Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Mon, 10 Mar 2025
This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, One Skin, and Ollie. Environmental toxins are everywhere in our modern world—yet most remain untested for their long-term health effects or combined impact. With exposure at an all-time high, understanding how to minimize risk is more important than ever. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re bringing you a special compilation episode featuring Dhru’s conversations with top experts on the toxins we encounter daily—and how to protect ourselves and our children. In this episode, our guests share practical strategies to reduce exposure and safeguard long-term health. Beth Lambert explores the growing epidemic of childhood disease linked to toxin exposure. She shares her personal journey of healing her children, the insights she uncovered along the way, the key factors affecting gut health, and how small changes can lead to big results. Dr. Joel breaks down the major drivers behind this rise, including ultra-processed foods and environmental toxins. He also introduces his SEEDS protocol—a holistic approach focused on both prevention and treatment. Beth Lambert is an Author, educator, and former healthcare consultant. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of Documenting Hope, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that focuses on root-cause healing solutions for children’s chronic health and developmental issues. She has monitored and documented the escalating rates of childhood chronic conditions for 15 years. Dr. Joel Warsh is a Board-Certified Pediatrician in Los Angeles, California who specializes in Parenting, Wellness and Integrative Medicine. He completed his Pediatric Medicine training at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) and worked in private practice in Beverly Hills before founding his current practice, Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine Studio City, in 2018. In this episode, Dhru and his guests dive into: The role of the gut microbiome in detoxification (01:40) Multigenerational changes to environmental toxins and changes to our food systems (11:40) Simple decisions that impact our overall health (22:54) Toxins in our everyday products and how to minimize exposure (25:59) What to prioritize to reduce toxic exposure, filtering water, and organic food (28:34) Toxins and the correlation between heavy metal exposure and Autism (35:44) Avoiding heavy metal exposure, testing, and diversity in food sources (38:19) Dr. Joel’s SEEDS protocol (44:21) Dhru’s Final Thoughts (51:34) Also mentioned: Full episode with Beth Lambert Full episode with Dr. Joel G. Warsh Parenting at Your Child's Pace: The Integrative Pediatrician’s Guide to the First Three Years Dr. Yvonne Burkart Episode: Toxicologist Reveals the Top Sources of Hidden Toxins We’re Being Exposed to Daily This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, One Skin, and Ollie. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Want to give your dog the best in clean eating? Take the online quiz and introduce Ollie to your pet. Right now, Ollie is offering 60% off your first box of meals when you subscribe today! Just head to Ollie.com, use the code DHRU and you’ll get 60% off your first box of meals in your subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the effects of toxic exposure on children's health?
Hi everyone, Drew Proat here. It's no secret that we're exposed to many toxins in our daily lives that are negatively impacting our health and our children's health in particular in a myriad of ways. In fact, 80,000 toxic chemicals have been released into our environment since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
And only very few of those chemicals have been tested for their long-term impact on human health. And definitely the vast majority have not been tested for their impact together on human health. But we can't freak out about this. There are many steps, simple steps that we can take every single day to minimize the effects of our toxic exposure to protect and heal the health of our families.
So on today's episode, I talk with two experts on how to do exactly that. First up, we have Beth Lambert. She's an author, educator, nonprofit director, and former healthcare consultant. She's also the founder and executive director of Documenting Hope, a 501c3 nonprofit organization focusing on root cause healing solutions for children's chronic health and developmental issues.
Also, in addition to Beth, I chat with a friend of mine, Dr. Joel Warsh. He's a board certified pediatrician in Los Angeles, and he specializes in parenting, wellness, and integrative medicine. Let's dive right in, starting with my conversation with Beth Lambert, which I really enjoyed, by the way.
And in this snippet, she details the changes that she made in her own household to address her children's health issues. And she also discusses the vital role that our gut microbiome plays when it comes to how our body handles toxic exposure.
The gut bacteria are so profoundly important for every function in our body from making neurotransmitters to regulating the immune system to determining whether we're reactive to our environment or not. And they help us detoxify. So I learned that my kids had imbalances in gut bacteria and I dove right into their gut
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Chapter 2: How can we improve gut health to minimize toxin effects?
but kind of became a little bit nerdy and obsessed by it because it's so cool what these microorganisms do for our body and how much it's within our control because a big part of our microbiome, it can be regulated by the food that goes in every day. And as a parent, even if you're not super resourced, you can to some degree control how that microbiome shapes up by food and through food.
So I would say our family was eating pretty standard, healthy American diet. So like I thought that was, you know, you ate whole wheat products and, you know, we ate organic, some of our stuff, but not maybe everything. We ate maybe a lot of pasta in our house, which I thought was healthy because that was sort of an idea, a narrative that's out there.
And, you know, my kids eat fruits and vegetables, but I found that the standard American diet There's the ultra processed version of the standard American diet. And even the healthy version of the standard American diet is not what human beings evolved to eat over millennia. So, you know, the human body has evolved. If you think about going back to our ancestral roots,
Eating more hunter gatherer type foods, right? Like eating things that had been maybe processed in traditional time honored ways, whether that's a soaking or sprouting or things like that. So we in the modern world do not eat the way our ancestors do. And our body pays the price. The microbiome has changed as a result of it.
So that was my first big heavy move was like, we're just changing our diet. So I started following a lot of Western price type teaching, which is basically just getting into alignment with the way ancestral habits for preparing food for the types of food you eat. And we stopped eating all things like seed oils and refined sugars and a lot of grains.
We dropped a lot of grains out and we started eating a lot of fermented foods. So that was one really powerful change. or I should even say empowering experience for me because I could control this every single day with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I saw results immediately.
You know, within a few weeks, I saw behaviors, for instance, tantruming, mood dysregulation, all come back into balance. I saw skin symptoms go away. I saw the gastrointestinal symptoms go away. I mean, things like constipation all of a sudden became normalized because food can have that impact on your body.
And I wouldn't say that was the only thing that we did, but that was certainly the cornerstone.
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Chapter 3: What dietary changes can help reduce toxin exposure?
house anything that wasn't natural out of the house laundry detergent toothpaste shampoos like all the products the stuff and things that we think are normal like I remember being a kid in like a teenager and I now see it for what it was I was like captured by the commercials I remember going into a CVS and like looking at all the products like the beauty products and the cosmetics like on the CVS
counters. And I was like, just Oh, I want that. And I want that. And there's almost this like, dopamine hit walking in there, because that's how you were influenced when we see things on. I mean, now it's on TikTok. But for me, it was on TV. And that is our culture, right?
That is so American is that we want the shiny things, the smelly things, the things that are pretty, and we fill our environment with these synthetic products. But those synthetic products are almost always toxic. They almost always have some kind of endocrine disrupting chemicals or maybe even heavy metals that we don't even know about, like in our cosmetics.
Chapter 4: How do environmental toxins impact our food systems?
And these are things that are very easy to change out. So that's one thing we did with our family. We just detoxified. We detoxified our life. And then the last, I think, major piece about what we did to turn my family's health around was to just start paying attention to nature. Like I grew up in New Hampshire, like a total woods kid. Like I love being outside. That was sort of my route.
So that's easy for me to always go back to. But I really started paying attention to things like circadian rhythms and going to sleep or, you know, turning the lights down when it gets dark out and getting up with the morning sunlight and really paying attention to the importance of sleep.
And those are things that in the modern world, we don't really do that often just because, again, it's not culturally normal to do that. It's culturally normal to turn on the lights on it. You know, as soon as the sun goes down and we stay up till midnight and, you know, we don't pay attention to nature, nor do we surround ourselves by it.
So I really made an effort to get my kids outside more barefoot in the sun with no sunscreen. I actually really feel like those were important parts of their healing journey. And they, you know, it's sort of baked into who we are.
I think it's such an important fundamental part of healing to just connect to nature, whether that's in your environment, whether that's in your food, whether it's in your rhythms or just sort of your outlook. Like we need to be connected to nature to be healthy humans.
animals every kid in any chronic condition they're dealing with or any symptoms they're dealing with every kid is a little bit different but there are themes across the board that are there you went through a bunch of different categories of your lives but for a lot of these documentation of reversal no evidence of disease healing that you've seen for the families if you had a rank in order what are like number one biggest contributors number two number three and the context for this question is that i was born in 82.
And I had a pretty diet growing up minus dinner. Dinner was always like a home cooked meal. I was under protein because we grew up vegetarian, but it was always like a good, you know, healthy vegetarian Indian meal at home that was made from scratch. Um, And a lot of my friends too, like, you know, they all had pretty diets and were drinking Coca-Cola a lot and other stuff and things like that.
And so we had a lot of processed food growing up, but it seems something different in this more recent generation of kids that there was like a switch that happened where all of a sudden it's like, Yes, I used to get sick a lot as a kid. I would get, I had like strep throat and bronchitis and other stuff every time it was like cold season, flu season.
But I wasn't dealing with anything more major than that, maybe upset stomach here and there. So something seems like it's kind of gotten more aggressive. Is it environmental toxins? You know, is it, what has been that lever and have you heard that from other people? As the winter chill sets in, there's nothing better than curling up in ultimate comfort.
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Chapter 5: What is the SEEDS protocol for holistic health?
one, two, three, four, five rounds of antibiotics, then passes that on to me. And then that passes on from me to my child. So you have multiple generations of humans who are transferring a microbiome that has been irrevocably damaged by antibiotics. So lots of us have that in our experience.
I've done talks in a large room and asked everybody in the room who's had an antibiotic to raise their hand. There's nobody in the room that hasn't raised their antibiotic. I mean, raised their antibiotic, raised their hand. There is nobody who doesn't raise their hand. Everybody has had an antibiotic. But it's not just antibiotics that disrupt the microbiome.
And again, I think the microbiome disruption is one of the main reasons why I have so many sick kids today, because it is the seed of our health. But there are so many other classes of medications that came out in the 60s, 70s and 80s that also disrupt the microbiome. So that would include birth control pills.
80% of women in the United States have been on birth control pills at one point or another. What did the birth control pills do? There are hormone and steroid medication and there are other classes like asthma, medications are steroid and medications that affect your gut bacteria. It basically causes certain types of microorganisms to thrive.
A lot of the like more fungal type overgrowth can happen when you're on birth control pills. And it really suppresses some of the better, more beneficial microorganisms in your gut. So again, that is then passed along generation to generation, because when a baby is born, the baby receives the mom's microbiome when it's a vaginal birth. The other class of medications would be reflux medications.
And those ones took off in the 90s. Like all of a sudden, boom, out of nowhere, like I was saying before, every baby was put on reflux meds. And I actually was on, I used to work in healthcare consulting
And I worked on a project once where my job was to find families that would be willing to test a reflux medication in their infants, newborns, zero to six months, because there wasn't patent protection or approval for that particular reflux medication.
So I was literally looking for parents whose kids who didn't have reflux, but would be willing to trial, you know, just so they could try it to make sure it was safe. That was to extend the patent life. That was to give patent protection to the pharmaceutical company so that they can continue to make the higher prices on their drug.
What we did by doing that is we created a whole market, a whole new market of infants who could receive reflux medications. Reflux medications totally disrupt the microbiome. They change the pH of your gastrointestinal tract by suppressing the acid that's produced. So think about all those ways I've just mentioned that are talking about just the microbiome.
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Chapter 6: How do antibiotics affect our children's health?
natural medicine or integrative medicine because there aren't any great solutions in modern medicine or at the time where you're going to need to take a lot of pills and people don't want to. So yeah, I don't want that for people. I want to get ahead of it. And I want people to think about these simple things because it adds up. It adds up over time.
The simple decisions that we make really add up and it matters. There was a great study out of Harvard. I don't know if you know the soup study. because I heard you talk about it a couple of times. I love this study. So that's why I mentioned it because I think it really goes well.
I mean that in a complimentary way. It's a study that everybody should know about.
Yeah. And that's why I, I love to chat about it because there were five days of soup, right? These patients, they took them in, they gave them five days of soup.
days of canned soup and then five days of homemade soup and they were looking at the bpa levels in urine the canned soup has bpa lining so they're looking at the difference a thousand percent difference in five days it is a magical study it's super simple it illustrates the point beautifully that little changes matter and that's why i love to talk about it because a thousand percent difference in five days from one chemical
Yes, your body can probably handle those five days of BPA. But if you're eating that soup every other day for five years, plus every other chemical that we're being exposed to, it adds up as opposed to the kid that eats the homemade soup. They don't have that BPA in their body. And yes, your body can handle it to a degree. But at what point is it too much?
I think we're getting to the point where it's too much for too many people. And that's why we're seeing all this chronic disease.
You know, we have a toxicologist on this podcast. Really love her work. We'll link to her in the show notes, along with your book and your social media. Her name is Dr. Yvonne Burkhart. And one of the things she was saying is that as somebody who worked in the industry, coming up with flavoring and different chemicals and additives that get placed into food and fragrances,
is that even when in the rare instance you get some safety studies on exposure to a certain toxin, it says, okay, this level of BPA is toxic, but at this level, it's okay, right? And so I don't know if CanSoup, if they're testing the levels, if they're not, let's give the benefit of the doubt and say they are.
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Chapter 7: What practical steps can families take to reduce toxic exposure?
like granulized rice that's being used as a carbohydrate source for snack foods, et cetera. And, you know, you could probably ask if there's a, you know, kids eat the same stuff. They eat the same snack. They like this one snack. They're going to eat this thing all the time. You can reach out to the company and ask them, do they have any heavy metal testing?
If it is rice that's out there, I don't want people to freak out about, you know, whole grain, sorry, not whole grain rice, but like typical white rice that's there, which does have elevated levels of
compared to years in the past but it seemed to me the biggest concern was like there was this big trend of people using rice as protein powder right so they were using rice brown rice powder as the protein powder and that concentration that seemed to be a problematic thing of the level of arsenic that was there i'm by no means an expert on it but i was tracking that and it seemed to be the concentrated source but again you can ask the companies
If there's certain products that your kids like to use on a regular basis, because their bodies don't, they're not as big as ours. So if they have half the concentration as you, but their body is a third smaller or a fourth smaller or a fifth smaller, it's going to be having a bigger toll on them.
Right. And I want to say to that, because there is a really good tip that I talk to parents about when it comes to this topic is,
if you're talking about a specific chemical from a specific product a lot of times the discussion will be around oh it's just fear-mongering and oh it's well below the levels and it's in the soil so why are we talking about it but when you have a child especially a child but anybody who's eating a product consistently like you said like there's one snack that they love and they're getting it every day that to me is where the biggest concern is that whatever
problematic chemicals are in there, whether it's a metal or anything else, those can build up in the body over time because you're eating it so frequently. So the easiest tip there is just to mix up what you're giving them. Try not to eat anything from the same company over and over and over again every day for weeks and years. Try to vary it up.
If you're going to do chips, do it from different companies. Try different kinds of chips. If you're going to do
know whatever product you're going to do even if you're buying fruit or vegetables like try to buy it from different places from different farms from different stores different varieties that way at least you're getting different things and hopefully that same chemicals are going to build up in your body to the point where it's going to cause an issue so i think that's a good way to minimize your risk by just varying up what you're eating as opposed to eating one thing because you just never know and we've seen it we saw with formula we saw lots of things you just never know
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Chapter 8: Why should we be concerned about the cumulative effects of toxins?
And that's what happens with lead. I mean, that's, to me, the...
easiest example that we are aware of in pediatrics because we test for lead in kids because it can build up i mean it can be in your home it can be in the paint it could be in china like old old pots and pans or old toys and it's oftentimes not because you touch it once it's because it's there and you're exposed to it over a long time that it builds up in your body and it gets to a point
where it's problematic. And if it gets really high, then it becomes very problematic. So I think that's probably true of all of the rest of them. And we don't necessarily need to fear cereal. But I think if we balance what we're eating and vary up our food, then we're going to minimize our risk of getting the same chemical over and over again.
This is a good opportunity to talk about something that you chat about in the book, and it's an acronym. It's called SEEDS. And I want to go through it because Yes, we do have a toxic environment that's out there and how we live our life makes us so much more resilient. You and I both were exposed to hundreds of toxins starting our day off today. We're doing okay.
We're going to continue and we're doing our best. So for families, remind them, walk them through SEEDS. And just how important it is to just dial in a couple of areas. And this is where we're really having families, you know, in your message, in your book.
Again, the book is out, it's going to be out on August, August 6th, Parenting at Your Child's Pace, An Integrative Pediatrician's Guide to the First Three Years. But it's really about just more than that. It's about sort of how to really create this as a lifestyle for you and your family. Or maybe you want to have a family one day like I do, my wife and I.
There's a lot of things that are out there that we can worry about. And some of those things, we have to decide what are going to be majors and what are going to be minors. And then there are the majors, the things that deserve the most amount of attention. And you put them together in this acronym called SEEDS. So walk us through that. The first S in SEEDS stands for? Stress.
What do you want to say about stress?
Well, I think that we live in a world where stress is... more prevalent than ever i mean people seem to be more anxious we have more anxiety disorder more depression more stress than ever before i think because of social media because of the news because of the fear and whether it's for ourselves or parenting or for our families we We know that chronic stress is not good for us.
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