Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Are Toxins Disrupting Your Metabolism? (Michele Scarlet) | Ep 445

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Are Toxins Disrupting Your Metabolism? (Michele Scarlet) | Ep 445 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: You've probably seen the headlines, toxins in your water, chemicals in your food, plastics destroying your hormones.
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: And then someone tells you, just buy organic, do a detox, you'll be fine.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: But what if both sides of this are wrong?
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: What if the mainstream is ignoring real evidence that certain chemicals mess with your metabolism?
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: While the wellness industry is selling you fear about things that barely matter.
• 0:24
  Philip Pape: Today I'm talking to a functional health practitioner who went through her own metabolic crisis.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: And we are going to sort the science from the noise.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: Which environmental exposures actually affect your metabolism?
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: Which ones are overhyped?
• 0:37
  Philip Pape: And what are the few practical changes worth making?
• 0:40
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Waits, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:59
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and I'm joined by Michelle Scarlett to discuss environmental factors and metabolism.
• 1:07
  Philip Pape: Now, Michelle, she and I have touched base recently on each other's podcast, and I really appreciate her work because she is a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner with a ton of experience over 15 years in fitness before she has had personal experience with a health crisis that made her look at what is happening inside my body, not just the training and the nutrition and the things, but what is actually going on, what are the signals that my body is telling me I need to look at.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: And she now helps women identify metabolic dysfunction and environmental factors and other signals so that they can uncover root causes behind things like low energy, hormonal imbalances, weight loss struggles, all the things that you guys care about as well.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: So today we're discussing toxins, the evidence versus the hype.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: There is a growing body of research on chemicals called obesogens and endocrine disruptors that can interfere with how your body stores fat, produces hormones, manages energy.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: The problem, I think, is that the science gets filtered through two equally unhelpful lenses.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: You've got doctors that often ignore it, and then you have the social media wellness industry that catastrophizes everything.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: So today you're going to learn which environmental exposures have the strongest evidence for affecting metabolism, where the detox and clean living messaging crosses into hype and a handful of practical, low effort tips and changes you can make right now if you're already doing the other things right, like training and eating well.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: Welcome to the show, Michelle.
• 2:35
  Michele Scarlet: Thank you so much, Philip.
• 2:36
  Michele Scarlet: I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to just like give your audience the truth because there is so much hype, there is so much ignorance, and there's just so much misinformation out there.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 2:48
  Philip Pape: And a lot of it comes down to how can I scare you the most as a consumer to buy my product?
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: And so let's start there.
• 2:56
  Philip Pape: Like, should the listener or the viewer be worried to some extent about what's in their food and water?
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: I mean, let's start there.
• 3:03
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, I mean, okay.
• 3:04
  Michele Scarlet: So, first of all, let's navigate this whole thing on social media about like clickbait and rage bait and correction bait and all this marketing tactics, if you will, to get you to prey on women.
• 3:18
  Michele Scarlet: So I work with women mostly uh in its entirety.
• 3:21
  Michele Scarlet: So I'll speak to women.
• 3:23
  Michele Scarlet: They prey on women who feel desperate, right, to lose weight.
• 3:27
  Michele Scarlet: They prey on this is no different than regular fitness for the last three decades, you know, that I've been alive.
• 3:33
  Michele Scarlet: They prey on women by scare tactics and saying buzzwords like we talked about yesterday, the cortisol, the blood sugar, the da-da-da-da, whatever it might be.
• 3:41
  Michele Scarlet: And, you know, I don't want to say that I don't talk about toxins or the need to detox because I certainly do believe in it and we'll talk about it more.
• 3:50
  Michele Scarlet: But if you think everything in your world is an emergency, right, you are gonna do more damage to your body, to your nervous system.
• 4:01
  Michele Scarlet: Like in my head, your nervous system is like another toxin that you need to kind of evaluate.
• 4:07
  Michele Scarlet: Do you know what I mean?
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: The internally derived toxins from how we live.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: Yes.
• 4:12
  Michele Scarlet: Right, right.
• 4:13
  Michele Scarlet: So, anyway, food and water.
• 4:15
  Michele Scarlet: Should people be worried about what they're eating and drinking?
• 4:18
  Michele Scarlet: A little bit.
• 4:19
  Michele Scarlet: Should they be worried?
• 4:21
  Michele Scarlet: Should they be aware?
• 4:23
  Michele Scarlet: Maybe two different things.
• 4:25
  Michele Scarlet: I certainly see every single day looking at lab tests, and I know you'll ask me about lab tests in a second, but looking at my own, do we need to be aware that we are ingesting far more toxins, far more pesticides, far more uh genetically modified foods than we have ever been?
• 4:45
  Michele Scarlet: Yes, I think that we should be aware of those things.
• 4:48
  Michele Scarlet: Do I think that every time we go out to a restaurant to eat, you have to know that, first of all, restaurants are like the worst business model in history.
• 4:59
  Michele Scarlet: So, meaning they don't make a lot of money, right?
• 5:02
  Michele Scarlet: And they need to keep things as cheap as possible.
• 5:04
  Michele Scarlet: Are they going to use the cheapest ingredients?
• 5:07
  Michele Scarlet: Probably, right?
• 5:08
  Michele Scarlet: So if you think about it like that, you can understand why they would do that.
• 5:13
  Michele Scarlet: What are those cheap ingredients doing to your body?
• 5:15
  Michele Scarlet: What are those pesticides doing to your body?
• 5:17
  Michele Scarlet: It doesn't necessarily automatically mean obesity, but does it mean metabolic friction?
• 5:24
  Michele Scarlet: Does it mean that the foundations, the working out, the strength training, the sleep recovery, all the things that you're doing to try to better your life, does it cause a little bit of friction or a little bit of issues with responsiveness, especially in metabolically fragile people or vulnerable people?
• 5:42
  Michele Scarlet: Absolutely it can.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: All right, good.
• 5:44
  Philip Pape: We have a few directions to go in here, right?
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: Because when I think of the word toxin, you know, the obvious things that can come to anybody's minds would be like alcohol and tobacco, right?
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: Like there's no question that those are toxins, right?
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: You mentioned restaurant food, you know, probably ultra-processed food.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: I also wonder about the dosage and how much these things matter.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: And again, this is this this can all connect together.
• 6:08
  Philip Pape: And my I guess my question thinking about this is for someone who is doing the lifestyle things you just mentioned, who's got maybe they're getting lab work, maybe they're on medication or hormone therapy or something, you know, they're eating as best they can, they're managing their body fat, they're doing all the things, sleep and everything.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: How much does do these things move the needle?
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: And is it how much of it is a function of the doses and the exposure?
• 6:34
  Michele Scarlet: Sure.
• 6:34
  Michele Scarlet: So I would say less about the dosage necessarily, because I mean, for instance, formaldehyde, okay, as a chemical, is a carcinogen, known carcinogen.
• 6:45
  Michele Scarlet: It is likely in every single piece of furniture you have in your house.
• 6:50
  Michele Scarlet: Okay.
• 6:50
  Michele Scarlet: So are you sort of being dosed with it all day, every day?
• 6:56
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, we are, right?
• 6:58
  Michele Scarlet: But we are not ingesting it, hopefully.
• 7:02
  Michele Scarlet: So there is a bit of dosage.
• 7:05
  Michele Scarlet: Now, I think where the trouble starts to happen is not actually dosage, it's accumulation.
• 7:13
  Michele Scarlet: So it has been found that I mean, okay, we could go down a million different ways here, but it has been found that fetus in the womb are being exposed to things like forever chemicals, microplastics, BPAs from that point in their life, if you want to call it that.
• 7:35
  Michele Scarlet: And then they grow up, and now we have a more toxic world than we've ever had.
• 7:40
  Michele Scarlet: And now we are starting to see not only chronic disease, we're starting to see autoimmune disease, we're starting to see cancers, we're starting to see diabetes, heart disease, all of these things affect younger and younger and younger people.
• 7:52
  Michele Scarlet: So, how can we say that if our world is not more toxic, how can it not cause this metabolic friction?
• 7:58
  Michele Scarlet: You know what I mean?
• 7:59
  Michele Scarlet: How can it not affect us metabolic?
• 8:00
  Michele Scarlet: And again, I know we're not trying to fear monger here, and I'm not trying to fear monger.
• 8:04
  Michele Scarlet: This is about awareness.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: I totally appreciate that, right?
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: And I love the nuance.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: And there is a toxic load or burden, and you kind of alluded to already how other things we don't think of as toxins, like the stress that are that's on our body from how we live, is also a burden.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: And the way I think of it is physiologically is there's a load.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: There's an input coming in that you have to deal with in some way.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: Your liver deals with it, you know, your cognitive function deals with it, like a lot of things.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: So it's it's a load.
• 8:30
  Philip Pape: And what I want to get to by the time we're done with this conversation today is like, do people have to be worried about mold and scented candles and birth control?
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: And and and and or is it can we simplify what to do and really what the big hitters are to look out for?
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: But we're trying to get to why first.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: That that's where I'm going at.
• 8:48
  Philip Pape: So do we care most about a specific type of toxin?
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: We want to dig into like obesogens, right?
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: Endocrine disruptors, like there is there a class of toxins that are really the most important to be aware of?
• 9:00
  Michele Scarlet: So I feel less about the type of chemical, and I feel more about how we're exposed to it.
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 9:06
  Michele Scarlet: So I feel more about are you ingesting?
• 9:09
  Michele Scarlet: Like number one thing, are you ingesting this chemical?
• 9:13
  Michele Scarlet: So is it pesticides, forever chemicals, BPAs?
• 9:17
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of some more things that we might be ingesting.
• 9:20
  Michele Scarlet: Our our water quality, maybe it's dead water.
• 9:24
  Michele Scarlet: You know what I mean?
• 9:24
  Michele Scarlet: Maybe we've filtered it out so much there's just no nutrients left in it.
• 9:27
  Michele Scarlet: Are we remineralizing to help ourselves?
• 9:30
  Michele Scarlet: Our pollution, right?
• 9:32
  Michele Scarlet: We're inhaling that.
• 9:33
  Michele Scarlet: I would call that ingesting, right?
• 9:35
  Michele Scarlet: And then to the point of endocrine disruptors, our moisturizer, our makeup, shampoo, conditioner, even though those might be on our face or on our bodies for a shorter period of time, I look at it as our body is absorbing those things.
• 9:52
  Michele Scarlet: And so that is like a constant exposure, a big accumulation.
• 9:56
  Michele Scarlet: Whereas I think of things like receipts.
• 10:00
  Michele Scarlet: There's like a whole thing about receipts.
• 10:02
  Michele Scarlet: And yeah, sure, you don't really want to be exposed to the chemicals on receipt paper.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: You're talking about the ink?
• 10:08
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah.
• 10:08
  Michele Scarlet: Or like just the paper in general.
• 10:10
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:10
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, I don't want to be exposed to it, of course.
• 10:13
  Michele Scarlet: But like for me to like pull it from the, you know, the little ticket thing for two seconds.
• 10:17
  Michele Scarlet: Yes.
• 10:18
  Michele Scarlet: Like that's such a minimal exposure, right?
• 10:21
  Michele Scarlet: That I wouldn't like you don't need to worry yourself if the cashier is handing you a receipt and you're like, oh my God, don't throw that at me.
• 10:29
  Michele Scarlet: You know, people can get a little bit overzealous about that kind of thing.
• 10:33
  Michele Scarlet: When really, if we just looked at the big hitters, like you said, your body can be resilient to toxins, obviously.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: Okay, so the ingesting absorbing piece is a good frame for that, right?
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: Because you mentioned pesticides, which is something that my own family has thought about over the years with things like oatmeal, because we love oatmeal, protein, the taste, everything about it, and the carbs.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: But when they tested all the oatmeals in the world, even organic oatmeals had Roundup, right?
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: Glyphosate.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: And so I remember looking at the results, and it was like one brand from Whole Foods seemed to have no detectable level, and that's what we started buying, right?
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: Because, you know, the amount of oatmeal we were consuming was like gallons of it.
• 11:15
  Philip Pape: And then things like, you know, I did a couple episodes in the past on cookware.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: Because again, I agree, like my wife will not use nonstick cookware.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: And there's a certain brand I like that's ceramic and it's done in a different way where it doesn't have the toxic chemicals.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: So, like, you have to make those decisions.
• 11:30
  Philip Pape: Cosmetics, though, let's talk about that because a lot of our audience is women, you talk to women all the time.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: I feel like this is one of those industry incentive or industry things like restaurants, right?
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: Like, it's a big marketing push, and I bet there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes nefarious over the decades to like hide hide some of the reality.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: I'm guessing.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: And then women themselves like are so pressured in society to want to use these things, just like in our conversation on on your show about the dye culture and the pressure to be skinny and all that.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: So that seems like a big one.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: Like that seems like one that's everywhere.
• 12:03
  Michele Scarlet: Yes.
• 12:04
  Michele Scarlet: Um, okay.
• 12:05
  Michele Scarlet: So I have makeup on my face right now.
• 12:08
  Michele Scarlet: I'm very lucky that I work from home and on days that I don't have to be camera facing, I don't have to have makeup on.
• 12:16
  Michele Scarlet: And I've never been somebody who's been like, you know, a ton of makeup like all over my skin.
• 12:23
  Michele Scarlet: So for me personally, I don't feel like it is my big hitter.
• 12:31
  Michele Scarlet: Okay.
• 12:32
  Michele Scarlet: For me personally.
• 12:33
  Michele Scarlet: Do I try to source out the cleanest version that I can?
• 12:37
  Michele Scarlet: Sure.
• 12:38
  Michele Scarlet: But not only for me at this point.
• 12:40
  Michele Scarlet: I've got two infants and a toddler.
• 12:42
  Michele Scarlet: They are, you know, constantly licking my face in some way or another.
• 12:47
  Michele Scarlet: And I don't want the exposure on them, not at such an early age.
• 12:51
  Michele Scarlet: And that's not to say that I shouldn't be worried about me, but this is kind of part of it.
• 12:55
  Michele Scarlet: Like pick your poison a little bit, right?
• 12:58
  Michele Scarlet: I do try to source out the cleanest as I possibly can.
• 13:02
  Michele Scarlet: It is kind of impossible for some products.
• 13:05
  Michele Scarlet: And I just go, okay, I'm gonna do the best I can.
• 13:07
  Michele Scarlet: And that's how I feel about makeup.
• 13:09
  Michele Scarlet: I'm gonna do the best that I can.
• 13:11
  Michele Scarlet: Do I go to Sephora?
• 13:12
  Michele Scarlet: No, I will stay away from Sephora all day long.
• 13:15
  Michele Scarlet: Everything in there is fragrance, everything in there is talc.
• 13:18
  Michele Scarlet: Everything in there is just like crap makeup.
• 13:21
  Michele Scarlet: They sell it for it is overpriced.
• 13:23
  Michele Scarlet: Do not go there to buy it.
• 13:25
  Michele Scarlet: If you want to source it out, I can I have a detox guide that I could send for you, Philip, with some of my favorite brands.
• 13:31
  Michele Scarlet: They don't have everything, but they have some stuff.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: Cool.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: No, and that's that's usually the best we can do because one of the trade-offs you make is the stuff just doesn't even work.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: Let's be honest, there's a reason these chemicals are in there and you have to make trade-offs.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: And like we said, it's the amount of the exposure and making those choices.
• 13:49
  Michele Scarlet: I would feel more strongly about people who do their nails weekly or every two weeks.
• 13:55
  Michele Scarlet: Because that is like a constant on your body at all times, poison.
• 14:00
  Michele Scarlet: Like ultimately, women are washing their face off before they go to bed.
• 14:03
  Michele Scarlet: So let's even say if you put it on first thing in the morning, take it off at night, you have half of your day without it.
• 14:09
  Michele Scarlet: Right.
• 14:10
  Michele Scarlet: I would say sitting in a nail salon for an hour every week or every two weeks to get your feet and nails done with shellac or gel nails, I would say that that would be a bigger exposure.
• 14:21
  Philip Pape: And what is actually happening?
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: I guess because the listener's probably thinking, okay, fine, but like because we're not trying to fear monger and we're trying to talk about awareness and making choices from a health perspective, from what's happening in your body, what is happening?
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: Are we again, are we talking about endocrine disruption specifically or other mechanisms going on here?
• 14:38
  Michele Scarlet: Well, there's a few different things that can happen inside the body.
• 14:40
  Michele Scarlet: An endocrine disruptor technically what happens is that it disrupts the receptors of your estrogen, of your progesterone, of your uh androgen hormones, and it can ultimately change the way your fat cells uh like can develop.
• 15:00
  Michele Scarlet: But mold can be a disruptor too.
• 15:02
  Michele Scarlet: It's almost like they can imitate like what your estrogen is supposed to be doing inside of your body.
• 15:08
  Michele Scarlet: It can the other thing is what can happen is what I see in lab testing is that your liver, because everything functions through your liver or filters through your liver, um, when it is overloaded with all kinds of stuff that you are taking in all day, every day for 45 years, uh bile flow can slow.
• 15:27
  Michele Scarlet: It can become thick, it can become sluggish.
• 15:30
  Michele Scarlet: And now your whole body's detoxification system backs up.
• 15:34
  Michele Scarlet: And so things can start to uh recirculate in the body, right?
• 15:38
  Michele Scarlet: So it's not that endocrine disruptors equal obesity, right?
• 15:44
  Michele Scarlet: That's not exactly what it what it does, is it kind of happens downstream.
• 15:48
  Michele Scarlet: It slowly happens, which is why we tend to see it in people over the age of 40, that accumulation factor, because things start to slow, recirculate, women become estrogen dominant, we start to see declining hormones in general at that age, and it kind of uncovers what your body has been compensating for over the decades that you've been alive.
• 16:11
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: So you're hating on some good points, and you alluded to things that maybe the listener didn't know you'd go into like fat storage and metabolism and stuff, and they're like, why is this all uh connected?
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: Which is why I mentioned obesogens before, because they're a little bit complicated to understand, right?
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: But when if you're interfering with the hormones that you just mentioned, you're also gonna affect your metabolism of your lipids, the creation of fat cells, your energy balance, like your metabolism.
• 16:36
  Philip Pape: Um, you mentioned BPA, I think, and the stuff in um what did we just talk about?
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: Cosmetics that that do all this.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: And then there's a lot of complicated mechanisms.
• 16:46
  Philip Pape: But what about fat cells and body composition and metabolism and all that?
• 16:51
  Philip Pape: Like, does it really just is it a function of altering like your thyroid function and insulin signaling?
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: And is that really what's happening?
• 16:58
  Philip Pape: Or is there some other mechanism?
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: Yep.
• 16:59
  Michele Scarlet: No, that's exactly what's happening.
• 17:01
  Michele Scarlet: It's like, as your hormones, like if it's an endocrine disruptor that we're talking about, so it starts with messing up your hormones, like I just talked about.
• 17:08
  Michele Scarlet: Well, that in nature is going to have a widespread effect across your body.
• 17:12
  Michele Scarlet: We are constantly in feedback loops to keep our body into homeostasis, right?
• 17:18
  Michele Scarlet: And so when your hormones, sex hormones are off, it's going to start signaling to thyroid.
• 17:23
  Michele Scarlet: It's going to start signaling to adrenals, it's going to cascade throughout your body.
• 17:28
  Michele Scarlet: And exactly that, that's when your metabolism starts to get into like adaptation mode and starts to like, I don't know what's happening here.
• 17:35
  Michele Scarlet: I need to conserve this energy because something chaotic is happening.
• 17:39
  Michele Scarlet: And I, what the last thing I'm going to do now is change body composition when I feel like this person is in danger.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: So again, it circles back to this is your stress load, your allostatic load, your body trying to get back to homeostasis to undo some sort of the wrong direction.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: It's being pushed, it's being stressed.
• 17:56
  Philip Pape: And the resiliency is kind of like one of the things that combats it, right?
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: Is what we can get to eventually talking about lifestyle, but also awareness and avoidance.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: So since we sort of started ranking things and you put absorbable or consumable things at the top, is there like another category or two of things that we want to get into?
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: Like cell phones come up, you know, with like, don't have your cell phone too close to your privates and stuff like that, right?
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: For men.
• 18:21
  Philip Pape: Um, for women too.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: And for women.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: So yeah, and breast cancer and all that.
• 18:26
  Philip Pape: So what what would be the next big category, do you think?
• 18:29
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, I would say things that you are like kind of just, yeah, near every day, not necessarily actually ingesting, would be my next.
• 18:37
  Michele Scarlet: And things that you obviously can't control.
• 18:39
  Michele Scarlet: So like if you live, it's unfortunate, but like you live next to a golf course or you live, I live next to a farmer's field.
• 18:46
  Michele Scarlet: You know what I mean?
• 18:47
  Michele Scarlet: I'm not necessarily going to be able to control that.
• 18:49
  Michele Scarlet: So I just say things like I do the best that I can.
• 18:52
  Michele Scarlet: When it comes to cell phone radiation EMFs, you know, I haven't done the research.
• 18:59
  Michele Scarlet: I don't know if I want to do the research.
• 19:01
  Michele Scarlet: Um I have a uh a girlfriend who believes wholeheartedly in those like EMF stickers.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 19:09
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 19:10
  Michele Scarlet: And she sends me, she sends me the research, and I I haven't really got myself to open it and I don't know why.
• 19:16
  Michele Scarlet: I'm very skeptical of it.
• 19:17
  Michele Scarlet: How can a sticker, like, what is the sticker?
• 19:19
  Michele Scarlet: It says it gives 19 feet of, you know, whatever.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: Protection, yeah.
• 19:24
  Michele Scarlet: Right.
• 19:25
  Michele Scarlet: But then there's a part of me that's like, I have two baby monitors in my room on my nightstands, plus my cell phone and my husband's cell phone on the other side.
• 19:34
  Michele Scarlet: Is it doing something that it shouldn't be doing?
• 19:36
  Michele Scarlet: You know, the other day I saw my mother-in-law put on some yoga playlist that was relaxing and soothing and put it next to my baby's head to get her to fall asleep.
• 19:45
  Michele Scarlet: And my brain immediately was like, Don't put that next to her head.
• 19:48
  Michele Scarlet: But I don't know why.
• 19:50
  Michele Scarlet: Don't know if it is overhype.
• 19:52
  Michele Scarlet: I don't know if it is, you know, if it's real.
• 19:55
  Michele Scarlet: It's kind of scary to think that this device that is literally attached to our bodies at all times.
• 20:01
  Philip Pape: I know, no, I hear you.
• 20:02
  Philip Pape: Uh me too.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: Every time I'm laying down and the phone's sitting on my thigh, I'm like, I'm gonna move that over a little bit.
• 20:07
  Michele Scarlet: Do you, do you know?
• 20:08
  Michele Scarlet: Do you have like I can't do that?
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: I really don't.
• 20:11
  Philip Pape: I have the same skepticism as you, and like you you can't follow what influencers say.
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: They they're all just it's like third hand information.
• 20:18
  Philip Pape: And they're getting paid.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: Electromechanics.
• 20:22
  Philip Pape: So I'm an engineer by background, and like one of the hardest courses I ever took was in electromechanics.
• 20:26
  Philip Pape: It's very, very complicated.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: And you know, you think of like Faraday cages, for example, those little pouches that you can put your phone in to protect it.
• 20:32
  Philip Pape: You'd literally have to like put your whole body in a pocket of some kind to protect it.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: But hey, I would never buy a house like next to a giant distribution station or a transformer or something like that.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: Because yeah, we don't, I don't think we have enough evidence to know because it's hard to you can't do longitudinal studies unless it's you know observational based on where people actually live and stuff.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: So I'm I'm just I'm I'm like with you.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: It's just do what you can.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: You know, if you can help where you live or what you live by, great.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: If it's something like pollution or whatever, I don't know if you can wear masks and stuff, you know, there's things you could do, maybe.
• 21:08
  Michele Scarlet: Overall, my thought process is this I think that our world is incredibly toxic, like start to finish, but we cannot live in a bubble, right?
• 21:19
  Michele Scarlet: Like we don't have control over everything.
• 21:22
  Michele Scarlet: So control what you can control.
• 21:24
  Michele Scarlet: I am a very big fan of once you are metabolically healthy, you should be supporting your detox organs.
• 21:33
  Michele Scarlet: You should be supporting your liver, like through there's many ways, and we can talk about how we can support your liver, but like daily, you should be this is should be part of, in my opinion, your foundational work, right?
• 21:45
  Michele Scarlet: Supporting your detox organs.
• 21:47
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I want and I want to get there, but before we do, there's a couple other areas I want to explore.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: And then also I do want to rule anything out that's like nonsense because I that's always a fun thing to do.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: Um, but When I think of women and women's bodies, I think breast implants, I think IUDs, I mean, what else?
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: There's so many things that are like in and on your body all the time.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: And I know you have personal exposure story related one of these, but tell us about those.
• 22:12
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah.
• 22:13
  Michele Scarlet: So I wholeheartedly agree.
• 22:14
  Michele Scarlet: So uh the personal story is that I had breast implants when I was 25 and I had them out, I want to say at like 34.
• 22:21
  Michele Scarlet: And the reason I had them out was because I was struggling massively with breast implant illness.
• 22:28
  Michele Scarlet: And so that has become more mainstream, has been uh, there's a lot more information about breast implant illness.
• 22:36
  Michele Scarlet: But what I have learned in, you know, in the time of the research, and then being like, okay, I'll spend another $10,000 to have these out of my body, is that basically your it's like called foreign body response.
• 22:48
  Michele Scarlet: And when you have something foreign in your body, regardless, like we don't even have to talk about the chemical aspect of what the makeup of those uh material actually was, your body is like, there is something that should not be here.
• 23:02
  Michele Scarlet: And now my immune system is activated.
• 23:04
  Philip Pape: It's activated, yeah, yeah.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: Like an autoimmune response, yeah.
• 23:07
  Philip Pape: And it is now but it's not auto, it's it's to the foreign thing.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 23:11
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah.
• 23:11
  Michele Scarlet: And if you think about it, like it is in your body 24-7.
• 23:15
  Michele Scarlet: It's warm, right?
• 23:17
  Michele Scarlet: And that makes a difference.
• 23:18
  Michele Scarlet: That's like heating up plastic, right, with your food on it or or uh like Teflon or whatever.
• 23:23
  Michele Scarlet: So it's like a constant exposure, doesn't matter how little, but that accumulation is just like low grade inflammation for 10 full years of my life on top of, you know, our pesticide use and that kind of thing.
• 23:41
  Michele Scarlet: And it was no wonder that my health had totally tanked.
• 23:46
  Michele Scarlet: My hormones were post-menopausal levels at 34 years old.
• 23:51
  Michele Scarlet: Right.
• 23:51
  Michele Scarlet: My gut inflammation was off the charts, and I say off the charts based on lab results that I had run on myself.
• 23:58
  Michele Scarlet: I had these out, went through my own protocol to help myself detox some of that inflammation, some of what was going on, did a little bit of a protocol to help uh support my hormones again and got pregnant within, I think, four to six months.
• 24:12
  Michele Scarlet: I had them out in March and I was pregnant by July.
• 24:16
  Michele Scarlet: So obviously, my body, you know, coming back into homeostasis when I removed that toxin or I removed that stressor.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: And I wonder how many people have the equivalent of that from something else.
• 24:29
  Philip Pape: Yes, Botox.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: Which, which, well, well, I always even go in there, but you're right.
• 24:34
  Philip Pape: We can talk about that.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: And there's a new show called The Beauty that's crazy about that goes in the extreme about this.
• 24:39
  Philip Pape: But uh, we could talk about Botox.
• 24:41
  Philip Pape: I was thinking even all the things we consume that you mentioned earlier, that then how the body may be responding in a similar way.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: But yeah, go ahead, Botox.
• 24:49
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, no, you know, it's funny because there was a time where I, you know, when I was trying to figure out how I was shifting into the the into the business that I'm in now.
• 24:57
  Michele Scarlet: And somebody suggested I like niche down into breast implant illness.
• 25:01
  Michele Scarlet: And I didn't really like it because it's not that relatable for a lot of people.
• 25:05
  Michele Scarlet: And so even when I tell my story, I always make the caveat that just because breast implants were the thing that kind of took me over the edge, it could be for some people the Botox, it could be for some people the wine every night, it could be for some people too much uh ultra-processed food, but literally the same thing is happening in your body that was happening to me.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: It's a great analogy for it.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: It really is.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: It like visualizes it because you're like, this is a foreign thing that your body can't handle.
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: And because people are different, like even things like gluten, which again, you know, my position is if you can eat it and tolerate it and enjoy it and you don't notice anything, I think it's fine.
• 25:44
  Philip Pape: But I know there's a whole spectrum of like, no, gluten's never good for any human being for this reason or the other.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: But if for you whatever you're consuming is causing that and you get rid of it and it does it, well, that tells you something, right?
• 25:55
  Philip Pape: Going back to signals like we talked about on your show.
• 25:58
  Michele Scarlet: 100%.
• 25:58
  Michele Scarlet: And when it comes to gluten, so my position on gluten, so I am gluten-free.
• 26:03
  Michele Scarlet: I am not celiac, but I am gluten-free because I eliminated it, saw the difference, put it back in, and immediately reacted.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: Exactly.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: Yep.
• 26:15
  Michele Scarlet: And I was like, nope, I'm good.
• 26:17
  Michele Scarlet: Don't need to do that again.
• 26:18
  Michele Scarlet: And so for me, that's my take on it.
• 26:20
  Michele Scarlet: And when I work with women, we start by taking it out.
• 26:23
  Michele Scarlet: Let's see what happens to your body when you take that out.
• 26:26
  Michele Scarlet: And I don't just mean digestively, I mean like cognitive function.
• 26:29
  Michele Scarlet: I mean like inflammation, swelling.
• 26:31
  Michele Scarlet: How do your clothes fit?
• 26:32
  Michele Scarlet: How do your rings fit all of a sudden?
• 26:34
  Michele Scarlet: You know, are you able to carry a conversation without tripping up on your words all the time?
• 26:39
  Michele Scarlet: Because you can't silo inflammation, right?
• 26:43
  Michele Scarlet: It's not going to be just to your gut.
• 26:44
  Michele Scarlet: It's going to be everywhere.
• 26:45
  Philip Pape: It's going to be everywhere.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: And, you know, here's another confusing thing because we talked about this on your show as well of like going to an extreme, like going to a carnivore diet or going to an elimination diet.
• 26:55
  Philip Pape: I think we talked about that.
• 26:56
  Philip Pape: And then by virtue of that, you've cut something out that is a toxin to you, but maybe a bunch of other things are not toxins and you don't know until you add them back in.
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: Something like gluten, right?
• 27:06
  Philip Pape: Um, I I've actually had clients who had histamine reactions.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: They weren't specifically gluten reactions, they were histamine reactions.
• 27:12
  Philip Pape: Like, how do people tease that stuff apart?
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: Because that's where it gets really confusing.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: Where like, okay, I started eating more food and all of a sudden my face got puffy.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: You're like, okay, now we need to go an interest down an interesting rabbit hole.
• 27:24
  Philip Pape: That's your body responding in some immune reaction, isn't it?
• 27:27
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah.
• 27:27
  Michele Scarlet: So 100%.
• 27:28
  Michele Scarlet: That's exactly what it is.
• 27:30
  Michele Scarlet: And so how I look at that is we have to take the issue out first.
• 27:35
  Michele Scarlet: You can't heal in the same place you got sick, is kind of my thought process there.
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: Sure.
• 27:40
  Michele Scarlet: So, you know, gluten, dairy, sugar, alcohol, you know, lectins, you know, go on and on about all the things that are told that you need to take out.
• 27:48
  Michele Scarlet: By the time you do that, you're eating ice all day, every day.
• 27:51
  Philip Pape: Broccoli, I've heard apparently.
• 27:53
  Michele Scarlet: Um, take out you have you take out the big ones, you start to focus on what's going on in the gut, you heal the gut.
• 28:02
  Michele Scarlet: Okay.
• 28:02
  Michele Scarlet: You heal the gut that you have like your tight junctions.
• 28:05
  Michele Scarlet: I mean, I don't know if you know this, but like if you're if the lining of your gut, you know, is tight like this, there's nothing getting in.
• 28:12
  Michele Scarlet: So your broccoli is not going to have an issue, right?
• 28:15
  Michele Scarlet: You're not but if your tight junctions, because you have for the majority of your life or you have this huge accumulation of toxins over the four decades, your tight junctions in your gut might look like this.
• 28:26
  Michele Scarlet: And now everything is getting in.
• 28:28
  Michele Scarlet: So you are reactive to all kinds of foods that you shouldn't be reactive to.
• 28:35
  Michele Scarlet: Okay.
• 28:36
  Michele Scarlet: Our bodies physiologically should be able to handle a whole array of foods.
• 28:43
  Michele Scarlet: And my take is if you have to go to carnivore to feel good, there is something way deeper going on that you need to look at and you need to heal because that's not your body's natural diet.
• 28:58
  Philip Pape: Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
• 29:00
  Philip Pape: That's a great, and that's where the nuance is, and that's where the individualization is, is somewhere in that space.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: So when people are thinking about gluten and sugar and all this stuff, and then they also hear detox and all the other things that could kill you tomorrow, and just literally don't eat anything except what did you say, ice water?
• 29:19
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Then, and your guard goes up on this, and we know that the liver and kidneys detoxify lots of things, and like you just said, the human body can kind of act like a trash can, but only to a point, especially in today's environment.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: Yes.
• 29:33
  Philip Pape: What jumps to the top of your list that you do think is overblown, that's like ridiculous, maybe not even a toxin at all, or just is disproportionately given attention?
• 29:44
  Michele Scarlet: I think fruit.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: Oh, yes.
• 29:46
  Philip Pape: I think fruit fruit and fructose, yes.
• 29:49
  Michele Scarlet: I think that people uh confuse fruit.
• 29:55
  Michele Scarlet: Like, okay, so every morning I have a yogurt.
• 29:59
  Michele Scarlet: I I have dairy.
• 30:00
  Michele Scarlet: Hey guys, I healed my gut and now I have dairy and it's totally good.
• 30:03
  Michele Scarlet: One of the big heavy hitters, right?
• 30:05
  Michele Scarlet: So I have protein yogurt with all kinds of fruit.
• 30:09
  Michele Scarlet: Like my whole thing first thing in the morning is I need to hit at least uh 30 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber.
• 30:15
  Michele Scarlet: And I get my fiber through my fruit.
• 30:18
  Michele Scarlet: I post it on my Instagram stories every single day, and without fail, people are in there being like, that's way too much sugar.
• 30:25
  Michele Scarlet: That's way too much sugar.
• 30:26
  Michele Scarlet: And in my head, I'm like, you have been brainwashed to think that the fructose and fruit is more harmful for you than the vitamins and the minerals and the nourishing aspects that fruit and the healing aspects that fruit actually have.
• 30:41
  Michele Scarlet: And there is not a chance, and I think I said this to you yesterday, I wouldn't ever go keto because I don't want to limit myself to six blueberries, you know, if I'm gonna have if I'm gonna sit down and have some fruit.
• 30:53
  Michele Scarlet: So I think fruit is probably um something that I think is demonized that absolutely should not be.
• 31:01
  Philip Pape: That's a good one.
• 31:01
  Philip Pape: That's a good one.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: And the the pithy response you you sometimes hear, which I kind of agree with, is like nobody ever gets fat eating fruit.
• 31:09
  Philip Pape: You know, that whole concept of let's put things in perspective, right?
• 31:14
  Philip Pape: Some anybody who's worried about fruit, there's probably something else they're doing or eating that's really the problem.
• 31:18
  Michele Scarlet: Oh my goodness.
• 31:19
  Michele Scarlet: The amount of people that I have said, like, okay, we need to increase your protein.
• 31:22
  Michele Scarlet: So like you need a protein at your lunch, your breakfast, your lunch, and your dinner, and you should probably think about protein forward snacks.
• 31:28
  Michele Scarlet: That literally the pushback, like that's way too much protein.
• 31:31
  Philip Pape: Oh, I'm gonna gain a bunch of weight because I'm gonna eat more, right?
• 31:33
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:34
  Philip Pape: That's their pushback.
• 31:35
  Michele Scarlet: That can't be good for me.
• 31:36
  Michele Scarlet: But the bag of chips that you're eating at the end of the day, that's like that's not the deal breaker.
• 31:41
  Michele Scarlet: You know, we do have to put it into perspective.
• 31:44
  Michele Scarlet: And not yes, at the very fundamentals, calorie is a calorie, but like, what are you actually absorbing?
• 31:51
  Michele Scarlet: Like, you know, what is the meat that you're eating?
• 31:54
  Michele Scarlet: What is the what are the minerals and vitamins, vitamins you're taking in from your fruits, fruits, and vegetables?
• 31:58
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and even the uh the compounds in the fruits and vegetables, which is something when I first got into nutrition science fascinated me because there's this whole chemical like milieu, right?
• 32:07
  Philip Pape: In in fruit and plants that isn't on the label.
• 32:11
  Philip Pape: Like it's not on the label.
• 32:12
  Philip Pape: It's chemicals, good chemicals that are in.
• 32:14
  Philip Pape: In fact, the joke about like uh the nutrition label for a banana showing all the chemicals, how it looks like this ultra-processed food, but it's just like natural chemicals.
• 32:22
  Philip Pape: And many of them are are great for you.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: And you you don't know, it's hard to go after specific ones like we do when we say eat more protein because the bot because of the microbiome and the gut that you've already mentioned, where you just need that diversity of those compounds coming in.
• 32:38
  Philip Pape: Anyway, side tangent, but so you mentioned fruit, and then I guess tied to that is what about all the lab tests and ways that people try to sell you on figuring out that hey, you've got all these toxins in that you need to buy my protocol.
• 32:53
  Philip Pape: Like, what's the biggest one there that people should avoid?
• 32:56
  Michele Scarlet: Lab test.
• 32:56
  Michele Scarlet: Is that what you're saying?
• 32:57
  Philip Pape: Yeah, lab test, the Dutch test, GI map, like a hair mineral analysis.
• 33:01
  Philip Pape: There's so many.
• 33:02
  Philip Pape: Like, is there one that's jumps out as waste of time, waste of money?
• 33:06
  Michele Scarlet: Okay.
• 33:06
  Michele Scarlet: So I'm gonna actually say no, but there's always nuance.
• 33:11
  Michele Scarlet: I use lab testing as a contextual tool, not as a diagnosis.
• 33:16
  Michele Scarlet: Okay.
• 33:17
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 33:18
  Michele Scarlet: So I run a GI map, a Dutch, and a hair mineral analysis test on every single one of the women that come to me because the women that are coming to me have been doing all the right things foundationally for 10 plus years and cannot move the needle.
• 33:34
  Michele Scarlet: And so I definitely don't think that if you are just like woke up one day and was like, I want to be healthy and you've done nothing else, do I think you need to jump to lab testing?
• 33:45
  Michele Scarlet: No.
• 33:45
  Michele Scarlet: Do I think you need to start with the foundations?
• 33:48
  Michele Scarlet: Absolutely.
• 33:48
  Michele Scarlet: You need to strength train, you need to clean up your food, you need to eat, you just need to move your body, you need to see sunlight, you need to, you know, you need to start with the foundations.
• 33:57
  Michele Scarlet: If things are not shifting, then you can look deeper.
• 34:02
  Michele Scarlet: And that's my take on functional lab testing.
• 34:05
  Michele Scarlet: And I wish I could give you something really juicy to be like, this doesn't work for everybody.
• 34:10
  Michele Scarlet: There is not a woman I've run a test on before that I haven't been able to go, oh man, like no wonder you're feeling so awful.
• 34:19
  Michele Scarlet: You know, no wonder you, you know, you're not sleeping, you're not, you know, whatever.
• 34:23
  Michele Scarlet: As we put it into context or as we look at the patterns to their habits, to their symptoms.
• 34:32
  Michele Scarlet: And now we have real data.
• 34:34
  Michele Scarlet: I am such a data freak.
• 34:36
  Michele Scarlet: The more information, the better.
• 34:38
  Michele Scarlet: And it just helps guide how to give them the right outcomes.
• 34:42
  Philip Pape: That's great.
• 34:42
  Philip Pape: I mean, you answered the question because it's really more about the principle of having as much information to eliminate what might be going on versus saying, I'm going to get a lab test and that's going to tell me the answer.
• 34:54
  Philip Pape: Because even with lab tests, the body is so complex that there's multiple things that could be moving in different directions that all work together.
• 35:01
  Philip Pape: And it's even hard to say in isolation what any one of those things mean, right?
• 35:04
  Philip Pape: You know, your albumin over here and your CRP over here.
• 35:07
  Philip Pape: And it's like, and and the cool thing is today they have like machine learning and and models that are being developed to try to better link all that stuff, which I'm sure you're always looking at what the latest is in the industry.
• 35:18
  Philip Pape: Okay, so that's the stay away from stuff or put things into context.
• 35:21
  Philip Pape: Now let's talk about what people should do, right?
• 35:23
  Philip Pape: So now I get to the meat of it.
• 35:24
  Philip Pape: We've teased people long enough.
• 35:26
  Philip Pape: For someone listening who understands they need to get the basics in, because we we're not going to make that the solution here.
• 35:33
  Philip Pape: That should be a thing that everyone's doing.
• 35:34
  Philip Pape: Listen to wits and weights, uh, listen to Michelle's podcast and lift your weights, move, eat your protein, you know, get enough sleep, manage your stress and everything.
• 35:43
  Philip Pape: Where do they start?
• 35:45
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, I mean, like the biggest thing for me is you need to start with nutrition.
• 35:49
  Michele Scarlet: I mean, food is medicine.
• 35:50
  Michele Scarlet: So if somebody is already kind of doing the basic things, let's say they just have like a regular balanced diet, right?
• 35:56
  Michele Scarlet: So they eat their protein, they eat their veggies, like generally a whole foods diet is what somebody is already doing.
• 36:02
  Michele Scarlet: So protein is phenomenal for uh increasing bile flow.
• 36:07
  Michele Scarlet: So maybe start looking at increasing like denser meats.
• 36:12
  Michele Scarlet: So things like steak, things like lamb, things like bison, that kind of stuff, that can really increase bile flow and um stomach acid.
• 36:20
  Michele Scarlet: So those are those are things that are just like really good for your body.
• 36:23
  Michele Scarlet: Uh vegetables, cauliflower and broccoli, things that really help support the liver.
• 36:29
  Michele Scarlet: And then beyond, I mean, there's lots there, lemon, bitters, that kind of stuff, bitter arugula, that can all increase bile flow as well.
• 36:36
  Michele Scarlet: So if we talk about the basics of food, those are where you can start.
• 36:40
  Michele Scarlet: If you want to talk about more like supplementation on an herbal piece, things like milk thistle, things like nettle tea, dandelion tea, these are all things that just like help increase, again, bile flow, kidney function.
• 36:56
  Michele Scarlet: I am a big fan of sauna.
• 36:59
  Michele Scarlet: But if you can't, if you don't have access to sauna, get outside and go for a walk in the summertime.
• 37:03
  Michele Scarlet: Like sweat, you know?
• 37:05
  Michele Scarlet: Um, it doesn't need to be excessive.
• 37:08
  Michele Scarlet: It doesn't need to go by, you know, the latest biohack uh sauna blanket thing.
• 37:12
  Michele Scarlet: Like it can be simple, but sweating is something that's really important.
• 37:16
  Michele Scarlet: I have a client right now who actually told me the you know the other day that she does not sweat like at all.
• 37:24
  Michele Scarlet: Never beads, and I'm like, 40 degrees out or you know, 100 degrees out for you guys in the US, and you don't sweat.
• 37:32
  Michele Scarlet: She's like, not even a little bit.
• 37:33
  Michele Scarlet: I was like, something's up, something is blocked up.
• 37:36
  Michele Scarlet: We need to get your lymph moving.
• 37:38
  Michele Scarlet: You know what I mean?
• 37:39
  Michele Scarlet: We need to get more consistent with like trying to sweat because your skin is a huge detox pathway and it'll just help push all of those toxins out.
• 37:48
  Michele Scarlet: So sweating is big.
• 37:50
  Michele Scarlet: I don't know how alternative your audience is.
• 37:55
  Philip Pape: Let's challenge everybody because I'm open to everything.
• 37:57
  Philip Pape: Let's talk about it.
• 37:59
  Michele Scarlet: So if you want to go deeper into your detoxification, uh, I guess we could say protocol or program or, you know, regime, I am a big fan of castor oil packs and I'm a big fan of coffee enemas.
• 38:13
  Philip Pape: Okay, coffee enemas are are definitely one I'm I'm skeptical of.
• 38:17
  Philip Pape: Um castor oil, maybe less so.
• 38:19
  Michele Scarlet: Okay, let's talk about the coffee enema.
• 38:21
  Michele Scarlet: It's weird, and I I think I talk about it a lot because I want to normalize how weird it is because it's weird.
• 38:28
  Michele Scarlet: Um, but what I have observed, what I have observed in myself, what I have observed in my clients, what I have read, I wouldn't do it.
• 38:39
  Michele Scarlet: I was skeptical at it at first as well.
• 38:41
  Michele Scarlet: And then I realized that I was struggling a lot with mold illness after I had my breast implants out.
• 38:45
  Michele Scarlet: And so I needed a way to help increase that detoxification because I I didn't want obviously mold kind of hanging around in my body.
• 38:54
  Michele Scarlet: So I introduced coffee enemas and it was life-changing.
• 39:00
  Michele Scarlet: It was life-changing.
• 39:01
  Michele Scarlet: The cognitive function, the digestive function, the lower inflammation, the more I read about it, it increases glutathione, which is your like master antioxidant by like a thousand percent.
• 39:15
  Michele Scarlet: Right?
• 39:17
  Michele Scarlet: Um, it increases bile flow.
• 39:18
  Michele Scarlet: So that detoxification just happens more efficiently, a little bit faster.
• 39:23
  Michele Scarlet: It's not something that I recommend to anybody who may be caffeine sensitive.
• 39:27
  Michele Scarlet: You know, if we are talking about Crohn's or any kind of like ulcerative colitis, I wouldn't necessarily go down that route.
• 39:36
  Michele Scarlet: Definitely not somebody who is struggling with cancer.
• 39:40
  Michele Scarlet: I know that there are a lot of people out there, a lot of influencers who talk about their cancer journey and doing coffee enemas.
• 39:46
  Michele Scarlet: It's not my not my scope, but I do know that detox can accelerate the cancering process.
• 39:51
  Michele Scarlet: And so that's just not my not my recommendation.
• 39:54
  Michele Scarlet: But overall, if you are looking for that, you know, deep detox, it has been life-changing for me and clients.
• 40:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, let's go deeper on this whole detox thing with related to bile, since you keep mentioning it, right?
• 40:08
  Philip Pape: Because the listener wants to understand this.
• 40:10
  Philip Pape: My very basic one-on-one understanding is the liver uh converts, conjugates, I don't know what the word, the verb is, uh, anything coming in into bile, right?
• 40:21
  Philip Pape: And then that get allows it to go into your intestine to eliminate from your body.
• 40:25
  Philip Pape: So I always come back to the question when it comes to the body is isn't your body, hasn't your body evolved to do all this stuff super effectively on its own?
• 40:35
  Philip Pape: And why do we need other things coming in intentionally to help it?
• 40:39
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, great question.
• 40:41
  Michele Scarlet: So short answer is no, it hasn't evolved to be able to handle how toxic our world has accelerated to.
• 40:49
  Philip Pape: So it's overloaded.
• 40:50
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's the premise.
• 40:51
  Philip Pape: It's overloaded.
• 40:52
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, big time.
• 40:53
  Philip Pape: So you're you're trying to offset the overlow with more bile.
• 40:56
  Michele Scarlet: Yes.
• 40:57
  Philip Pape: And the body does that.
• 40:58
  Michele Scarlet: I mean, do we bile, right?
• 41:00
  Michele Scarlet: Like your bile can become sluggish.
• 41:02
  Michele Scarlet: And that's when you start to look at like uh gallstones and that kind of stuff when things get like clumpy, right?
• 41:08
  Michele Scarlet: Um, and things are not like free flowing.
• 41:11
  Philip Pape: And do we, is this measurable like through labs or through some sort of stool test or something?
• 41:15
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 41:16
  Michele Scarlet: There are markers on both the Dutch and the GI map that taught that show you like your phase one and phase two detoxification.
• 41:24
  Michele Scarlet: So it's not like, you know, on a scale of one to 10, your bile flow is a 10, but it does give sort of hints and patterns that you have like sluggish detoxification.
• 41:34
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 41:34
  Michele Scarlet: And then if you correlate that to symptoms, so if somebody is constipated, right?
• 41:39
  Michele Scarlet: Then you can, you know, it goes like bowel, colon, liver, you know, if you want to go up the body like that.
• 41:46
  Michele Scarlet: If somebody is constipated, they definitely are struggling with bile issues.
• 41:50
  Philip Pape: Got it.
• 41:50
  Philip Pape: You see, I like the nerdy questions.
• 41:52
  Philip Pape: I want to understand the next level deep.
• 41:54
  Philip Pape: And okay, so I don't need an excuse to eat more steak or lamb, but I'm glad you gave me one.
• 41:59
  Philip Pape: And Christopher's vegetables are awesome.
• 42:01
  Philip Pape: So, like, you know, steak and broccoli for dinner is great.
• 42:04
  Philip Pape: But so some of the things you mentioned, those the lemons and bitters, certain supplements, sweating and sauna.
• 42:09
  Philip Pape: And I definitely see more and more evidence these days of like benefits of sauna, and there's nothing wrong with it.
• 42:13
  Philip Pape: So if you enjoy sauna, go for it.
• 42:15
  Philip Pape: I don't have one, but one of my friends just joined a gym that has one.
• 42:18
  Philip Pape: I'm jealous of him.
• 42:19
  Philip Pape: So what about like if we take it back a notch on just general grocery shopping and eating and consuming in general, or you can make an easy change, that some of the fear-mongering there as well, around organic and things that are on the label.
• 42:34
  Philip Pape: And there's lots and lots of marketing phrases that don't mean anything.
• 42:39
  Philip Pape: And then there are some that do.
• 42:41
  Philip Pape: I've had a couple, I had a rancher on who was talking a lot about that.
• 42:45
  Philip Pape: It was pretty fascinating how stuff can easily get twisted on like even fresh packages like meat in the labeling that they use.
• 42:51
  Philip Pape: So, what are your thoughts, like the the big hitters, organic or something else that people can change when they grocery shop?
• 42:58
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah.
• 42:58
  Michele Scarlet: So if you're in the grocery store, so my biggest thing would be like if you're going like I I do think you should eat organic when you can, but when is it maybe a waste of time?
• 43:09
  Michele Scarlet: Things like oranges, things like bananas, things where there's like quite a thick peel.
• 43:15
  Philip Pape: Rind, yeah.
• 43:16
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 43:16
  Michele Scarlet: You don't necessarily need to go organic on those things because it's just not penetrating, right?
• 43:22
  Michele Scarlet: So things like apples, I would go organic, things like grapes, cherries, anything that you're just like throwing in your mouth, right?
• 43:31
  Michele Scarlet: If you can't go organic with your fruits and vegetables, it is costly.
• 43:35
  Michele Scarlet: Like that it sucks, but it is.
• 43:37
  Michele Scarlet: Then you're gonna want to soak it in baking soda and water when you get home.
• 43:41
  Michele Scarlet: And so, you know, we don't always have available organic produce.
• 43:45
  Michele Scarlet: So the first thing that I do as soon as I get home from the grocery store stainless steel bowl, organic baking soda, and reverse reverse osmosis water and put all my produce in there and then just let it soak, wash it off.
• 43:59
  Michele Scarlet: Then into the fridge ready to eat.
• 44:01
  Michele Scarlet: So that's that's a big one.
• 44:03
  Philip Pape: What about okay?
• 44:04
  Philip Pape: So that makes sense for produce.
• 44:05
  Philip Pape: Like packaged foods maybe gets a little more confusing because there are a lot of plant-based products and packaged foods.
• 44:10
  Philip Pape: I mentioned oatmeal, which is kind of packaged in a way.
• 44:12
  Philip Pape: Is there anything else that stands out as people consume a lot of it and maybe they should look for what they're buying?
• 44:18
  Michele Scarlet: Uh so yeah, I mean, like we already kind of touched on the oatmeal piece.
• 44:22
  Michele Scarlet: If you can find glyphosate-free oatmeal or oats, like go go for that, obviously.
• 44:26
  Michele Scarlet: I think for meat products, you want to see grass-fed, grass finished, because just because it says grass-fed doesn't necessarily mean that it's not also fed GMO corn.
• 44:42
  Michele Scarlet: Right?
• 44:43
  Michele Scarlet: So yeah, grass-fed, grass-finished.
• 44:45
  Michele Scarlet: Uh, same idea on eggs, right?
• 44:49
  Michele Scarlet: Like free range.
• 44:50
  Michele Scarlet: Um, what is the word?
• 44:52
  Philip Pape: Well, there's vegetarian, there's cage-free, there's free range.
• 44:55
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, I feel like they say they like pasture, pasture raised.
• 44:58
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 44:59
  Michele Scarlet: Free range is not exactly free range.
• 45:02
  Michele Scarlet: Pasture raised is like they truly are in the open.
• 45:06
  Philip Pape: They eat bugs and everything.
• 45:08
  Michele Scarlet: Yes, yeah.
• 45:08
  Michele Scarlet: They have their like true diet, which would make them the most healthy ultimately.
• 45:13
  Philip Pape: And you can tell by looking at the yolks because we have chickens, but people get jealous when I say that because those eggs are so for superior.
• 45:20
  Philip Pape: Are they orange?
• 45:21
  Philip Pape: Are they deep orange, they're dense, like so good.
• 45:25
  Philip Pape: And then you get grocery store eggs and they're like pale, you're like, where's the yolk?
• 45:29
  Philip Pape: You know, the difference.
• 45:30
  Michele Scarlet: You know what?
• 45:30
  Michele Scarlet: I had um, so my husband and I uh moved into the house that we're currently in.
• 45:35
  Michele Scarlet: I want to say it'll be two years in July.
• 45:38
  Michele Scarlet: And we had our first garden this past summer, and I was so excited about it.
• 45:43
  Michele Scarlet: And we had like so many zucchinis that like took us right into the fall.
• 45:48
  Michele Scarlet: It was incredible.
• 45:49
  Michele Scarlet: And I'm not even like zucchini's not my favorite vegetable, but it was easy to grow and you know, it obviously produced a lot.
• 45:54
  Michele Scarlet: I had a store bought zucchini the other day.
• 45:58
  Michele Scarlet: It was gross, like bland, like flavorless, flavorless, like tasted like nothing.
• 46:04
  Michele Scarlet: And my husband and I are big on eggs.
• 46:05
  Michele Scarlet: We eat eggs all the time.
• 46:06
  Michele Scarlet: Our house goes through like a carton of eggs every morning.
• 46:09
  Michele Scarlet: And I last summer I was at a girlfriend's house and she made me eggs in the morning, and I was like, these are tasteless.
• 46:15
  Michele Scarlet: Like there's live, they're so so pale yellow.
• 46:17
  Michele Scarlet: And I looked at the package and it was just like, you know, your generic egg, you know, the cheapest one, whatever.
• 46:22
  Michele Scarlet: Like she didn't put any thought into it.
• 46:24
  Michele Scarlet: And I was like, wow, there is a real difference in the way things taste when you go for quality.
• 46:30
  Michele Scarlet: And for me, I have, you know, a deep value that food is medicine.
• 46:36
  Michele Scarlet: And so maybe not everybody has that.
• 46:39
  Michele Scarlet: But like my husband and I, we have a very big budget for our food on purpose because we know what it does for our bodies, we know how it serves our bodies, and maybe we cut somewhere else and we don't go out for dinner, you know, every week or whatever.
• 46:51
  Michele Scarlet: But yeah, no, having that quality food is gonna be the biggest impact on somebody's health.
• 46:58
  Philip Pape: Yeah, good.
• 46:58
  Philip Pape: I'm glad you said that because you're right, you have to make trade-offs or decisions.
• 47:03
  Philip Pape: And going to restaurants is very, very expensive.
• 47:06
  Philip Pape: So that alone, like since we've had kids and we live in the Northeast where it's like freezing cold in the winter, and we we don't want to be just going out to restaurants all the time necessarily.
• 47:15
  Philip Pape: Saves a lot of money.
• 47:16
  Philip Pape: And then you get to have fun learning recipes and cooking and cooking in bulk, right?
• 47:20
  Philip Pape: Like buy in bulk, buy family-sized things.
• 47:22
  Philip Pape: You could go to the extent of finding ranchers and farmers, farms nearby if you're lucky enough, and buy like whole heads of cattle or be, you know, whole bee's and stuff.
• 47:31
  Michele Scarlet: We do that.
• 47:32
  Michele Scarlet: Um buy a quarter cow, a quarter cow every, I don't know when my husband does it, but we every year we buy a quarter cow.
• 47:39
  Philip Pape: Yeah, it's another way to save money.
• 47:40
  Philip Pape: I mean, it just takes intention.
• 47:42
  Philip Pape: So, okay, let's wrap it all up with this is a whole topic and you cover it on your show all the time.
• 47:48
  Philip Pape: Where can somebody who's listened to all this start?
• 47:51
  Philip Pape: And ultimately, you know, obviously you have a whole business built around helping women with some of these areas.
• 47:57
  Philip Pape: You know, what's the order of operations?
• 47:59
  Philip Pape: Like, we've talked to the listener and said, okay, the basics are important.
• 48:02
  Philip Pape: You can listen to our shows on how to do that.
• 48:04
  Philip Pape: We talk about it all the time.
• 48:05
  Philip Pape: We've talked about what to be aware of and simple decisions you can make today, starting today and tomorrow.
• 48:10
  Philip Pape: What's like the next thing for someone's, okay, I want to take this seriously.
• 48:13
  Philip Pape: What should I do?
• 48:15
  Michele Scarlet: Uh, at that point, like if you want even more optimal health, I would be going down some functional labs.
• 48:21
  Michele Scarlet: I would be, I'd be like, okay, let's dig a little bit deeper.
• 48:25
  Michele Scarlet: And so I have the three foundational functional labs, like I mentioned, the hair, the stool, and the urine hormone tests.
• 48:31
  Michele Scarlet: But like, if you're concerned about toxic burden, like if you want to see the, you know, forever chemicals, the BPA is like what is kind of stopping things, you know, that metabolic friction from like getting you to the next level.
• 48:45
  Michele Scarlet: You can do uh like total tox tests, you can do mycotoxin, which is mold, if you're if you suspect, you know, that you've had mold exposure and that might be the reason you're uh, you know, you're not progressing into that next level.
• 48:57
  Michele Scarlet: But I would definitely say you go start with the foundations, get consistent, like a solid three months of foundational commitment should move the needle far.
• 49:09
  Philip Pape: Big time, yes.
• 49:11
  Michele Scarlet: You know, if things, if you are true to yourself and it has not shifted in three months, then I would be digging deeper.
• 49:20
  Philip Pape: Yeah, it's a great approach.
• 49:21
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, that would be the functional labs for sure.
• 49:23
  Philip Pape: And is there an episode on your podcast, which is the true health podcast, by the way?
• 49:27
  Philip Pape: If I didn't already mention it, apologies.
• 49:29
  Philip Pape: Because I know you had one in January about lab tests, but is there one that you can think of on the top of your head about these lab tests?
• 49:35
  Philip Pape: Or we can add it later.
• 49:37
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, no, I do.
• 49:37
  Michele Scarlet: I think one of my most recent ones um is I think it's like called like the three lab tests that changed my life.
• 49:43
  Michele Scarlet: And I go into de I go, yeah, I go into deeply.
• 49:46
  Philip Pape: That's what it's called.
• 49:46
  Philip Pape: Yeah, as I'm looking at it right now.
• 49:48
  Michele Scarlet: And it really did because I was that person.
• 49:50
  Michele Scarlet: I was that person who was deeply committed for, you know, like 13 years of my life to the foundations and thought that that was the be-all end all of health.
• 50:00
  Michele Scarlet: And then when I had my own health crisis, I didn't even know where to turn.
• 50:04
  Michele Scarlet: And when I, you know, realized that this piece was the next piece, these were the three that I ran.
• 50:10
  Michele Scarlet: And it changed literally everything.
• 50:12
  Michele Scarlet: And now I run these actually every year on myself just to keep myself a baseline.
• 50:16
  Michele Scarlet: But yes, there is an episode.
• 50:17
  Michele Scarlet: It's called That These Three Labs Changed My Life.
• 50:19
  Michele Scarlet: It's only 10 minutes long.
• 50:20
  Michele Scarlet: I don't love, I didn't get into like the real deep weeds of it because I like the convenience of a 10-minute podcast.
• 50:27
  Michele Scarlet: If you just like, you just want the bullet points.
• 50:30
  Michele Scarlet: But if you're interested in those, go listen to that.
• 50:32
  Michele Scarlet: It's a good one.
• 50:33
  Michele Scarlet: And it just kind of gives you the, hmm, like, is this something that I maybe need?
• 50:37
  Philip Pape: It's a great approach.
• 50:38
  Philip Pape: Again, I I love the nuance and the reason behind this.
• 50:42
  Philip Pape: It makes a lot of sense.
• 50:43
  Philip Pape: We talk about physique engineering here, and that's that's what it is.
• 50:46
  Philip Pape: It's like gathering the data, taking the steps, doing the simple things that will move the needle the farthest and seeing what's left and continuing to dig in, dig in, dig in.
• 50:54
  Philip Pape: Um, you know, we have something in engineering called the five Y, which is like a root cause.
• 50:58
  Philip Pape: It's not just engineering, but where you say, why is something happening?
• 51:01
  Philip Pape: It's because of this.
• 51:02
  Philip Pape: Okay, why is that happening?
• 51:03
  Philip Pape: It's because of this.
• 51:04
  Philip Pape: That's an impossible thing to follow unless you've already gotten yourself to a good baseline, which is easy to do without all this stuff we talked about today.
• 51:12
  Philip Pape: But then this stuff is gonna move the needle even further.
• 51:14
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna point the listener to that episode and your podcast.
• 51:18
  Philip Pape: Where else do you want folks to find you?
• 51:20
  Michele Scarlet: Yeah, I so podcast, that episode, and I hang out on Instagram probably all day long.
• 51:25
  Michele Scarlet: You can find me at Michelle Scarlet underscore um over there on IG.
• 51:29
  Philip Pape: At Michelle Scarlet underscore on Instagram and the podcast, True Health Podcast.
• 51:33
  Philip Pape: And by the way, she has an episode with me on there as well.
• 51:36
  Philip Pape: So definitely check all of those out.
• 51:37
  Philip Pape: Michelle, it's it's been so awesome recording these with you and keep doing what you're doing.
• 51:42
  Philip Pape: It's been great to have you on the show.
• 51:44
  Michele Scarlet: Thank you, you too.
• 51:44
  Michele Scarlet: Thank you so much, Philip.