The Smart Human with Dr. Aly Cohen

Maria “Adi” Benito is an integrative adult endocrinologist and the director of Princeton Integrative Endocrinology. After her residency in Internal Medicine at Pennsylvania Hospital (1997-2000) (University of Pennsylvania Health System), she completed a Fellowship in Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania (200-2004) and a fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine (2008-2010). She has attended David Winston’s Center for Herbal studies (2012-2014 )and the Khalsa Healing Arts and Yoga Center (meditation teacher training 2005-2006). Adi joined the fellowship faculty of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (University of Arizona) in 2012. She developed and authored the first course on Integrative endocrinology for this program. She has contributed a chapter in thyroid health to the 2nd edition of Integrative Women’s health (Weil Integrative Medicine Library) and has been an invited guest reviewer for www.dr.Weil.com. Adi lectures on the integrative management of endocrine conditions including diabetes prevention and thyroid disorders to the community. She is the chief medical advisor of Eating for Your Health, a non-profit organization based in Princeton, NJ, whose mission is to help people lead healthier lives by eating deliciously prepared whole foods in a supportive setting. In her private practice, she uses an integrative approach to the management of pre-diabetes, thyroid conditions, and PCOS, blending the best of the healing arts.

Dr. Yvonne Burkart is a PhD Toxicologist, Mom of two, and Consultant. She is a 23-year veteran of Toxicology with expertise in reproductive toxicity, particularly endocrine disruption, infertility, cancer, and glutathione homeostasis. She has also served as a Senior Toxicologist in the flavor and fragrance chemical industry where she helped to ensure the safety of flavor ingredients.

After experiencing the power of a low tox lifestyle, Dr. Yvonne began a mission to help consumers slash their toxic exposure with confidence and ease. She is extremely passionate about helping parents protect their children from toxic exposure. Dr. Yvonne lives in California with her husband and two children.

LINKS My website https://dryvonneburkart.com/ YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@dryvonneburkart/videos Hormone Disrupting Ingredient Cheatsheet and Training https://info.safeingredientacademy.com/3738-9693

In this interview, we discuss:

-What is integrative cardiology and how does it differ from conventional cardiology? -How many people have heart disease today? Is this number growing? -How do women differ when it comes to heart disease...risk, management, and even symptoms of heart problems?  -Which lab screening tests do you use for heart disease?  -What is advanced lipid testing (ex. apolipoprotein B, lipoprotein(a), CRP, small dense LDL) are best for predicting heart disease risk? -Which imaging studies are best for diagnosing heart disease? -What are the pros and cons of pharmaceutical therapy?  -Are statin medications bad for us? How are statin medication best managed when necessary? -How do lifestyle approaches, such as diet, sleep, exercise, affect our risk for heart disease? Which diet is best to prevent or manage heart disease? -Do mind-body approaches, like meditation and yoga,  affect blood pressure and/or heart disease risk? -What 3 things can we all do RIGHT NOW to make our hearts healthier?

Vivian A. Kominos, MD, FACC, a nationally recognized clinician and educator in integrative cardiology, is a graduate of St Louis University School of Medicine. She completed her internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in her home state of New Jersey. She is board certified in both Integrative Medicine and Cardiology. She has practiced cardiology for over 35 years and has concentrated on integrative medicine and integrative cardiology for the past 15 years. She is Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine (AWCIM) where she completed her integrative medicine fellowship in 2007. She is a founding member of the American Board of Integrative Medicine where she served as vice chair and remained an active board member until 2020.Besides being a mentor for the AWCIM fellowship, she is intimately involved in the fellowship educational curricula, authoring modules on topics ranging from cardiovascular health and disease to nutrition, mind body medicine, and obesity. She is a speaker and educator for her peers, medical students and residents, nurses, allied health professionals and the community. She enjoys volunteering at the Parker Family Health Center in Red Bank, New Jersey. She loves running, kayaking, cooking and spending time with family and friends. Her greatest joy is her 2 1/2 year old granddaughter

Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, is widely recognized as one of the environmental community’s most prominent and effective critics of establishment agriculture and U.S. farm policy.

• On November 2, food policy authority Michael Pollan named Cook one of “the world’s 7 most powerful foodies”, along with First Lady Michelle Obama, nutritionist Marion Nestle and The New York Times’ columnist Mark Bittman.
• On November 19, The Times' Bittman listed EWG among 25 people and organizations for whom he was thankful as Thanksgiving approached.
• In its 2011 roster of Washington’s top lobbyists, The Hill, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, said Cook “is at the forefront of challenges to corn ethanol and subsidies for Big Agriculture, upcoming hot-button issues as Congress tackles energy matters and starts work on a new farm bill.”
• Cook was voted the “Ultimate Green Game Changer” in 2009 by the readers of The Huffington Post. As Arianna Huffington put it, “The EWG is an environmental superhero with a full set of digital tools in its arsenal.”

Cook is a principal architect of the landmark conservation provisions of the 1985 farm bill, which for the first time attempted to shift U.S. farm policy from a narrow focus on maximum crop production to conservation of land, water, wetlands and wildlife. The legislation was the most important environmental farm policy reform of recent years, affecting more than 400 million acres of privately owned - and publicly subsidized - farmland.

EWG’s online database listing every farm subsidy recipient in the nation and the amount of money each receives has generated thousands of stories about America’s broken farm policy. A New York Times profile of Cook said the website helped “transform the [2002] farm bill into a question about equity and whether the country's wealthiest farmers should be paid to grow commodity crops while many smaller family farms receive nothing and are going out of business.” Cook and EWG played a similarly prominent role during the crafting of the 2008 farm bill.

In the 1990s, EWG’s research on pesticides was a major factor in the passage of the landmark pesticide reform law, the Food Quality Protection Act. EWG was among the first organizations to draw attention to the health threat posed by the weed-killer atrazine, conducting the first extensive tests for the chemical in tap water in 29 Midwestern cities.

Cook has addressed food and agriculture policy in numerous interviews, including 60 Minutes, the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, the Today Show, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX Business News, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. Cook testifies regularly before House and Senate committees, has briefed top Congressional staff and has met with senior Obama administration officials, including Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack and Environmental Protection Administration chief Lisa Jackson. Cook earned a B.A. in history, B.S. in agriculture and M.S. in soil science from the University of Missouri Columbia. He is a board member of The Organic Center and the Amazon Conservation Team. He is married to Deb Callahan and lives in northern California with their young son, Callahan. 

David Kriebel, Sc.D., Director, Lowell Center for Sustainable Production

https://www.uml.edu/research/lowell-center/

Professor Emeritus, Department of Public Health

https://www.uml.edu/Health-Sciences/Public-Health/faculty/kriebel-david.aspx

David Kriebel is a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Trained at Harvard in occupational/environmental epidemiology, his research has helped to identify many important environmental and occupational causes of cancer, lung diseases, injuries and other health hazards. For over 30 years he taught in the Department of Work Environment at UMass Lowell, an interdisciplinary graduate program that trained hundreds of occupational health researchers, practitioners and activists. Dr. Kriebel has co-authored two textbooks and published more than 150 peer reviewed papers. As a member of a committee of the U.S. National Research Council, Dr. Kriebel helped establish the link between exposure to Agent Orange among Vietnam veterans and cancer, leading to compensation for many disabled veterans. He advised the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences on its long term study of the health effects of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill and clean-up operations and conducted research to identify cancers and other diseases among the first responders to the World Trade Center Disaster. Dr. Kriebel is also the Director of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, which collaborates with industries, government agencies, unions, and community organizations on the redesign of systems of production to make them healthier and more environmentally sound. He continues to teach epidemiology and also frequently speaks to community groups and government agencies on the role of science in democratic decision making, particularly in cancer prevention. 

A few articles that you may find useful:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/thesmarthuman/FDA_Consumer_Update_on_tattoos_FDA_Cosmetics_Facts-Tattoos_Foerster_Tattoo_inks__cancer_Negi__Tattoo_inks_toxicological_risks_systematic_review_Toxicol_Indus_Health_2022_Sabbioni_Carcinogenic.pdf

Other podcasts with David Kriebel:

https://www.whatmamawants.org/archived-episodes/david-kriebel Colleagues,

I thought you would like to know that Dr. Christel Nielsen and colleagues at Lund University, Sweden, have published the first study to specifically target the tattoo-lymphoma hypothesis. The results are suggestive of an effect, and I hope will help convince funders and skeptical reviewers to support additional studies to explore the hypothesis.

Take care,

David

Tattoos as a risk factor for malignant lymphoma: a population-based case–control study

Christel Nielsen, Mats Jerkeman, Anna Saxne Jöud

e-Clinical Medicine

is now available online: Tattoos as a risk factor for malignant lymphoma: a population-based case–control study - ScienceDirect

Dr. Goodson grew up in Missouri and graduated from the University of Missouri Columbia and Harvard Medical School. He trained as a general surgeon and specialized in breast surgery before it was a recognized field. He was a member of the research group that established breast conservation, i.e., lumpectomy, as the preferred treatment for early breast cancer. Recognizing that he was treating more young women with breast cancer, he joined with Dr. Shanaz Dairkee in 2005 to investigate how common environmental chemicals such as BPA, methylparaben, PFOA, etc. disrupt the normal biology of non-cancerous, human breasts. He has been a professor at the University of California San Francisco and a Senior Scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute. He is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a member of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, and a spokesperson for The Halifax Project. In addition to research, he enjoys photography, writing, and creating hand-drawn animation as on his website, www.drwilliamgoodson.com

•  The number of new cancer cases had ticked up to more than two million in 2023, from 1.9 million in 2022. 
• According to the report, cancer rates are increasing for six of the 10 most common cancers: breast, prostate, melanoma, kidney, pancreas and uterine, while lung, colorectal and pancreas cancers cause the most deaths. 
• Among adults younger than 50, colorectal cancer has become the leading cause of cancer death in men and the second-leading cause in women, behind breast cancer. In the late 1990s, it ranked fourth in both men and women younger than 50.  

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Smart Human Podcast. Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Rachel Massey, who is Senior Science and Policy Advisor at the Collaborative for Health and Environment and a Senior Research Associate at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts. Today, we are talking about a very important topic to me, artificial sports turf. We talk about materials, health effects, alternatives, and ways to stay safe. So stay tuned.

Rachel Massey is Senior Science and Policy Advisory at the Collaborative for Health and Environment, and a Senior Research Associate at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She has over two decades of experience working at the intersection of public interest science and policy making in state, national and international arenas. Until recently she served as Senior Associate Director at the Toxics Use Reduction Institute at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where her projects included state, federal and international chemicals policy initiatives, analyzing toxics use reduction opportunities for businesses and communities, and working in partnership with small businesses and grassroots organizations addressing toxics at the community level.

In 2022 she received the Ken Zarker Memorial Pollution Prevention Champion Award from the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable. She has authored numerous reports and articles on chemicals policy and safer alternatives, including reports for European government agencies and the United Nations on chemicals and development, chemicals in consumer products, and other topics. Rachel received a Master of Science in Environmental Change and Management from Oxford University, a Master of Public Affairs from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a Doctor of Science in Work Environment from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Here are some suggested links/resources:

Blog posts through the Collaborative for Health and Environment:

https://www.healthandenvironment.org/join-us/blog/playing-on-plastic-artificial-turf-hazards-and-safer-alternatives

https://www.healthandenvironment.org/join-us/blog/6ppd-in-tires-a-concern-for-playgrounds-artificial-turf-and-more

https://www.healthandenvironment.org/join-us/blog/playground-surfacing-fall-protection-and-fun-without-toxic-chemicals

Resources from the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production and the Toxics Use Reduction Institute at UMass Lowell:

https://www.uml.edu/research/lowell-center/athletic-playing-fields/

One-page overview of artificial turf concerns: 

https://www.turi.org/content/download/13559/206802/file/ArtificialTurfConcerns_flyer_April2021.pdf Extended fact sheet on athletic fields (2020): 

https://www.turi.org/content/download/13271/203906/file/Factsheet.Artificial_Turf.September2020.pdf.pdf Report on athletic fields (2018-2019): 

https://www.turi.org/content/download/11980/188623/file/TURI+Report+2018-002+June+2019.+Athletic+Playing+Fields.pdf PFAS in artificial turf carpet: https://www.turi.org/content/download/12963/201149/file/TURI+fact+sheet+-+PFAS+in+artificial+turf.pdf 

Natural grass field case studies: turi.org/organicgrasscasestudies Short videos on natural grass fields in MA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmjv1qteLho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nws-ZpeaQJc

Resources from Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai:

https://mountsinaiexposomics.org/artificial-turf/ https://icahn.mssm.edu/files/ISMMS/Assets/Departments/Environmental%20Medicine%20and%20Public%20Health/CEHC/CEHC%20Artificial%20Turf%20Consumer%20Guide%205.2017.pdf https://icahn.mssm.edu/files/ISMMS/Assets/Departments/Environmental%20Medicine%20and%20Public%20Health/CEHC/CEHC%20Artificial%20Turf%20Position%20Statement%205.2017.pdf Healthy Playing Surfaces website, housed at Mt. Sinai: https://www.healthyplayingsurfaces.org/

Other:

CHE webinar: https://www.healthandenvironment.org/webinars/96595 Webinar Q&A: https://www.healthandenvironment.org/assets/images/webinarimages/Artificial%20Turf%20Q&A_FINAL.pdf Healthy Building Network: https://healthybuilding.net/products/11-turf Webinar by CCE and PEER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCi6-8JI8zE Non Toxic Communities: https://www.nontoxiccommunities.com/

Theodora Scarato MSW is Executive Director of Environmental Health Trust (EHT). Scarato has published several research papers include a paper on reducing EMF exposures in buildings. 

Davis and Scarato co-authored a major state of the science review paper with numerous experts entitled “Wireless technologies, non-ionizing electromagnetic fields and children: Identifying and reducing health risks” published in Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care. 

EHT filed a historic lawsuit-  EHT et al., v the FCC- against the FCC regarding their wireless radiation safety limits and received a favorable decision whereby the FCC has been mandated to re-examine the record evidence on wireless radiation. 

Environmental Health Trust Read the Science on Wireless

Action Steps

• Wireless radiation limits should protect people and wildlife! 

• Protect children 

• Sign up For EHT’s Newsletter

Learn easy ways to reduce exposure at Healthy Tech at Home, Factsheets For Healthy Home 

Read Science

Barry H Cohen, M.D., F.A.C.P. Dr. Cohen is one of the founders and medical directors of Mercer Kidney Institute, in New Jersey, specializing in the treatment of kidney disease and hypertension for over 51 years. He is board certified in Nephrology and is a Fellow of American College of Physicians. He was Director of Dialysis Services at Capital Health Regional Center and St. Francis hospital and Chairman of the Nephrology section at Capital Health System in New Jersey for over 45 years. He has been past president of the Capital Health medical staff and is currently the Medical Director at FMC Princeton Dialysis Unit.

Dr. Cohen was instrumental in bringing dialysis to New Jersey over 50 years ago, when he started the first chronic outpatient dialysis program in Trenton in 1977, soon after its introduction into mainstream medical care. He has trained hundreds of young physicians as a founder and chairperson of continuing medical education for over 40 years has held countless conferences for continuing medical education (CME), and remains ones of the most highly respected clinicians in the east coast for his profound knowledge of medicine, his humility, warmth, gentle demeaner.