Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcription has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hi and welcome to the yes to life show on UK health radio. I’m Robin Daly, founder of yes to life, UK’s integrative cancer care charity, and host for this weekly radio show. If you’re a healthcare professional, you may also like to know that I co-host the Cancer Talk podcast series with senior NHS oncologist Dr Penny Kechagioglouhioglu. It’s available on all major podcast platforms and also via our website that’s yes to life.org.uk It won’t have escaped the notice of listeners to this show that chronic disease generally, including cancer, is on a runaway trajectory with spiraling incidents. Many factors seem to be playing into this, but a front runner with a wealth of evidence behind it is toxins in our environment. Dr. Jenny Goodman focuses her full attention on the situation and is an expert in terms of knowing what we can do to lower our risks in regard to toxicity. Hi Jenny, welcome back to the yes to life show.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Robin Daly
And it’s great to have you as my guest again. Now, you’re a real leader in this field of living with our increasingly toxic environment. And I’ve got to say, you’re also a leader in communicating your expertise to the public. Thank you. And this is something we’ve got to be very grateful for. As you’re talking about a situation, really, it’s still getting worse, although there are hopes of an overall improvement somewhere around the corner. Navigating life in the 21st century in a way that avoids serious health consequences from toxicity seems to me to be becoming increasingly difficult. So we need people like you. So I want to start out this time with a contrast and compare in regards to strategies. It seems to me that in order to be as toxin-free as possible, we can avoid or reduce our exposure, or we can protect ourselves from exposure, or we can detox. Those seem to me to be the three things where we have our fingertips to do.

Robin Daly
Furthermore, it seems that all three of these strategies are important under different circumstances. So could you do a little contrast and compare the strengths and weaknesses of each of these strategies and when and why each of them could be needed?

Dr Jenny Goodman
Well, I mean, the short answer is yes, all of the above. And the complexity and severity of chronic disease that’s confronting us in the 21st century is never going to have a mono solution. It’s never going to be, to quote Michael Moadley, just one thing. But it can helpfully be just one thing at a time. So I mean, the first thing I would say is there’s lots you can do. But in conveying it, we always have to keep the balance between overwhelm, like naming all the things that you can do, and practicality, because most people only make two or three changes at any one goal. So your three approaches to toxicity were detox, avoiding the sources of the toxins, and what was the third one?

Robin Daly
protecting yourself from exposure.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Okay, so let’s start with protecting ourselves from exposure because some exposure is inevitable. And there are two ways of doing this. One is really good nutrition, which your listeners know about already. And that is essentially because most nutrients are antitoxins and conversely, most toxins are anti-nutrients. So for example, the heavy metals that are poisoning us, like aluminium, mercury, cadmium and so on, they do some of their damage by displacing the good minerals we need, like zinc and so on, pushing them off the enzymes whose helpers they are and where they’re sitting and replacing them. So if you start off with a good level of healthy minerals like zinc, selenium, iodine and so on, your body is going to literally have fewer molecular spaces for the toxins to occupy. Conversely, if you have got these toxins on board, then increasing the good nutrients helps to push them out.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Other ways that good nutrition helps is that, I’ll tell you a secret, we can’t really, as doctors, detoxify you, it’s your liver that’s detoxifying you. All we can do, as doctors, healers, nutritionists, naturopaths, is give the liver the conditions it needs, maximally, to do its job. Now one of the things the liver enzymes need to detox anything, whether it be heavy metal, pesticides, plastics, whatever, is a good supply of all the B vitamins. B1, B2, B3, B6, B12, all of them, and vitamin C as well. So most of the vitamins as well as the minerals are what we call co-factors, helpers for your detox enzymes. So again, on the one hand, the more of them you have, the better you are equipped to deal with the toxins in your environment.

Dr Jenny Goodman
On the other hand, the more toxins there are in your environment, the more they will deplete those vitamins and minerals that the liver enzymes need for detox. So we end up with an ironic situation that I explained in my first book, Staying Alive in Toxic Times, which is that we actually need more nutrients than we needed a couple of hundred years ago in order to combat the environmental toxins. But because of junk food and depleted soils, we’re actually getting less in the way of nutrients. So that’s a double whammy and good nutrition is the way out of it. The other half of your question, how do we protect ourselves from environmental toxins? Actually, it’s harder than nutrition. It’s about education. It’s about knowing where the toxins are. And that ties in with your second one, which is avoidance. So let’s combine it with avoidance. We need to know where the toxins are in order to avoid them.

Dr Jenny Goodman
And this is where we come to the danger of overwhelm, because environmental toxicity, unless you live at the top of the mountain or right by the sea, is pretty well everywhere. I’m tempted to say, especially in an urban environment, but that implies that all rural environments in the countryside are safe. If you’re on an organic farm or at the top of the mountain in a meadow with nothing except sheep, hopefully sheep that have never been dipped. But for most of us, we’re either in the countryside surrounded by farmers spraying insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, or we’re in the city breathing in traffic fumes, industrial air pollution. So there are really simple things you can do. If you live in the countryside, you find out where your nearest non-organic farmers are and you tell them that you’re extra sensitive to pesticides, you know, calling it an allergy is not true.

Dr Jenny Goodman
It’s toxicity, but it’s more acceptable to farmers who might feel a bit got at. So you say, I’m terribly sorry, I’m chemically sensitive. Please, could you warn me when you’re going to spray your crops and I will either, you know, leave home for a week or I’ll at least close my windows. So find out what’s happening. If you have a choice of where you live, obviously you’re going to live somewhere where any farms are organic and that’s more and more possible because more and more farmers are converting to organic. If you’re in the city and you’re walking, you can take the back roads. You can avoid walking on the main roads. And surprisingly, this makes a huge difference because a lot of the pollutants that are coming out of exhaust pipes are actually solid.

Dr Jenny Goodman
They’re heavy. They land on the ground and they don’t travel very far. So taking the back roads makes a really big difference. Carrying your children up high on your shoulders rather than having them in a buggy, because in a buggy, they are at the same, their nose is at the level of the exhaust pipe, which is a hazard. Walking as far from the curb as you can again makes a difference because these pollutant particles travel and they land, but they don’t travel that far. And of course, that’s not very satisfactory, but there are other kinds of pollution such as in the food from the soil and in the water that we can do a lot more about by trying to eat organic, by trying to filter our water. Air pollution outdoors is a hard one, but air pollution indoors is an easy one. So we can avoid air fresheners by not having them in the home, not spraying them. We can avoid scented candles by not having them.

Dr Jenny Goodman
If you want lovely smells in your home, you can get essential oils, essential oils of lavender, lemon, lemongrass, rosemary, orange flower, jasmine, all of these frankincense, they’re beautiful smells and you just sprinkle them around. But you could also ask yourself the question, why, why do you need air fresheners? Why does the air in your house need freshening? Have you emptied the bins? Have you opened the windows? It can be as simple as that. So go through your bathroom cabinets and go through the cupboard under your kitchen sink and have a look at all those cleaning chemicals stashed there. Get a magnifying glass and read the labels and you’ll see your skull and crossbones on many of them. because actually all we need really to clean our homes is water and perhaps a little bit of vinegar or sodium bicarbonate. We don’t need all these chemicals, but we have been indoctrinated especially recently to think that clean means free of microbes.

Dr Jenny Goodman
And we’ve been spraying antibacterial sanitizer and stuff everywhere. And it’s really a problem. It’s like dosing ourselves with antibiotics because these chemicals kill all the essential bugs along with the ones we’re aiming at. And often we’re not at all clear what we’re aiming at. Most of the bugs in our homes, on our bodies, in our bodies, on everybody else’s bodies are essential for us. They’re friends, they’re symbionts, they live with us. So, you know, we eliminate them at our peril. So yeah, 90% of the chemicals in most people’s kitchens are not necessary. And then we can move to the bathroom. So we’re all using deodorants and we have to ask ourselves why? Because if we wash regularly, we’re not gonna be smelly. You know, the smell of human sweat is only unpleasant if it’s old, stale, or if it’s the sweat of fear. And I know there are lots of alternative safe deodorants on the market, but A, some of them are not actually safe if you look closely, they’re made of rock alum.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Alum is aluminium in a so-called natural form, but actually the only natural state for aluminium is buried in the crust of the earth. Once it’s been extracted, it can get in through the skin. The armpit is right next to the breast. Aluminium is implicated in breast cancer and it’s implicated in dementia as well, particularly in Alzheimer’s. So you can occasionally find deodorants that have got no nasty chemicals in them. And my patients tell me reliably that they don’t work. So, you know, I think, let it go. Let’s all get used to the smell of healthy, fresh human sweat. And let’s wash regularly, end of problem. And not only that, some of these deodorants are antiperspirants. And if you stop yourself from perspiring, from sweating, you are stopping yourself from detoxing. And the whole theme of today is toxicity. And sweating is one of the body’s really clever ways in addition to the liver’s detox enzymes that we naturally get rid of toxins. So if we’re stopping ourselves doing that, that’s bad news.

Dr Jenny Goodman
what else might be in your bathroom cabinet? Synthetic perfumes. Now before the industrial revolution perfume was literally flower essences. We can still get that. That’s what essential oils are that I was talking about before. They really are just made from extracting in a mechanical way the lovely scents from flowers and petals and leaves. But the vast majority of perfume you would buy in a chemist or a supermarket is synthetic and contains particularly nasty chemicals like benzene which we know is implicated in leukemia. There’s solid research on this and just to pause for a minute you encounter perfume not just in perfume but in almost all other conventional commercial cosmetic products whether it’s makeup or moisturizer or hand cream or gendiodin.

Dr Jenny Goodman
They always have something in them called Parfume or fragrance they call it. These have loads of chemicals in that are listed if you look with your magnifying glass and loads of equally toxic ones that are not listed because by law they don’t have to put them on the label if they constitute one percent or less of what’s in the perfume. The Environmental Working Group in America did some fabulous research on this and they found that most perfumes on sale contain at least 14 unlisted ingredients. So these things are carcinogenic but the good news is there really are safe alternatives to all of them. There are lots of safe moisturizers I mean you can just use coconut oil although if you filter the chlorine out of your water you’ll find your skin actually doesn’t get so dry and so you don’t need so much moisturizer but there are absolutely safe herbal-based moisturizers and perfumes.

Dr Jenny Goodman
One of my patients asked me about using essential oils natural flower essences as perfumes said but does it last all day? To which the answer is no. It doesn’t last all day precisely because the body is able to break it down and degrade it. You put some more on after a couple of hours it’s harmless but anything that does last all day is by definition synthetic and worrying because the body’s not got the ability to break it down.

Robin Daly
Interestingly, yeah, convenience is usually the enemy of health, I’ve noticed, you know, like stuff that’s saved a long time on the shelf is bad news and all that kind of convenience.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Exactly. It’s like taking the husk off the grain and the germ and out of the grain to make it store for longer so you’ve got white flour or white rice which doesn’t go off because it’s dead.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Yeah, it’s the same principle, but convenience is a kind of tyranny over us, isn’t it?

Robin Daly
Absolutely, it’s the way that far too many things are foisted on us and we unwittingly lap them up because they’re so handy.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Detoxification, there are seven simple methods and they’re in my first book in chapter seven. Seven methods in chapter seven. I will tell you what they are. Some of them are easy. Some of them are more hard-worked. The first one is vegetable juicing, organic vegetable juicing, which is absolutely wonderful as both treatment and prevention for cancer and for getting rid of almost any toxin in your system. The second one is Epsom sorts baths. That’s magnesium sulfate, which goes in through the skin. The third is colonic hydrotherapy, which is not for everyone and not for anyone under 18, but can really give the liver such a helping hand in doing the detox. Then there is sprouting seeds on your window ledge because the tiny plants about one and a half inches high have got 50 times more nutrients than the mature vegetables. Then there is using vitamin C in really high dose.

Dr Jenny Goodman
I’m explaining in the book how to do it. Building the dose up very gradually will get rid of most heavy metals and toxins. Then there are specific supplements for specific toxins. So if you know that you’ve got aluminium in your system, you need silica to get it out. If you know that you’ve got, let’s say, mercury, then you know you need zinc and selenium and sulfur, coriander and pleurilla, those sorts of things. I’m not sure if that adds up to seven, but they’re all in the first book anyway. Just to say, those detox methods work well as prevention and treatment. They’re the other half of knowing what’s out there and protecting ourselves.

Robin Daly
Excellent. Okay, well look, you’ve given us a vast number of things to pay attention to. So as you said, you don’t want to do all these at once because you get overwhelmed. So what I thought would be interesting is maybe we can do a little bit of prioritizing here. So in terms of the type of things you can be exposed to, the hazards, the health hazards, and taking into account how serious they are as a health hazard and how likely we are to have been exposed to them, we need to start with the worst and the things we should pay attention to most.

Dr Jenny Goodman
you need to be aware that I’m not seeing this stuff to get popular and what I’m going to answer you is not a way to get popular with the general population or with the industry because more hazardous than anything I’ve mentioned now because of its extreme prevalence and our continual exposure to it is electromagnetic radiation from our mobile phones, from our smartphones, also from Wi-Fi routers and also from the cell phone towers, the masts, the mobile phone masts, which sprung up particularly in 2020-21, they knocked down where nobody was looking, suddenly there are these masts everywhere. If you drive on the motorway you see them every half a minute and there are kids particularly getting very sick when they live nearer than 600 meters to them and there are electrosensitive people who can feel them and can’t go near them and there are huge increases in the rate of brain tumors and they are linked,

Dr Jenny Goodman
there are studies linking them to the mobile phone that’s held to the ear, they’re mostly occurring on the side of the head where the user characteristically holds their phone. The younger you are the greater the hazard because your brain is still growing and the longer you’ve been using the phone the greater the hazard and the more hours of the day that you spend on it the greater the hazard. I found this research incredibly disturbing when I discovered it within the past couple of years and my overwhelming reaction was I don’t want to know this, I don’t want it to be true.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Not because I use a smartphone, I don’t, but because people are very close to me whom I love, including my kids, do because they’re part of that generation. But unfortunately, there’s a huge amount of evidence and I will document it in my second book, it’ll be in the references linking this new form of energy to which we’ve never been exposed in all our millions of years of evolution to the increase in many types of cancer, particularly brain tumors. And, you know, we’re not evolved to cope with it. The electromagnetic field that we are evolved to cope with is the Earth’s magnetic field, and if you go and stand barefoot on the grass or on a beach, you are aligned with the Earth’s electromagnetic fields. This is not hippy dippy stuff. This is physics. And unfortunately, it’s true. And I really wish it wasn’t because even if you’re not using your mobile phone, if you haven’t put it in flight mode or turned it off, it’s transmitting signals all the time.

Dr Jenny Goodman
It’s trying to connect with the nearest most. And it’s not just humans who are being affected by this. Birds and bees and other animals are trying to navigate using the electromagnetic field of the Earth as their compass. They’ve always done this. They’re getting disorientated and they’re dropping dead and the birds are bumping into the cell phone towers and dying, and we know we’ve got colony collapse among the bees. And that’s really serious because the bees pollinate our crops and we won’t have anything to eat if, you know, if we lose the bees. Now, it’s also insecticides undoubtedly that are poisoning the bees and loss of habitat. But electromagnetic radiation is looking like a real factor here. So it’s affecting the bees. It’s affecting us. So I think the first thing to do is to moderate your use of the mobile phone to keep it at a distance from your body.

Dr Jenny Goodman
So you have something plastic, not metal, connecting your ears to the phone. Don’t carry it on your person in your pocket if it’s switched on. And if you do have to carry it on your person, put it on flight mode and if you have to use it, hold it away from your body and minimise the duration of your calls. Now, it’s hard to acquire those habits. They’re new habits, but we all learn to acquire the habit of brushing our teeth. It’s a nuisance. It’s boring. It takes time, but we can do these things. And there are companies producing items and garments and devices that help protect us from the mobile phone radiation. And I’m going to list them in the new book, which is coming out in July. So there’s no need to despair. We don’t have to stop communicating with each other, but we do have to do it more carefully. So that’s number one.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Number two is about chemical as opposed to electromagnetic pollution. And that’s what’s in our food. Now, if it’s in the soil. It’s on your plate. So if farmers are putting insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides on their fields, that’s in their crops, it’s taken up by the roots of the crops. And those crops, even if you’re eating broccoli as opposed to junk food, it’s on your plate, right? So the single most effective way to not consume any pesticides at all, which are, by the way, implicated in Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and dementia, as well as many types of cancer. The way to avoid them is to eat organic. Now, when I say that, people throw at me the accusation that that’s a middle class indulgence. Now there is a truth in that accusation, there are people who are so poor that they can barely afford food at all, never mind organic, and they’re going to food banks, and that is absolutely criminal and a direct result of our hyper-capitalist society.

Dr Jenny Goodman
And it is also true that those people are very time poor, they’re working three or four jobs just to survive, and that’s why convenience is king, and they’re eating junk food and fast food, and they’ve all got time to sprout little vegetables on their window ledge. I fully appreciate that, and it’s a scandal, but there are many organisations campaigning to make organic and regeneratively farmed food available to the poorest in our society, and again I’ll list them in the new book, but that is happening, and that applies to about three million people. To the other 67 million people in our country I would say, if you can possibly afford to eat organic, you are not only doing your body an enormous favour, you are doing the whole society an enormous favour, because as I quote the founder of Green Fibres as saying, William Lana, what we buy will be produced, what we don’t won’t.

Dr Jenny Goodman
So it’s not just about eating organic for your own body, it’s about boycotting chemically farmed food, and that applies to meat as well as to vegetables. It is possible, it’s not nearly as expensive as people think, and the middle classes are very guilty in this, so I had a patient say to me once, actually more than once, I can’t possibly afford to eat organic. Oh by the way, can we reschedule the next consultation because I’ll be in Barbados? And I’m sitting there thinking well, wish I could afford to get my vitamin D in Barbados. So it is about prioritising, now in the 50s we spent 33% of our income on food, a third of our income is partly because housing was more affordable, but it was also a priority, now we spend about 8% of our income on food.

Dr Jenny Goodman
So I do think we need to turn it around and prioritise it because there’s nothing as bad for your income as getting cancer. So eating organic is my number two priority, and my number three, which also comes with a financial cost, but there are stages of it, is filter your water, because in the water there is chlorine, there’s fluoride, there’s pesticide residues, there’s heavy metal residues, and there are micro plastics, we haven’t talked about plastics, but they do the same as pesticides and they act as estrogen mimics. Every time you’re drinking water out of a plastic bottle, especially if it’s warm, or you’re wrapping your food in cling film, you are absorbing micro plastics, and they’re everywhere unfortunately, they’ve been found inside hoardshead birds in the remote Pacific, you know, on islands where our plastic that we throw away,

Dr Jenny Goodman
or we think we recycle, but the local council strapped for cash throws it away, it ends up in the ocean, and it ends up in the soil, and it ends up in us, micro plastics, the air and the water and the soil. A good water filter will take those out. Now if you’re a student or you’re renting, all you can do is get a countertop water filter, but they do make a huge difference, you can tell by the taste. If you’re a bit more able to spend on it, you can get a water filter that’s under the counter, so all the water coming out of your kitchen tap will be filtered, and that helps a lot. The ideal, which not every role can afford, is a whole house water filter, which means you’re not only drinking clean water and rinsing your vegetables in clean water and cooking your rice or whatever in clean water, you’re also bathing and showering in clean water, and with a chlorine that’s particularly important because we absorb it through our skin and through inhalation in the bath and the shower,

Dr Jenny Goodman
not just by swallowing the water. And lastly, I think probably the most worrying thing in the water is not in everybody’s water, it’s in some people’s water, and that is fluoride. It’s a toxic waste product from the phosphate fertilizer manufacturers and they’ve managed to get it into the water in most states of America and in the Republic of Ireland, in Birmingham and the West Midlands, it’s been in the water since 1964 and I have seen reports which I can’t find now dating back to the 90s that that part of the UK has a much higher rate of bone cancer, osteosarcoma, osteoclastoma and so on and certainly they’ve done studies showing there’s a much higher rate of hip fracture in areas like the West Midlands where there is fluoride in the water. Now in London it isn’t in there yet, in the Northeast there is a battle taking place because they want to put fluoride in the water there.

Dr Jenny Goodman
They’ve done it in Cheshire, in Northern Ireland I think they’ve said no and in Southampton I think the campaign against it succeeded. I’m not up to speed on this but again during lockdown Boris Johnson’s government passed a bill that included a couple of clauses planning to put fluoride in the drinking water for every part of the UK and we have to campaign against it, there is a campaign against it and you know as with all the other pollutants we’ve talked about I would urge people to take action not only to protect their own bodies but to campaign collectively for taking these pollutants out in the first place.

Dr Jenny Goodman
We don’t need fluoride in the water, not a nutrient, drives iodine out of the body associated with diseases of brain and bone, thyroid, kidney, ovary. So these are campaigning issues as well as personal health issues but sometimes the action you take does one and the same, particularly if you eat organic you are supporting the organic farmers and you are not supporting the industrialised chemical farmers who are wrecking our green and pleasant land.

Robin Daly
And can I bring in a quick question about something you haven’t mentioned yet, just to find out where you think it stands on this scale of hazard, which is the natural toxins. I mean, there’s a lot of talk about mold and things recently that’s been in the news. Would you like to tell me something about that?

Dr Jenny Goodman
Yes, yes, mold is not synthetic, but it produces substances called mycotoxins, as MYCO, mycotoxins, which are every bit as lethal as all the synthetic products I’ve been talking about. So it’s a confusion here when we say it’s natural. It’s natural in that it’s a living creature. I think what is unnatural is for it to be growing in our home environments. And that is what’s happening. Unfortunately, the drive to home insulation, while it’s good for the planet at large, is not so great for people with chemical sensitivity or people who are sick. If you close your home up so there’s no ventilation, that’s when molds grow. Now, why do they grow? They grow because they love the damp. We do have a damp climate in the UK. Nothing we can do about that.

Dr Jenny Goodman
It’s damp and it’s cold. And unfortunately, it’s very mold friendly. And there is an evolutionary question to be asked about why our ancestors migrated this far north, this far away from the equator, to live in a climate that is very hard to live in, because we can’t live outdoors for most of the year. So we build our shelters, we build our houses, we close the windows, we close the doors and we insulate. Then what do we do? We exhale. That’s producing moisture. We cook, that’s producing steam. We shower, we wash, that’s producing steam. So all that water vapor has got nowhere to go if there’s no ventilation, particularly if the house is cold. And so it goes primarily to where the walls meet the ceiling and it hangs out in the bathroom and it hangs out in the kitchen.

Dr Jenny Goodman
And if it’s if it’s visible, it’s black and you can see that mold. And we need to do several things about it. One is we need to prevent it by having good ventilation. And this is terribly difficult because, you know, I think climate change is a real and present threat. And here I am saying open windows. And if it’s winter, you have to have the heating on. Now, I can see there’s a problem and a paradox here. I don’t know how to resolve it, but I’ve had so many patients that get better when they open the windows and their visitors say, oh, but all the heat’s going out of the window, to which the reply is, yes, unfortunately, but so are the mold spores. Right. And so incidentally, or any synthetic chemicals in your in your furniture, your soft furnishings, your sofas and mattresses and curtains and carpets and so on. If they’re not organic and natural, they’re outgassing chemicals, which also need to be able to get out of the windows.

Dr Jenny Goodman
So it’s a real problem that we need homes that are warm and well ventilated, otherwise mold will grow. Having said that, if you have got mold, I wouldn’t use chemical fungicides. I would use the tried and trusted method, which is borax. And you can get borax from Baldwin’s chemist in London from almost nowhere else, actually. I find it really disturbing the way it’s become very hard to get hold of borax. And there’s a whole campaign saying it’s dangerous, but I’m not suggesting you eat it. I’m suggesting you mix the white powder with a little bit of water into a paste and you put that on the surfaces. It stops mold from forming and it also cleans it off. But a word of warning about cleaning off the mold.

Dr Jenny Goodman
If you are chemically sensitive and you’ve got arthritis or asthma or any of these conditions that can be made much worse by mold, that includes chronic fatigue. Don’t do it yourself. Go out of the house, get someone else to use the borax and clean off the mold, air the house and hopefully the mold won’t come back if you take preventive measures.

Robin Daly
Okay, well that was very interesting and useful. Thanks very much. So look, we haven’t got a lot of time left, but I think before we get to the end of the show, we should lift the corner of the dust sheet that’s covering your brand new book, which is to be surely published. So what’s it called? What’s it all about?

Dr Jenny Goodman
Thank you. All right. Well, it’s called getting healthy in toxic times, subtitle, an ecological doctor’s prescription for healing your body and the planet. Right. And it is all about the connections between our own health and the health of the planet. Great one. Both are in diastrates and the reasons are inexplicably connected.

Robin Daly
Yeah, very good. All right, so I think you’d probably say this is a compliment or a companion to your other books.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Yes, the first book, Staying Alive in Toxic Times, was primarily focused on nutrition. Its final chapter, chapter seven, does talk all about pollutants and toxicity and how to avoid it and how to get rid of it, but it’s almost like a tiny summary or foreshadowing of this second book. So yeah, the first book is subtitled A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health. It’s very much about living in tune with the seasons, eating in tune with the seasons, taking supplements in accordance with the seasons, not needing any in the summer, hopefully. But this book is about the connection between what’s happening to our bodies and what’s happening to the planet. What’s happening to our bodies is a vast increase in chronic degenerative diseases like cancer, dementia, diabetes, heart disease, autism, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmune diseases, all of which have always existed but have been incredibly rare until 100 years ago.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Really, really rare. So we have to account for this vast increase. Well, first of all, we need to notice that this vast increase is happening because we just get familiar with what’s around us. We all somebody with cancer and we think that’s normal. Our grandparents would not have found it normal and it’s not about aging. I make a very strong argument in the introduction of the new book where this is not about aging and that’s a myth. It’s about the pollution that we’re exposed to as well as the terrible nutrition that for many people goes along with it. Both are largely down to the industrialization of agriculture, which is both impoverishing our food and causing a lot of the pollution that we’re eating, drinking, inhaling or rubbing into our skin. So in a way, when I was writing the book, I’m busy explaining how pollution in four realms, earth, water, air and fire is responsible for these epidemics of chronic disease.

Dr Jenny Goodman
But then I had to rewind and write the introduction and explain that there is an epidemic of these chronic diseases. And that’s the first and most important thing that we have to face, that these diseases are at pandemic levels and they weren’t before. They’re increasing so rapidly, it can be nothing to do with genetics and has to be everything to do with environment. So yeah, there are chapters about earth, water, air and fire pollution in those realms, but there’s also a chapter on pollution in the home and 90% of the suggestions in there can be implemented immediately. We can easily control the air in our own home much better than we can control the air on the street outside.

Robin Daly
Alright, sounds great when people are going to be able to buy it.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Well, it’s being published on the 11th of July.

Dr Jenny Goodman
I think it may be available by late June. I don’t fully understand the way the publishing schedule works, but official publication date is 11th of July, but certainly it’ll be possible to pre-order copies much sooner than that. It may even be possible now. But it will be available through all the usual outlets. Please choose the most ethical outlet available. And yeah, from late June, it should be available 11th of July. And the publishers are Chelsea Green.

Robin Daly
Right. And in terms of a website where they can get news about the publication and more about your work.

Dr Jenny Goodman
Thank you for reminding me. I’m not a naturally digital person, so I always have to be reminded. I haven’t had a website for very long, but I do have one now, and it’s DrJennyGoodman.com. And I have a social media angel who helps me with all this mysterious electronic stuff, and he will put updates on there for how the book is progressing, and also the many talks I will be giving about it in the next few months. Fantastic. Live, not webinars, live talks with real people at them.

Robin Daly
Excellent. All right, that’s it for today. So thanks very much for coming on the show, Jenny. Advanced congratulations on the publication of the book, and of course I’m going to have to get you back on the show again to speak about that once it comes out. Dr. Goodman’s first book, Staying Alive in Toxic Times, is a mine of useful information. So if you’ve not already seen it, take the trouble to look it out, particularly if you’re someone with cancer. And keep a lookout for the release of her new book in the coming weeks by following her on social media. Tickets have just gone on sale for our two Yes to Life conferences this year. There is an online one-day conference on the 22nd of June and an in-person day conference in London on the 28th of September.

Robin Daly
Both events go under the title Pushing the Boundaries and are devoted to looking at the latest developments in integrative oncology across the board. They are super excessively priced, as we really want you to come, preferably to both. And in fact, to support that, we’re offering a super early bird bundle price for the two conferences together. You can access full details from the dedicated website, which is yesterlifeadialconference.org. And if you can make the in-person event, I’d love to meet you there. Thanks very much for listening today. I hope you want to join me again next week for another Yes to Life show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.