this out to more and more people because it’s not just like having a low acid coffee and there are other brands out there that are doing the same, but then the coffee doesn’t taste great. It’s having a low acid, gut friendly coffee that also people try and they love how it tastes then. 150 million Americans drink coffee every single day. So, if I can meet them where they’re at, and then teach them about gut health and teach them that there’s another way that things could be, and learn about microplastics and how you’re consuming your coffee, and if you make it at home, there are ways that you can make it healthier and ways that could be less healthy for you. I think it’s like a win-win for everyone because the number one thing that patients have always asked me when I put them on a more like an elimination diet or a cleanse is do I have to give up my coffee?
Dr. Wendy Myers
People ask the same thing with me too. If they’re doing like a detox program with a detox coffee. I’m like, no, no, no, no. You can still have your coffee. I’m having my coffee. I don’t care what the problem is, or the consequences, I have to have my coffee.
Vincent Pedre
The funny thing also is I learned, because I’m a genetic slow metabolizer for caffeine, so I’m super caffeine sensitive. And how would you know if you’re the type of person who, if you drank a cup of coffee in the evening after dinner, you won’t sleep that night? Then you’re a slow metabolizer. If you can have an espresso at 10:00 PM at night and then go to bed at 11:00 PM and fall asleep, you’re a fast metabolizer. Well, I’m a slow metabolizer. And so even when I decided to go into the coffee, I was a bit nervous and I was thinking, well, because I was drinking decaf at the time because I was nervous, just trying to stay away from too much caffeine and. So, when I decided to do the coffee, I asked my followers, do you drink decaf or caffeinated? And 85% of them drink caffeinated. So I realized, okay, you can’t swim against the tide. People want their caffeinated coffee. So when I tried it, I was nervous that it was gonna make me a bit amped up.
I learned that through the dark roasting process, it also lowers the caffeine content a bit and for anybody who’s a slow metabolizer, and I’ve had a couple of people who are slow metabolizers and I’ve turned them on to Happy Gut Coffee. As long as you stick to just one cup, if you’re a slow metabolizer, you’re good. You don’t want to go to two cups. You’re gonna start feeling a bit amped up. But one cup, you are good because the dark roast lowers the caffeine content, so it’s not gonna be as strong as like when you go out and get a commercial coffee that is just chock full of caffeine.
Ads 37:44
This episode is brought to you today by Purity Woods Skin Care. If you care about your health and longevity, which let’s face it, if you are listening to this show right now you probably do, then I assume you know to watch what you eat, get plenty of exercise and prioritize sleep. But where I noticed many of my health-conscious peers can drop the ball so to speak is when it comes to their personal care products. Truly folks, we all need to be reading the ingredients list on any product that we are putting on our skin and absorbs directly into our bloodstream. But, how often do you buy skin care products because they’re labelled as clean or organic or they have organic in the name of the product or they say paraben-free only to find out that there’s a ton of toxic ingredients in them that are damaging to your skin, body, and hormones?
Why is it so hard to find skin care products that are truly 100% USDA organic certified? That’s why I use and recommend Purity Woods Skin Care. Purity Woods’ mission is to provide people with the cleanest and most effective healthy aging and longevity products available. All of their products are USDA certified organic non-GMO, free of anything artificial, free of toxic preservatives and additives like pesticides, chemical fertilizers, dyes, parabens, and of course, it’s cruelty-free and never tested on animals. Purity Woods’ best-selling product the age-defying Dream Cream, has been flying off the shelves for a reason. This formulation includes red maple leaf extracts along with collagen-boosting ingredients like organic mango seed butter, organic gooseberry, which if you don’t know is the most antioxidant-rich food on earth. As you know, I am a big research geek, and in recent years, there has been some generally fascinating science coming out of the University of Rhode Island about red maple leaf extract for the skin.
So, this little-known skin care ingredient has been shown to block the breakdown of elastin, the key protein in your skin that allows it to stretch and remain firm. Some researchers are even calling this ingredient a potential plant-based Botox, so to speak. So, if you are ready to detox your skin routine of all those hormone-disrupting synthetic chemicals that plague 99% of the skin care industry but don’t want to compromise on the results, I highly recommend that you try Purity Woods’s age-defying Dream Cream. If you do not agree that that is the best skin care you’ve ever used, your purchase is protected by their really generous 60-day happiness guarantee. But honestly, I’ve never seen a skin care product of this quality at this reasonable price point. Thankfully, the good people at Purity Woods have a special discount code specifically for my listeners. You can try yourself, for 27% off today. Just go to puritywoods.com/wendy or enter Wendy at checkout.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, that’s interesting about the dark roast helping with the caffeine. I had never heard that before, but I think the dark roast also tastes a lot better, the taste more chocolatey, more caramelized.
Vincent Pedre
It allows for a lot of the flavor profile and the beans to come out. You get chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla, a little bit of a nutty finish. It’s really nice.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I like the dark roast, but not too dark, not burnt. I just don’t exactly, I don’t understand it. I don’t know, everywhere you go that’s not outside your home and it’s not like a nice coffee shop, almost every other place they serve the coffee, it’s burnt and it’s so super, super, super hot to hide the bad flavor profile of it.
Vincent Pedre
And then your stomach is upset afterward.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I have that issue too. I hadn’t made that correlation, but I do. I’ll get a cup of coffee and my stomach will start getting acidic, preparing for just the coffee going up to my mouth. It’s like it is already prepping for it, and I’m very intuitive with my food. But with the happy good coffee, I don’t have that at all. You mentioned heavy metals and that you test for heavy metals. I think that’s really interesting because a lot of brands don’t test for heavy metals.
Vincent Pedre
I got really curious about that because of the consumer reports that came out last year on dark chocolate and how a lot of the brands out there actually had higher levels of lead and cadmium than are allowed. And that was super shocking to me because I was actually consuming one. From time to time, I would buy one of those dark chocolate brands and then I find out that it has high levels of lead, and lead is a mitochondrial toxin. Cadmium is actually associated with prostate cancer and high cadmium levels are associated with prostate cancer that is not responsive to treatment. So, getting exposed to heavy metals is not something to be taken lightly. And unfortunately, we’ve already been exposed. A lot of us who grew up before the seventies or in the early seventies when we were just putting up regulations on taking lead out of gasoline, taking lead out of paint, but there was still dust on the roads that was covered from the exhaust of cars that was from leaded gasoline. So, a lot of us growing up in that time period got exposed to lead.
Cadmium is something that people get exposed to through smoking cigarettes, not typically through other means or contaminated water as well. It was super surprising to me that it was found in cacao beans sourced from certain areas and in dark chocolate brands. We wrote about this in our blog on happygutlife.com, but anybody can look this up on consumer reports, and look up which brands we contaminated. They tested a bunch of brands and looked at the ones that are good and which ones are not acceptable. I’m not sure what the follow-up is with those brands. I hope that they’re checking their source for cacao beans for heavy metals. You don’t even think about these things because you’re not gonna taste it. It’s gonna taste like a delicious bar of dark chocolate. It doesn’t tell you if it’s contaminated with heavy metals or not.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I was wondering why more coffee brands don’t test for cadmium because for me, it just seems like a really good marketing angle because one of the biggest contaminants of coffee is cadmium. That’s part of what gives us like a little bit of a kick. It gives the adrenal a little boost, a little crutch almost. And that’s one of the attractions to coffee. I think one of the stimulant attractions to coffee. But it’s a huge problem and it really just depends on where the coffee is grown. Some soils have higher cadmium levels and the coffee beans take that up in the soil and then it’s just present there. I think it’s brilliant that you test for the heavy metals.
Vincent Pedre
I think it’s really important, and I think there’s a lot of these factors that we’re not thinking about, like the toxins in coffee that might actually be playing a role in the crash that a lot of people feel like two to three hours after a cup of coffee, and then you think that you need another cup of coffee. As a slow metabolizer, obviously caffeine sticks around for a while, but when I used to drink regular coffee, I would get this high and then I would come crashing down, and by one 2:00 PM I felt like I needed another cup of coffee to make it through the day. And now since I’ve been having my Happy Gut coffee, just one cup in the morning, I never feel too high. I never feel a crash and, and it does make me wonder if it’s not just the caffeine, is it other toxins in the coffee that could be playing a role in the mental slowness that comes, the physical fatigue when you crash afterwards?
You have to think also about the sugar. I don’t put any sugar in my coffee, but if you go out and pick up a coffee and some of the main commercial brands, they are loaded with sugar. So not only do you have a caffeine high, you have a sugar high, and then you come crashing down a few hours later and heading back to the coffee shop for another shot of espresso.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think there’s a little plan in that. I also like to put fat in my coffee as well. I put heavy cream in my coffee because it also can blunt that adrenal kick that you get and give your poor little adrenals a little bit more of a break. I like that. Not a total pass. But a little bit more of a break from the rash
Vincent Pedre
I put a collagen powder in my coffee. I like using coffee as a vehicle to take in other good things. So I like the fat as an appetite suppressant, also collagen powder. In my coffee, I also put something called SBIs. They’re serum derived. Bovine immunoglobulins. They’re basically immunoglobulins that bind toxins in the gut. In general, I like to use that as a regular maintenance routine for my gut because they protect me against even like when eating out and you just don’t know what you get exposed to.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Is that similar to colostrum or the ingredients?
Vincent Pedre
It’s very similar to colostrum. The difference is that certain people like myself who have a dairy sensitivity might not do well with colostrum, but because SBIs don’t have any dairy in them, they’re really good for anybody who might have any type of dairy sensitivity. It’s better to use SBIs than to use colostrum. You’re getting the same benefits that SBIs buying toxins. They bind an endotoxin in the gut, for example, and they also help stimulate the gut border to seal itself. So they help with leaky gut and they just help with promoting a healthier gut microbiome in general.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I take colostrum on a regular basis just because of the immune boosting benefits and the gut healing benefits. But yeah, that’s great, going straight to the SBI is that active ingredient that helps that gut healing as well for those that can’t do dairy.
Vincent Pedre
Yeah, exactly. Do you add your colostrum to your coffee or have you ever tried that?
Dr. Wendy Myers
I don’t, I guess I worry about maybe harming the stuff in the colostrum. So I like it straight. I don’t want to put anything in it. I just want heavy cream and stevia in my coffee and I’m a happy camper and good to go. I’m unhappy, very unhappy if I don’t have heavy cream.
Vincent Pedre
As long as it’s grass fed, it’s good.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I have an amazing source here in Houston. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about where we can learn more about your Happy Gut Coffee?
Vincent Pedre
Super simple. Just go to happygutcoffee.com and it’ll take you straight to the website. You can learn more about it there and learn about how we source it and some of the properties of the coffee. You can also actually look at our testing sheets are on the websites. You can see what types of third-party testing we’ve done for the coffee to make sure that it’s free of toxins. And through there you can also learn more about me, my story, and a lot of free content that we produce. We’ve written a lot of blog posts on microplastics, on the benefits of coffee, on all sorts of topics related to coffee drinking and gut health, and just gut health in general.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Vincent, thank you so much for coming on the show. I love doing this show because I really do want people to rethink their coffee and their coffee intake and how they’re making it and what they’re really consuming in their cup. My father was a coffee freak. He used to roast his own coffee beans and buy green coffee beans from all over the world. I definitely have gotten an education from him on that. I love buying little micro roast coffees from little farms all over the world, and that’s a trendy thing because people just love their coffee. I love that you’re participating in that and finding these amazing little farms that are organic and doing these little micro roasts of these special beans
Vincent Pedre
Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s just brought a lot of joy to me, especially when you see that when you give somebody something that tastes good and you know it’s good for their health, you see the smile on their face and the surprise when they’re like, wow, this is no acid. It’s so smooth. That brings me a lot of joy.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, everyone, go check out happygutcoffee.com and Vincent, again, thanks so much for coming on the show and everyone, thanks for tuning in every week to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers and I love doing this show because I love just helping you pick apart every little aspect of your life. I know it’s a pain, but you really need to rethink everything that you’re doing in your life, what you’re putting in your body, every bite that you’re eating, and over time, slowly but surely upgrading what you’re doing and rethinking everything and making better choices. This show is no different. I hope that it made some difference for you in helping to upgrade your coffee experience. So, thanks for tuning in.
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 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 guest 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.
