The transcriptions provided on this website are generated using artificial intelligence (AI) technology and may contain significant errors, including instances where the AI system can incorrectly add or invent content that was never actually spoken in the original audio. These errors may include fabricated medical terminology, non-existent treatments, incorrect demographic information, or other invented content that was not present in the original recording. These transcriptions of radio shows discussing integrative cancer therapies are provided solely as part of Yes to Life’s educational resources to help cancer patients and their families learn about additional therapies and treatments that may be available to support them before, during, and after medical treatment. Neither these transcriptions nor the original audio recordings constitute medical advice or endorsement of any particular treatment, practitioner, or clinic. By accessing these transcriptions, you acknowledge that Yes to Life does not guarantee their accuracy, completeness, or reliability, and expressly disclaims liability for any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. All medical decisions should be made solely in consultation with qualified healthcare professionals. These transcriptions are protected by copyright law and are the property of Yes to Life. If you identify errors or inaccuracies, please contact us immediately at office@yestolife.org.uk for correction.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of the UK’s integrative cancer care charity Yes to Life that supports people with cancer in learning about a broad range of approaches to helping themselves to recover their health and well-being. One of the massive issues of our time is the tide of toxins we encounter in the environment, in our food, our water, our furniture, our cleaning products and so on and on. The list seems endless. The direct consequences this is having on our health are slowly becoming clear to more and more people, particularly those with cancer. So I’m pleased today to welcome an expert in this field onto the show Dr Jenny Goodman. Dr Goodman has been working in the field of nutritional and environmental medicine for two decades and is passionate about the need for public education around the harms and dangers of toxins. I’m speaking to Dr Goodman over the internet. I’m really pleased to have you as my guest on the Yes to Life show.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Thank you, I’m very pleased to be here.

Robin Daly
Yeah, I really loved your session at Your Life and Cancer last spring, which was the first time that I actually became aware of your work. But yeah, really interesting stuff. We’re going to be talking more about that today. Your key topic, toxins and their role in chronic illness and cancer in particular, as well as strategies for protecting ourselves and detoxifying. So I actually noticed we’ve done very few episodes of this show on this really important topic, which is pretty remiss of me. So I’m glad to be setting things right a little bit now. So I want to start out with a general look at the territory. It used to be sort of vehemently argued that there was little or no link between environmental toxins and health issues and that everything was at safe, government approved, low levels, highly unlikely to impact human health. So I was wondering, is there any evidence-based ground left for these guys to stand on now or any last apologists now relegated to the fringes with the climate change deniers?

Dr Jenny Goodman
Yes, there is so much evidence of the effects of environmental pollution on human health, and indeed on the health of animals and plants, that it’s just extraordinarily overwhelming. But what I’ve discovered, particularly in the past few months researching for my next book, is that 99.99% of this evidence is in learned medical journals. It is not in the public domain. I mean, technically it is because it’s available. Anyone can look at these journals, but it hasn’t filtered down into the public consciousness or into clinical practice. So even though it’s in the medical journals and the scientific journals, and it’s in journals which are about environmental issues as well, and it’s in a couple of very obscure textbooks, like the kind that costs 60 quid and nobody reads. a day in foils and a day in waterstones researching this. And you’ve got shelves and shelves of health books with no mention of environmental pollution. And you’ve got shelves and shelves of books on the climate crisis and other ecological problems with nothing about the impact on health. A lot about the impact on wildlife, right? A lot about species loss and biodiversity loss. But all that means is we acknowledge that our chemicals are killing animals. We forget that we too are animals. And yes, there’s a huge amount of evidence and I am documenting it. But what I would also say is there’s another type of evidence which is simply looking at the increase in cancer rates. Now you yourself have said, come on, we’ve got to pay attention to this. One in two of us will get cancer. What I’d say rather is one in two of us will get cancer if we carry on as we are living now. If we carry on eating junk food rather than fresh fruit and vegetables. And if we carry on being oblivious to the pollution that’s all around us, we have been putting a huge amounts of toxic substances by which I mean specifically the technical term is xenobiotics with an X, X-E-N-O which is Greek for alien. So substance is foreign to human biochemistry. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution about 250 years ago, we’ve been pumping these petrochemicals and other toxic compounds into the air, into the water, into the soil and therefore into our foods. And the personal care products so-called that we rub into our skin, the moisturizers and creams and so on for cosmetic and medical purposes are all petrochemical as well. Now the thing is 250 years since this began is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a tiny sliver of time in the context of our evolution, of our biological development. I mean, life began three and a half billion years ago, human life two million years ago. So for all these billions and millions and hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve been living just with what the earth produces naturally. And the only substances we encountered were foods that grew or animals that we killed which our body was evolved to work with. Suddenly we are encountering all these unnatural chemicals which most of us can cope with a little bit up to a point. Some of us can’t cope with a tool and that depends on specific genetic differences, right? So the liver makes enzymes whose job is detoxification. But what are the liver enzymes designed in quotes by mother nature to detoxify? Mostly it’s our own hormones, particularly estrogen in women and anything we might encounter in the natural world like poison ivy or stinging nettles or snake bites or scorpion bites, that sort of thing is what our evolution has prepared us for. Now, some people’s systems work all right detoxifying pesticides, but others don’t. And those are the people who are most vulnerable. Now I’ve been doing genetic tests for years to find out who is most vulnerable, but this is not in mainstream medicine at all.

Dr Jenny Goodman
And ultimately the people who are most vulnerable who end up with multiple chemical sensitivity or have extreme reactions to a small encounter with a little bit of pesticides, really they are what I would call the canary people. They’re the canary down the mine, simply signaling or foreshadowing to us what awaits all of us if we don’t clean up our planet and clean up our act. I mean, I think it was back in 1854 that the great native American leader chief Seattle said what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. Now we are actually doing it.

Robin Daly
Well, look, it’s very interesting you tying together these two things. I think you’re right. They haven’t really been tied together yet. The kind of environmental disaster which, you know, everyone is waking up to. And the health disaster that is intimately linked with that. And it’s pretty clear there is a health disaster, but they haven’t really been tied together as being intimately involved with each other.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Well, you know, it isn’t clear to everybody that there’s a health disaster. It’s clear to you and it’s clear to me. And I think this is because it’s very quickly normalized. Now I travel on the London tube sometimes and there are adverts everywhere saying, wear a hatch for something or other day. Cure brain tumors by wearing hats. Grow a mustache to help a bro with prostate cancer and wear pink ribbons and rung marathons to help breast cancer. Now I’m not against people doing their bit and it’s a wonderful and moving expression of compassion. But what it’s also doing is normalizing cancer. And, you know, if I stand in a room full of 50 people and I say, put your hand up if you know someone with cancer, every hand in the room goes up. And if I had asked that same question 100 years ago of an equivalent group of people, maybe two or three hands would have gone up. But because we live with it, we live in this moment. We think it’s normal that we know someone with heart disease, we know someone with diabetes, we know someone with dementia, we know an autistic child, we know somebody with an autoimmune disease, a woman whose thyroid doesn’t work properly. All of this was incredibly rare two or 300 years ago. And the story we’re told is the increase in all these illnesses because epidemiologically it’s undeniable that they’re increasing exponentially. The story we are told is because we have an aging population. Now there’s flawed logic that says, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, we’re now living long enough to get all these hideous diseases. But it isn’t true that we’re living longer. It’s based on a fallacy, which is if you compare our average age of death to that in the Victorian times when Dickens was writing, yes, there’s a massive difference. Their average age of death was about 45 or 50, but why? Because that figure includes child mortality.

Dr Jenny Goodman
a quarter of all children died before their fifth birthday. That brings the average level of death right down to 45 or 50. Now we haven’t got that, thank God, and the reason we haven’t got it is thanks to improved hygiene and sanitation and nutrition and people no longer living in the West in the hideously overcrowded conditions in which they lived in Dickens day. So it’s a fallacy. Plenty of people in Victorian times lived into their 80s and 90s but they kept their marbles. They didn’t get Alzheimer’s. In fact the disease Alzheimer described was the case of a woman who was 51 who was losing her brain power like 40 years earlier than you would expect. It was pre-Cenal dementia. But the most devastating argument of all to explain that the increase in these diseases is to do with environmental and nutritional factors and not to do with age. It’s simply this, cancer is going up faster among children than it is among adults. and that can be nothing to do with aging. So we need to address the causes.

Robin Daly
Absolutely right. So I think you’ve pretty much dispelled one of the myths I wanted to ask about which is to do with this natural ability of the body to detoxify and it’s not something you even need to think or worry about. And this is something that seems to be spread around by, particularly by oncologists who ironically are known for dispensing some of the most toxic treatments allowed to be used on humans. But certainly we do have a pretty extraordinary ability to withstand toxic onslaught but I think you’ve already said something to the effect that really it wasn’t built for what we’ve got now.

Dr Jenny Goodman
No, it wasn’t. But the other thing is, it is true to say that what’s doing the detox is our liver, but not only was it built for a completely different kind of compound. It’s also the case that the liver can only do its job if it has the right conditions. Right. So if you are eating lots of junk food and not enough fiber and too much sugar and so on, then the blood that reaches the liver through the hepatic portal vein, because it doesn’t just get blood in an artery from the heart, it also gets blood supply from the gut, including from the colon. If you’re eating junk, then that blood supply that reaches the liver will be so full of self generated toxins from your gut that the whole of the liver’s detox capacity will be used dealing with that. And similarly, if you’re a woman on the pill or a bloke drinking three or four or five pints of non organic beer or any kind of beer every evening, that will use up your liver’s detox capacity. So it’s there and it’s brilliant, but it’s finite. So what we’re really doing when we talk about detoxification, we can’t detoxify, only the liver can do it. What we’re really doing is giving the liver the ideal conditions in which to do its detoxification work. So we’re eating pure food, we’re avoiding the pollutants and we can go into some detail about how to do that so that the liver is free to get on with its job.

Robin Daly
Right okay well when it comes to thinking about environmental toxins and in food and all the products some people have thought about it a lot sooner than others obviously I mean the Germans it seems been notably ahead in thinking about this way back in the early part of the 20th century they were looking into this stuff they were investigating organic food production and all that kind of thing but nonetheless that doesn’t naturally lead to things you know getting better it hasn’t really because there’s an immense force at work going in the other direction and I’ve noticed this rather demoralizing 50-year cycle around the major toxins which seems to be you know it’s brought in with lots of vampires being massively convenient modern cheap effective safe addition to life asbestos all about keeping us safe you know from fire and the first rumblings that all is not well almost straight away actually very early in its introduction but then it takes about 50 years of tackling intense lobbying bogus science all this kickback from industry basically until it’s finally outlawed by which time the whole place is saturated in that particular toxin you know they’ve got asbestos in the kindergartens in the hospitals all our houses everywhere and but massive profits have been extracted at a vast cost to human health so you know that that’s the kind of pattern but right now it seems like we’ve got so many of these on the go these 50-year cycles that even fighting them is an impossible task and we haven’t got 50 years to deal with the problem anymore you know so I’m just wondering how are we going to turn this around

Dr Jenny Goodman
And the only way that I know how to turn it around is education, information, demystifying, getting the word out. And most of all, and I want to give credit to the person who I heard this from, William Lana, who runs green fibres, non-toxic fabrics and clothing in top net. And he said, what we buy will be produced, what we don’t want. And basically what we have to do is stop underestimating our incredible power as consumers, right? It was a consumer boycott that helped significantly to bring down apartheid in South Africa. So if we keep using our cars to go everywhere and keep buying petrol, it will keep being produced and polluting the earth. If we keep using, for example, you’ve got a child with eczema, you go to the GP. They’re going to give you a moisturising cream that is petrochemical, right? Damaging to the child, particularly to their cell membranes in their brain and damaging to the people whose land was destroyed and polluted when they were digging up the oil in the first place. There are hundreds of wonderful herbal remedies for eczema that you can use instead. So we need to stop buying these products. Plastic, right? Plastic is very harmful in itself. It’s not only choking the oceans, but it’s making a significant contribution to breast cancer, prostate cancer and other cancers as a reproductive tract. Why? Because plasticizers like phthalates and DPA are estrogen mimics. They sit on the estrogen receptors, stimulate them, but they’re not really estrogen, but they cause that proliferation of breast and ovary and womb lining tissue, which is cancer. So if we stop buying anything wrapped in plastic and make that little bit of effort to get the paper bag, which you can find in the mushroom section of the supermarket. I don’t know why they think only mushrooms need paper bags. Put your apples or your spinach or your carrots in a paper bag. I have this fantasy of a kind of mass trespass where we all turn up at the supermarket and throw the plastic wrapping back on the floor, having extracted the content. And if everyone did that, that was an action we did for a week. The supermarkets would suddenly learn you can have all the fruit and veg loose like it used to be in the old green grocery shop. You don’t need to wrap everything in plastic. You don’t need to wrap things in cling film, which is estrogenic, or in aluminium foil, which in some instances, if it’s touching something acid can indeed be, you know, toxic metal released into your system. There are paper bags, there are safe, if you care, is the company that makes safe wrappings for food, watery paper bags are fine. So what we’re up against is inconvenience, right? Or rather, what we’re up against is the tyranny of convenience, because learning to change our habits in these ways, even though each action is small in itself, is a change of routine, and we’re all busy, and we’re all overworked,

Dr Jenny Goodman
and we’re all tired. But you know, it’s worth the effort. We get into the habit of brushing our teeth every evening, and we could get into the habit of just buying everything not wrapped in plastic, using, for example, instead of washing up liquid that really stinks to high heaven, and is incredibly destructive to us and to wildlife, you can get really gentle, safe washing up liquids, particularly the one made by Sumer, S-U-M-A. If you can’t find Sumer, then e-cover is not bad. Surface cleaning, you know, we shouldn’t be spraying these antibacterial stuff, we should just be using a damp cloth. Furniture, if you must polish it, you can use beeswax, which is natural. For windows, you can just use a damp cloth or a little bit of safe washing up liquid, and you know, you can cook in pots and pans that are not made of aluminium, but again, if you’ve got aluminium pans in your boiling pasta or boiling an egg, it’s not a problem, but if something acid like tomato or lemon or rhubarb touches that, it will leach the aluminium out. Aluminium is implicated in both breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, again, there are hundreds of references for this, a lot of them from Professor Darbury from Redding University. So another thing, sadly, we have to do, we shouldn’t have to, is get a water filter, because what’s coming out of our tap and poisoning us, of course, it should only be water, it should be pure H2O, but what’s coming out is the chlorine that they put in to get rid of the bugs. The thing is they put it in but they don’t take it out again and they say it’s absolutely necessary but I’ve been looking into this and in Holland, in the Netherlands they don’t use chlorine. They use a combination of sophisticated physical filtering, and then ultraviolet light ultraviolet light kills all known germs. So does iodine, by the way, which is safer than chlorine. So it isn’t essential but given that they do it, and that also the water companies don’t remove traces of antibiotics and hormones and other drugs which are in the water. And why are they in the water, because people and animals are taking these drugs, the animals pee directly on the earth, we pay indirectly into the water table, and they have no system for taking out so the residues of drugs are in our water and they’re in the rivers actually the fish are on drugs, they’re getting side effects just like us. And, and any residues of artificial fertilizers pesticides are certainly not properly removed either. And just to add to this lovely cocktail, a few months ago, the government introduced the health and social care bill. And if I remember rightly clauses 147 and 148 slipped in quietly between all the rest are saying, we the government are going to introduce fluoridation artificial fluoridation into every area of the UK. Every single area. Now it used to be a decision made by local authorities, but there has been a pilot study effectively in Birmingham and the West Midlands, they’ve had fluoride added to their water since 1964.

Dr Jenny Goodman
And in my practice, I see children from all over Europe. I’ve seen a disproportionate number from the West Midlands of children with developmental disorders of brain and bone to areas targeted by fluoride which doesn’t belong in the human body at all. And we’re told it’s because it’s good for their teeth. But what’s good for children’s teeth is to brush their teeth and not eat sugar. End of story. And again, as you were talking about with asbestos we have to look at the powerful commercial interests behind this. Where’s the fluoride coming from. It is a waste product, a toxic byproduct of the phosphate fertilizer industry, and they have a waste disposal problem. And 50 years ago they were told you can’t release this stuff from factory chimneys it’s toxic. And no country in Europe has put it in their water, but it is in the water in the States, because the American Dental Association and my understanding has been bought off by the phosphate fertilizer industry to say, take this fluoride we don’t know what to do with it, put it in the water supply and tell all the mums and dads, it’s good for the children’s teeth. So I see damage to bone and brain also ovary kidney and overwhelmingly the thyroid gland, because fluoride and chlorine are in the same chemical group as iodine which is essential for the health of the breast, the ovary the test is in the thyroid, of course, for all the cells of our body and fluoride pushes iodide out and chlorine pushes iodine out, and we need both. So, water filters are not cheap, but they are worth their weight in gold, because they take this stuff out of the water. If you can afford it, you will not just a filter on your kitchen tap. You want a whole house water filter because they’re not only you know we’re drinking chlorine and fluoride and God knows what you’re no longer showering in it. And that very very slight smell of chlorine. Once you take it away, you’ll start to become re sensitized to it and you’ll notice it in other people’s houses. No, it’s not as bad as a swimming pool, but it’s there. So we’ve talked about pollution in the water. We’ve talked a little bit about indoor pollution. And we should mention mold, because although it’s not technically synthetic it’s just as toxic if you’ve got mold.

Robin Daly
It’s been news lately, hasn’t it?

Dr Jenny Goodman
because of that poor little boy in the north way who died age two despite his parents pleading for them to do something. I mean it’s natural in the sense that it’s a living organism, it’s a fungus, but it’s unnatural in the sense that if you’re living in a tightly insulated building with no change of air and it’s cold and there’s no ventilation, you will get mold and it’s really a hazard of our climate in the UK. You don’t get it in desert places.

Robin Daly
But it is linked, it seems to me it’s very much linked to changes in lifestyle though because of course in the past the houses were cold and drafty and so fungus didn’t get so much of a go at it but now actually we keep the, you know, they’re all incredibly sealed up and every draft is seen to and measured with air pressure testers and everything and so we’re in a way, we’re asking for trouble in this climate.

Dr Jenny Goodman
I know it’s a real problem and I think it’s almost the only instance I know of where what’s good for the planet and what’s good for the person don’t actually coincide because I mean I frankly I have the heating on if it’s very cold but I always have the windows open because that’s the only way to prevent mould is to replicate the climate of the southern Mediterranean. So what else do people do in their homes? They spray air fresheners around. These are some of the most toxic chemicals in existence and they’re very strongly implicated in migraines and other severe headaches and my question is why does your house need freshening in the first place? What is it that’s smelling? Open the windows, empty the bin, empty the compost bin and if you still need a nice smell get some natural organic essential oils. Essential oils are what perfume used to be before it became a petrochemical toxic product just you know essential oil of geranium or lavender or jasmine or rose lemon rosemary these are wonderful smells and you sprinkle them around you put them in a little burner with a beeswax tea light underneath and that’s your air freshener. Most good health food shops will sell natural versions of you know makeup, shampoo, moisturizer but I still advise people to read the ingredients list and indeed to get a magnifying glass to do so even in the health food shop you can’t be certain. Another huge area of possible toxicity is menstrual products. You know pads and tampons have got all sorts of stuff in but you can get safe ones from either safecosmetics.org or natural care. In the UK you want naturalcare.com. There are safe ways to get rid of nits you know the eggs of lice and children’s hair. There’s a wonderful company called Community Hygiene Concern although of course nits is nothing to do with hygiene. CHC.org they will send you a bug buster kit with no chemicals at all not even herbal ones. It’s a special way of combing them out and they go away. Similarly with pets people put flea collars on their pets or the vet puts drops of flea collar between the animal’s shoulder blades or equivalent of shoulder blades in a cat or dog. These are insecticides. They are incredibly toxic to the pet and to the humans especially the children that are stroking the cat or dog. You can keep fleas off pets completely by rubbing powdered neem bark into them. It’s the bark of an Indian tree. It’s a thousands year old herbal remedy and it’s green so your pet goes green for a day or two. They lick it off themselves. They lick it off and it becomes a natural dewormer for them as well and it keeps the fleas away completely.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Not neem oil. I’m saying the powdered bark of the neem tree. Another major source of hazards that I’ve discovered is mattresses. Conventional mattresses when they’re new and just unwrapped from their plastic they out gas or off gas all the chemicals they contain and you’re on there for eight hours a night and your face is pretty close to the mattress so I would not worry if your mattress is more than two years old because it’s finished out gating but I would worry if you’re going to get a new mattress and I would get an organically produced mattress from the natural mat or abaca organic. Okay again I wouldn’t dry clean your clothes but if you have to do it in the summer bring it home and hang it in the garden for a few days so those dry cleaning chemicals which are most definitely associated with cancer and the World Health Organization classifies them as carcinogenic. They can out gas in the garden for a few days and only then bring them into your wardrobe. There are safe paints for decorating. There’ll be loads more about this in my next book but virtually everything you use in your home you can get safe non-toxic alternatives to but even simpler than that if you’re decorating if you’re having new flooring put down just keep the windows open. Do it in the summer and keep the windows open. So you know there are lots of little changes we need to make and we need to know what we’re up against. I think your mention of asbestos is very very appropriate because we were told asbestos was totally safe. It took decades, took decades before the link with mesothelioma was established which is cancer of the plural lining of the lung. And the same with cigarette smoke. We were told that that was safe. Now, as you say, we don’t have 50 years. We’re not going to convince the people at the top. I’m afraid the government are too closely linked with a commercial interests that don’t want us to know that they’re poisoning us. And this has to be grassroots. It has to come from the bottom up. We just have to stop buying their poisons and campaign for cycle lanes, use every patch of land to grow our own vegetables, you know, our own carrots, potatoes, cabbages, you know, even if they’re onto allotments, there are tiny patches of land. Every school should be using some of its grounds for growing, teaching the kids how to grow vegetables, teaching them how to cook. It’s got to be a people’s revolution because it’s not going to change from the top.

Robin Daly
Well, there’s two things that strike me. One is, well, first of all, the days when we thought it was a simple matter to just choose to buy this or this are long gone. It’s good that we have far more choice. As you say, you can go out and you can buy an alternative to most things now, which you couldn’t have done 25 years ago. So that’s brilliant. And a lot of those alternatives really are good. But then, of course, as the sales of those have gone up, the people who produced the less good things get into greenwashing and trying to pretend that theirs are good. They jump on the bandwagon. Absolutely. Anything that makes money, they’ll want to be there.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Another way that’s happening, sorry to interrupt, but another way that’s happening is that big pharmaceutical companies are buying up vitamin companies, supplements companies, and that’s very scary.

Robin Daly
Well that’s exactly the equivalent of sort of huge corporations buying up health food companies and things like that which is happening as well and in unfortunately well you know you could say on the one hand oh that’s improving the output of the corporations but in fact the problem is that the corporations don’t have the ethos themselves and they’re not fundamentally trustworthy. If you’ve built a business which is based on the fact that you produce non-toxic goods then of course if you are shown to be a fraud then they’ll be a buyer stuff so you have to stick by it but you know that the corporations are not really in that position and they if they can find a shortcut that’ll make them more money you know they’re going to do it in the end so it will degrade the whole area unfortunately so you know I think the need to be educated goes up and up and up as time goes on it seems to me and so it’s to think we can easily navigate this is ridiculous because you know I walked around a shop watching what other people put in their trolleys and I can see that some people think they’re buying quite good stuff and actually I know they’re not you know but it’s simply that they’re falling for the marketing.

Dr Jenny Goodman
why I say that the very first tool you need to become healthy is a magnifying glass. walk around in the chemist as well as in the food shop and you read the ingredients list on everything. If you don’t know it or can’t pronounce it or it’s some weird Latin name, the chances are you shouldn’t be putting it in or on your body because our skin is permeable and these cosmetics are fat soluble because petrochemicals are so they go straight in and they head for where the fat is stored which is in our brain. But there is an exception to that which is you might see lavendula foliata or something like that. It’s just the Latin name for lavender. So that’s okay. So, you know, you can check up what it is.

Robin Daly
So the other thing that strikes me apart from the navigating the complexities of what it is exactly you’re buying is that say you are someone who’s been diagnosed with cancer and you’re thinking for the first time well I have to look at this area of toxicity. You’ve already listed a massive number of areas of life to look at and it seems to me there’s a need for some kind of prioritization to know how to navigate that. Some things must be more important than others and I’m just wondering what you put at the top of the list first things to sort out in your life.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Yeah, I think number one is eating organic because if you’re not eating organic produce, sadly you are eating pesticides and insecticides and herbicides, weed killers like glyphosate. So absolute number one is to eat organic. Number two is to get a plumbed in water filter. So you’re drinking pure water and those are definitely the two most important things. Everything and those are things I would do immediately if I had that diagnosis or ideally before, you know, because this is prevention and treatment. It is both. If it’s prevention, you don’t need to be quite so strict. If it’s treatment, you do need to be quite strict. So filter your water, eat organic. And obviously, if you’re dealing with cancer, we know that the toxin that feeds cancer cells the most is sugar. And I call it a toxin because although it’s natural, it’s not natural in the quantities in which we consume it. You know, the amount of sorry, but the form is very, very concentrated. Right. So if you, if you eat a slice of raw beetroot, yeah, there’s sugar in it, but a teaspoon of sugar, you’d have to eat about 20 whole beetroots to get that much. So it feeds cancer cells. And vitamin C, which is very similar, but crucially different molecule pushes it out. Right. So the combination of having loads and loads of vitamin C and zero sugar is both treatment and prevention for cancer. So I would prioritize those things, loads of vitamin C, no sugar, nothing that isn’t organic, nothing with additives or flavorings. Eventually, nothing with an ingredients list on it at all. If you pick an apple or catch a fish, it doesn’t need an ingredients list. It is just itself. So, you know, organically humanely reared meat, poultry to some extent, fish, organic, free range eggs, loads and loads of organic vegetables, a certain amount of organic fruit, but obviously not too much because we’re tempted to overdose on the sugar that’s built into us by evolution because sugar used to be in short supply and now it’s in excess. And there are detoxification methods which you can use. One of the best is organic vegetable juicing. And I do mean making juice rather than smoothie, because what you’re doing is you’re concentrating all the antioxidant goodies that are in the vegetables and making them into a medicine. You’d have to eat more vegetables than a person can eat in the day in order to get the benefit of that natural medicine. So it’s kind of on a spectrum with herbal medicine. It’s getting the goodness out of the plant. So organic vegetable juicing, there are recipes in chapter seven of my book for how to do this. Again, it takes time, but it doesn’t take as much time as you think. And it’s well worth doing. And I mean, I would do that preventively. But again, if you’re doing it preventively, do it two or three times a week. If you’ve actually got cancer, to be honest, I would do it two or three times a day.

Robin Daly
OK, so what it seems to be you just said is that you prioritise all the things you’re putting into your body at the top of the list. Now, would it be fair to guess that the next thing down the list would be the things you put onto your body?

Dr Jenny Goodman
Yes, and it’s some affecting men as well as women now. And if you’re eating a really healthy diet, particularly with lots of good fats, lots of omega threes, which is from fish oil and walnuts and good omega sixes from evening primrose oil hemp seed oil, cold pressed organic safflower sunflower oil and so on, then your skin shouldn’t be dry, and you shouldn’t need to smother it in moisturizer. So first of all, you have the good oils from the inside out and you don’t eat the junk fats like margarine or supermarket oil in plastic bottles that looks like we we which has been refined and is now trans fats effectively and toxic to the cell membrane. But if you do still want to rub something on your skin. First you go to don’t go to the chemist and don’t go to the supermarket. Go to a good health food shop, not one that just sells its own brands, one that has a variety of brands. Take your time. Take your magnifying glass and find one of the brands that really is pure so sukin is good. We’re leader is good. And there are a couple of other really good trustworthy brands, which really haven’t got any junk in, but don’t assume that a year from now, they haven’t been taken over by a drug company who’s put loads of additives in there. So it’s like you’ve only read the ingredients list as it is today. This is this is hard work. But basically, you can get really pure herbal creams for anything you need to put on. You do not need deodorant right we sweat in order to detoxify ourselves, it’s natural, it’s essential. If you are worried about smelling then get a pack of wipes made by natural care. Natural care wipes have got nothing in but water, and the tiny bit of grapefruit seed extract which is a herbal antifungal carry them around with you and go and wipe your armpits every couple of hours if you’re sweating a lot. But don’t use deodorant or antiperspirant because we need to sweat. And actually, personally, I think we need to reacustom ourselves to the natural smell of healthy human sweat. You know, if you have a shower every day, and it’s the sweat of physical activity, not the sweat of fear, it doesn’t smell too bad. And you don’t want to be putting deodorants under your arm, it’s got aluminium in or parabens or any of these carcinogenic chemicals and perfume as I say you can use natural essential oils. They don’t last all day. Anything that lasts all day is synthetic the body can’t break it down. Essential oils like rose or lavender or geranium, orange flower you can break them down because they’re natural molecules akin to the body’s own biochemistry. Almost all of this is within our control. The bit in terms of what goes into our body and what doesn’t. The bit that’s not in our control is car fumes, air pollution, and that’s where we need to join one of the wonderful organizations that are campaigning against it like Client Earth, the Clean Air Fund, and Mums for Lungs. Mums for Lungs produce a little leaflet that you can pop through the window of someone who’s sitting there with their car engine idling and pushing out fumes. And I’ve done this, you give the driver a big smile, can I give you a leaflet?

Dr Jenny Goodman
And it just points out how we’re polluting the air, we’re heating the planet, we’re poisoning the children. The coroner reported that Ella Kissy Deborah died of air pollution, her asthma killed her because she lived on a busy road. So the only approach to this is collected. But what you can do as an individual is change your route if you’re walking. If you walk from A to B along the main road, take the back roads where there are fewer cars and you’ll get five or 10 minutes more exercise, which is good, but you won’t be breathing in the fumes. What worries me tremendously is that exhaust pipes are at the same height as a toddler’s nose. You know, our little kids and our kids in buggies are breathing in this stuff. And we have to campaign on it because with the pollution in the home, 95% of it you can choose to cut out. But once you go outside your door, we’re talking about collective political campaigning.

Robin Daly
Well, so back to cancer in particular. So we talked about a lot of things to do with reducing your exposure. But if you’ve got a diagnosis of cancer, probably a sensible priority is finding out how much of a toxic load you’ve already got and if necessary doing something about it. So how do you find out and what can you do about getting rid of toxins, some of which are very persistent?

Dr Jenny Goodman
a practitioner who’s qualified in ecological medicine, so you can look at the website of the BSEM, British Society for Ecological Medicine, or you find a herbalist, or you find a nutritional therapist, they’re equally good, I’ve got a whole list of colleagues I recommend, and they will have access to the right laboratories to test for toxins. So there’s doctor’s data and Great Plains Laboratory in America and you can access them via VHL, which is Viva Health Laboratories, which have taken over from BioLab in London, and they can organise all those tests for you. I would say though that a good ecological physician should be able to make some of that diagnosis without doing the tests simply by taking a detailed environmental history. Where did you grow up? What were your parents’ occupations? Did your dad work on a nuclear testing site? You know, did your grandfather work down a lead mine? Did you grow up playing on a slag heap? Because I’ve had patients who did, and have the lead and so on in their systems. You know, was your mum a dentist? Have you got mercury poisoning? So a good and thorough environmental history taking should point you in the right direction, so you don’t randomly test everything. If you’re a landscape gardener and you’ve been working for 30 years and you’ve never been organic, you’ve been spraying pesticides all over yourself. Now, if you’ve been sweeping up wet leaves, you may have more toxicity from that. So you take a history before you rush to testing. When you’ve done the testing, there are some detoxification methods that work for virtually anything, in particular the vegetable juicing and the very high dose vitamin C. But if you have got petrochemical poisoning, fat soluble poisoning, and pesticides are fat soluble, and so are plasticizer chemicals, then saunas are an invaluable tool because they will get the fat soluble chemicals out. Phosphatidylcholine or PC is unfortunately incredibly expensive, but also one of the few things that really helps to get out the fat soluble chemicals. Colonic hydrotherapy or colonic irrigation is very, very useful, maybe in conjunction with fasting, but maybe on its own. Epsom salts, baths are very useful for heavy metal toxicity because the magnesium helps push out the heavy metals and the sulfur in it, sulfate helps with estrogen metabolism and estrogen detox. And then there are specific supplements for specific metals. So if you’ve got aluminium poisoning, silica is the substance that pushes it out. If you’ve got cadmium poisoning, then you need zinc and huge doses of vitamin C. If you’ve got nickel poisoning, again you need vitamin C and zinc, but you also need an amino acid called mafionine, which grabs onto the nickel and takes it out. So for mercury poisoning and many, many things that help, from chlorella and cilantro. By the way, the cilantro or coriander has to be organically grown because it’s good at taking mercury out of the body because it picks it up, but it will equally pick it up from the soil if it’s there.

Dr Jenny Goodman
So it has to have been grown in really uncontaminated soil or you defeat the object and huge doses of vitamin C and selenium and sulfur and zinc. Again, there are many, they’re all listed in chapter seven of my book and a good practitioner can take you through all that. If you’ve been drinking unfiltered water for a long time or your dentist has been putting fluoride in your mouth or you’ve been using fluoride toothpaste and the dentist is telling the children not to rinse. So this swallowing fluoride, it’s even in the dental floss now and it’s in mouthwash and it’s easy to measure the urinary fluoride level. That’s an easy test that Viva Health Laboratories will be doing. How do you get rid of the chlorine in the fluoride? It’s very simple. Lugol’s iodine. Lugol’s iodine is half iodine and half iodide because different organs need it in different forms. So the breast needs iodine, the thyroid needs iodide and so on and most organs of the body need both and if you give somebody either Lugol’s iodine or OptiMox make Iodoral, which is an iodine tablet, you get rid of the chlorine, you get rid of the fluoride. You should do this with a practitioner who is familiar with it because you can overdose on iodine like you can overdose on anything and if you’ve got overactive thyroid you really shouldn’t do it but iodine is a really neglected nutrient and absolutely brilliant. It stops the infection cold and it gets the toxic halogens like fluoride and chlorine out of the body. Amazing.

Robin Daly
Wow, very interesting. Well, look, we’re out of time. I think we’ve sort of scratched the surface of the topic today, really. The good news is that, as you mentioned earlier, you’ve written a book on the subject, which goes into lots of detail. Do you want to quickly tell listeners about your book and about your website where they can find out more?

Dr Jenny Goodman
Sure. The book is called Staying Alive in Toxic Times. It’s uptitled A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health because it’s also about how to live and eat according to the seasons. So the first four chapters are winter, spring, summer and autumn. The fifth chapter is called Seasons of Your Life and it’s about how to stay healthy at every stage of the life cycle, starting from preconception, how to have healthy babies, breastfeeding and so on, childhood right up into old age and don’t dementia prevent osteoporosis and all that. Then there’s a short chapter six called Nourish and Flourish and that guides people through the minefield which is supplementation, how to choose nutritional supplements that are really full of vitamins and minerals and not full of fillers and additives and junk and it’s shocking what’s in some of the commercial supplements, how to take only what you need and how to take it when you need it at the right time as well, right time of day, right time of year. The seventh and final chapter and for our discussion the most important is called Tox Detox. You can’t poison the planet without poisoning the people and that is basically about what toxins we’re encountering, where we’re encountering them, how to avoid them, how to not retox and how to detoxify, how to get them out of your body and keep them out.

Robin Daly
Very useful indeed and your your website address is?

Dr Jenny Goodman
It’s drjennygoodman.com.

Robin Daly
Fantastic. All right well look thanks very much for going through this hugely important topic today. As I say we’ve under done it in terms of how much we presented material about this so I’m very pleased to have had this chance to talk to you today.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Well, it’s been absolutely lovely to talk with you, Robin, and, you know, all power to the wonderful, important work you’re doing. Thank you so much. Bye. Bye.

Robin Daly
Well that was thoroughly enlightening. Do check out those resources that Jenny referred to, her website, where you’ll find further material and links to other resources and her book which is also featured on the website. Thanks so much for listening today. I’ll be back next week with another Yes To Life show o I do hope you’ll be able to join me again. Goodbye.