- What are a few things that you do and or avoid in light of what you know about these endocrine disruptors? And by the way, it goes without saying that you're in spectacular cognitive and physical shape for any age, but it's really remarkable. I feel comfortable sharing this because someone else published it online recently.

You are soon to enjoy your what birthday? - 89th. - 89th birthday, amazing. And with all the talk about longevity, cognitive and physical longevity, everyone's thinking, including me, like, what does she do? Well, she avoids all these endocrine disruptors and she has a wonderfully rich life of curiosity and other things.

But yeah, what are some other things that you do and avoid in light of what you know, for which there may or may not be a controlled study, but I think we're all just curious. We'll frame this as what you do. - So water, our water, I worry about the water.

I studied water for a long time in my past life. So we actually distill our water. So we have a tabletop distiller. My husband, Steven, cleans it out. There's a lot of gunk in it, by the way, even though it's San Francisco that has clean water, at the end of the day, after you've distilled the water, there's a lot of gunk.

- So you distill the water, so this is not reverse osmosis. - No, distilling. - Okay. - Yeah, so it's steam distilled and then it condenses in a glass container. And then we put that in glass containers in the fridge. And so, and it tastes really good, by the way, really, really, somebody was just over and he said, "This tastes like melted snow." - Hmm.

- I thought it was lovely. - And you use that for drinking, for coffee, for tea, for cooking too, if you make rice, you're using distilled. - Actually, no, no, but for ice cubes. And you know, whenever I can think about it, we can't use too much 'cause you'd be too busy.

You always did. - Right. - But he does it once a day, it's just the two of us. So water is important. We try to leave our shoes at the door. - Tell me about that one. - Well, dust that you bring in contains a lot of the, particularly the PFAS chemicals.

And so that's actually, I'm not 100% good on that, but we try to do that. And I'm careful with the products I put on my face. I check them out the way I suggested, you know, environmental working group. And I go to the farmer's market. I always buy organic, always buy organic.

But I know that's a cost issue for some people and an availability issue for some people. But in San Francisco, you can do that. Some areas where I don't do more of what I should, I think I'm starting to be aware of the chemicals in clothing. We haven't talked about that, but there's a, turns out there's a lot of, particularly in, it's a problem for workout wear because you're absorbing so much, you're sweaty, you're hot, and you're bringing these chemicals into your body.

And that may be one of the interventions that we do, get a bunch of athletes to use safe clothing and traditional clothing and see what their body burden is. That's how you know. - So erring toward cotton as opposed to synthetic materials. - Right, and the dyes are important.

So you don't want, you want maybe plant-based dyes. It's not my area of expertise. I have a colleague who I work with on this and I'll go with her advice. But I'm just saying that's another area that I think people will soon be paying attention to. There's also the area that is much more difficult, which is what's in building materials and furniture.

But a lot of these PFAS and the flame retardants are in our furniture and in our building materials and trying to think about how to build. I was asked about safety in a new village that's being built in California, by the way. And it's really challenging to think about if you were gonna do this right and you were gonna build a town that was toxic free, how would you do that?

I'm thinking about that. - I'm thinking about the opener of the Simpsons and doing the exact opposite. Where like in the opener of the Simpsons, there's like a three-eyed fish and there's the chemical plant. And I'm just thinking, you just look at the opener of the Simpsons, you do the inverse of everything that's there, the inverse of everything that's there, including alcohol intake, which is robust on the Simpsons.

But interesting. So, and when it comes to food sourcing, like non-fruit, non-vegetable food sourcing, is there anything we can do? I mean, it's so hard for people to get eggs from farms. I mean, you can, if you go to a farmer's market, but this stuff can get pretty tricky, pretty expensive.

And most people listening are not gonna be living in Sonoma where they might have a neighbor that has chickens or something. It's a hard problem. - It is a hard problem. And I think maybe people asking for it more would help. I don't know. I mean, in San Francisco, I'm lucky 'cause I can just get, you know, just on the phone, fresh direct order, and I know it's okay.

But I know that's not the case everywhere. So I think being aware, honestly, is a really big step. If you are aware that this is something you want to change, you will find ways to change it. - It's interesting because a few years back, there was a lot of discussion about dyes in children's toys, in particular toys from overseas, right?

Remember, kids are not, you know, babies are always gnawing on stuff and teething in. And there was a lot of attention like, "Hey, like what's in these sippy cups?" And my understanding is toys and sippy cups. And my understanding is that BPAs were banned from sippy cups. - Phthalates.

- Phthalates, excuse me. - Based on my work. - Based on your work. Thank you so much. Thank you for the clarification, truly, and for the work that led to that. We know that baby skin is more absorbent than older skin. We know, and so there are literally laws in place and restrictions in place to make sure that some of this stuff is minimized in young kids.

But then we sort of, after age 12, we're kind of like, "Okay, well, it's a free-for-all. It depends on your budget, where you go." And so we can't rely on governing bodies to do this. But I think it's a useful conversation, especially given your relationship to Scandinavia, which is a fun one to elaborate on, to illustrate some of the discrepancy between the U.S.

and Europe. What sorts of chemicals are banned in Europe, in food, in lotions, et cetera, that you're aware of, that are prominent here in the U.S.? Maybe that's a good filter to place some of this choice-making through. - Europe has had a policy called REACH, and under REACH, you have to show that a chemical is safe before it's put into the marketplace.

So the way our system is here, it's put in the marketplace, and then if somebody gets worried about it, they might do a study, they might find harm. Remember how long it took me to find that phthalate connection? It was 10 years. Two studies, 10 years, $10 million, by the way.

So if you're gonna wait for that, I don't know, given the number of chemicals out there, 80,000 or more, forget it. So I think the REACH policy of testing before something's put in the market is making a big difference in Europe, and I think that's one reason why they're much better off.

- Are those animal tests, or animal and human tests that they're doing over there? - Whatever defines safety. It depends on the chemical, it depends on what the product is. I can't answer that in general. - So that might be a good avenue for changing legislature here, right? To install something similar to REACH.

- Absolutely, but it's not gonna happen, I don't think. - No? - No. Because there's too many forces against that. It's very, very hard for manufacturers to make changes. I'll give you one example. So you know that, you might not know, but should know, that phthalates are very prevalent in the hospital setting.

If you think of a tube, you know, to dialysis, to chemotherapy, to IV, that's all phthalates, right? And that's going into your body. And there was recently a bill passed in California that DEHP could not be in IV bags. It's fantastic success. - In the actual bag? - Yes.

- The bags could not contain these endocrine disruptors? - Yes, DEHP specifically. - DEHP, okay. - Diethylhexyl phthalate, the most anti-androgenic phthalate. So that was a great step forward, but that's like one chemical, right, in one product. And that was a battle. So you see how hard it is to do this, extremely hard.

There's a company, Bbron, which makes hospital products, and they are very forward-thinking, and they set up a factory in Florida to make alternative IV bags out of another product, polyolefin. And the problem is that we're not sure about the safety of polyolefin. So it gets really difficult. You know, you can say, "Remove DEHP," but now we scientists have to say, "What does it mean for a chemical to be safe?" And we don't know that.

I don't mean to disillusion you and your listeners, but that's a huge challenge that we're up against. We know it's safer, we know it's safer, and we know what the bad actors are, and we know the things we don't want to be exposed to, but we have to be careful when we think about what do we want to put in instead.

- If people are interested in limiting their exposure to these endocrine disruptors, one of the key questions that's going to come up again and again, especially in light of PCOS and sperm counts, is we can't control what happened to us during pregnancy. But once we have some sense of agency over what we put into our body and how we put it into our body, do you think that there's plasticity and resilience to this system?

So, you know, God forbid, if somebody was exposed to a lot of these things early on, can they, you know, by making changes, can they rescue themselves to any degree? - No. - No? - No. - So it's really just dependent on what your parents did. - Yes, that's not to say that your own exposure cannot change things further and make things worse.

But here's a fact. If a male's mother smokes when he's in the womb, then he has a, this is a Danish study, by the way, 50% reduction in sperm count. - If his mother smoked while he was in the womb, how much smoking are we talking? - I don't know, I don't remember.

But the reason I bring this up is because there's nothing he can do to change that, okay? If he smokes as an adult, he has, I think, a similar reduction in sperm count. He can stop and his sperm will be restored. He can get his sperm health back. But whatever happened in the womb stays in the womb, if you will, so it's developmental.

It's not going to, you know, it's gonna be there for life. And that's true for the brain as well. So I think anybody who's thinking of conceiving a pregnancy or pregnant has a responsibility to really learn how to reduce their exposure. Because these things are, by the way, passed on for several generations.

It's your child and your child's child, because the germ cells for your grandchild are going to be carried in within your child. - So germ cells are not germs as in infectious germs? - Right, right, right. - It's the cells that will produce the egg and sperm, that germinate, hence the word germ.

- So it's a huge responsibility. And I think people should take it very seriously, that they have, you know, they're going to be affecting the health of subsequent generations. Some labs say it's seven generations. I don't know if that's true, but certainly three generations. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)