Zandra Palma, MD practices what she calls “sub-diagnostic analysis and disease reversal,” which is primarily environmental medicine with a touch of functional medicine. Environmental medicine, according to our guest, looks for elegant solutions to chronic health conditions. This often means removing environmental toxins that trigger mitochondrial dysfunction.
Common environmental toxins include heavy metals, pesticides, plastics like BPA, and biotoxins like Lyme and mold—among many others. She also discusses the treatments she uses to reboot mitochondrial function.
Her passion is to spread the word about the gravity of the effects environmental toxins have on human health, especially the hormone-disrupting impacts of plastics and BPAs.
She recently gave a TEDx talk, which was censored by the TED organization. Thankfully, she was able to rip the video so you can still watch it online. In her talk, she provides specific tips to protect yourself from environmental toxins and recommendations for initiating grass roots movements in your community.
Other topics Dr. Palma covered in the conversation include:
- Factors that motivate patients to care about their environment, such as weight loss, fertility and the health of future generations
- The CLARITY-BPA Program
- Why environmentalism is a public health issue
- And much, much more!
Dr. Zandra Palma: So, the scientists making this research are in touch with the FDA and the EPA and other federal regulatory agencies, and they’ve been trying to get their ear and lobbying them for years with no effect for 20 years now. And I think, right now, the only way that things are going to change is through a more grass roots sort of movement. So, it’s really getting the word out to people. And when people end up in my office… So, there are things that you can do on the individual level to help them sort of “detox” or rid their body of different chemicals. But when it’s BPA, it’s a really tricky one. And the reason is that it’s hard to scoop water out of the boat while there’s still a lot of holes in the boat and waters still coming into the boat. So, you can up-regulate somebody’s glucuronidation pathways and support elimination through the gut so things don’t get reconjugated and reabsorbed. And you can open somebody’s drainage pathways so they’re eliminating as much as possible.
But you can still do all that, and if they’re still getting a lot of BPA into the system, which is what we know about BPA, it’s a constant in. It’s a constant out, yes. But because it’s a constant in, there’s a constant level and it’s constantly disrupting the immune system, disrupting the hormones, disrupting the metabolic system, disrupting the neurological system.
James Maskell: Welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, the place health professionals come to hear from innovators and agitators leading the charge. We cover the latest clinical breakthroughs and health technology, as well as practical tools to help you transform your practice and the health of your community.
This podcast is brought to you by the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center, who provide a range of options to help you deliver successful, effective functional and integrated medicine. To find out more and to get started, go to goevomed.com/lmrc. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week we have a special interview with Dr. Zandra Palma. She is an environmental medicine doctor, trained in functional medicine. She worked at Parsley Health and now has her own practice, and recently, she gave a TED Talk that was banned by TED. And I think that in this community, there’ll be a lot of understanding of why that’s an important topic.
I’m sure many people who are listening to this will see these kinds of patients in their practice all the time, but I think it also speaks to a bigger issue in society about how we deal with environmental illness and the causes of environmental illness and the companies that create the products that cause environmental illness. I think it’s a really interesting topic. Definitely relates to the upcoming mitochondria event that we’re having October 13 and 14, I think, in Park City. I mentioned that briefly. We’ll have all the details in the show notes. Enjoy.
So, a warm welcome to the podcast, Dr. Zandra Palma. Welcome, doctor.
Dr. Zandra Palma: Thank you.
James Maskell: Great to have you here on the podcast and excited to share a little bit more about your story. And I think there’s some pieces in here for every practitioner, no matter what type of medicine they practice and where they are, what stage of practice they’re at. So, why don’t we just start from the beginning. So, you are practicing functional medicine and passionate about environmental medicine.
Dr. Zandra Palma: Yeah. I would say I’m practicing more environmental medicine these days than functional medicine, and I’m trained in both. I’m trained in several things. My traditional conventional training, my residencies were in internal medicine and then anesthesiology. And then I took a hard left turn, studied functional medicine for a while, practiced at Parsley Health, which is all functional medicine plus primary care, somewhere kind of in the middle there. And then through that, because people were finding me for environmental medicine types of things, I just ended up veering into environmental medicine more. And now, I would say what I practice, I kind of made up new words for what I practice because I realized none of these terms really encapsulates it perfectly. So, what I do, I call it sub-diagnostic analysis and disease reversal, but it draws from all the parts of my background as you always do when you’re practicing, but definitely mostly from environmental medicine and then probably functional medicine second.
James Maskell: When you say environmental medicine, is that mold, Lyme, chronic infection type of stuff, or is it pollutants, that kind of stuff?
Dr. Zandra Palma: It’s all of that. The complex chronic illness and environmental medicine stuff have a high degree of overlap because usually you find an environmental cause for complex chronic illness. That’s just how those things work. So, yes, I do partially mean complex chronic illness, but the simplest explanation is just the study of how things in your immediate environment can make you sick. And maybe that thing’s not in your immediate environment anymore, maybe it was in your immediate environment 20 years ago. But doing the work up to find out what made you sick, and it’s usually an environmental factor. We even consider things that are inside of you to be environmental factors. So, it’s not all as you would think of stuff lying around your house or in your work environment. We even talk about gut bugs or infections you might have, which is where Lyme comes in, as environmental.
James Maskell: What are some of your favorite ways of getting to that root cause and understanding that? What are the tools that you use at your disposal?
Dr. Zandra Palma: So, I think toxin testing, whether it’s biotoxins or manmade toxins, is a huge part of my practice, and that’s a big part of classic environmental medicine. Looking for manmade toxins that might come from exposures from things you eat, whatever was sprayed on your food when it was growing, whatever was touching your food as it came to you when it was processed. The things that are around you in your house, formaldehyde, what your baseboard was treated with, the things that you sleep on, what your curtains are made of, the things that you work around, the chemicals used in your work environment. If you work in agriculture or in some kind of production thing, the chemicals that…
So, I’m talking mainly about manmade chemicals. I look at those. And then biotoxic chemicals. So, chemicals produced by either living things in your environment like molds, things that are coming in through your lungs and through your skin. Or things that are made by bugs that are living in your own body. So, things that are bacterial toxins made by bugs living in your body. And then the non-manmade, non-biotoxins, so the toxins that are not biological, but that weren’t put there by a man. So, heavy metals being the biggest category of that. All of that testing, I think, I rely on most heavily out of anything.
James Maskell: Absolutely. Okay, cool.
Dr. Zandra Palma: Usually urine tests, but sometimes blood. Sometimes hair.
James Maskell: Well, it takes me back because where I first started before I came to functional medicine was really in that realm too. And what got me excited about functional medicine was a system basically where multiple practitioners could work together and have a common language because I know that detoxification is a part of many different genres of medicine, but there’s not a common language, there’s not necessarily a common, do this in this order. So, that’s what got me excited about that. But I do recognize that this is a very needed area. There’s a lot of people struggling. Over the last month here on the Forum, we’ve had conversations about mitochondria and SIRS and those kind of conversations because, ultimately, that’s what’s going on. If you had to share a clinical pearl from your experience of treating that type of issue-
Dr. Zandra Palma: Yeah, absolutely, I will. I would say that almost all environmentally acquired illness, which SIRS is usually one, almost all complex chronic illness, almost all environmentally acquired illness is usually actually mediated through mitochondria. So, usually, somewhere down at the deepest level we’re looking at mitochondrial injury. So, yes, removing root cause is always important, and that’s that trick that I got from functional medicine. And what’s so elegant about environmental medicine is yes, these things can be expensive and yes, you can put together a 25 supplement protocol, and in functional medicine you’re going to see that all the time.
But sometimes the most elegant solution isn’t to give something or to add something or to do a procedure, it’s just to take away whatever was causing the injury in the first place. Sometimes, again, that injury was in the distant past, and you still have to repair. And that has a lot to do with the cell danger response, which I’m sure you got into in your mitochondria talk. But my biggest clinical pearl is that if you’re thinking about environmental causes of illness, if you’re thinking about environmentally acquired illness and complex chronic illness, always look at the mitochondria. And back in the day, we used to have to fix everything around the mitochondria to bring the mitochondria back to life. Mitochondria are like Tinkerbell, they’re so sensitive and so specific. They go into this dormant state called M zero. You have to clap them back to life very delicately and be this amazing clinician to do it.
So, you had to fix everything around it, all the environmental factors or whatever. We don’t have to do that anymore. We can pep them up. And you still have to do it eventually, but there is a way to bring them back online without fixing everything around them now. There are a couple ways, and my two favorites, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this more later. My two favorites are methylene blue and high-dose melatonin. Both incredible mitochondrial resuscitation agents. And I’m not saying you should use them in the absence of other interventions, but when you need to bring mitochondria back online without any of the other stuff being fixed, those are the ones I go to.
James Maskell: That’s cool. Actually, that ties in quite a few cool things that we’ve had on the forum. Last year we had Russ Wrighter on and he’s the melatonin legend, and he talked about exactly what you just said there, and that was really cool to hear that from you and that you’re using it. And methylene blue certainly don’t see it much at functional medicine conferences yet, but at the biohacking conference you can tell he was taking it, put it that way.
Dr. Zandra Palma: From the toilet stands in the bathroom.
James Maskell: Also, the blue tongue. But yeah, one way there.
Dr. Zandra Palma: Yeah, the blue tongue.
James Maskell: Well, cool. Well, look, I’m really excited to dive in here because we’ve been friends for a few years, and then, I know that there was a lot of excitement, and would be for any clinician to actually have their moment to bring what they’re passionate about to a serious stage, to a TEDx Talk. Do you want to just talk about the process of how you got your talk and where it was and what led up to it?
Dr. Zandra Palma: So, I was really excited. I was really excited because TED had sort of been this adolescent dream of mine. And I really think that if we change the messaging around environmentalism to include more environmental medicine, I think the whole thing will change. I think it’ll just motivate people on a deeper level. Because when you practice medicine long enough, you see how people’s motivations stratify. And you can tell them the environment’s having a hard time, and they could care for a second, and then something else trumps that need. Or you can tell them, “Oh, the fish are dying.” And they care for a second until their own kid is sick and then they don’t care that much about the fish. So, the things that motivate people are you’re getting fat, you’re not able to lose the weight, you’re not going to be able to have a baby, your kids are not going to grow up healthy, you’re not going to be able to find a mate.
It’s really core things. And if we bring the environmentalism discussion back to that, back to the health of the human body and the success of your offspring and reproductive success, I think that will motivate people to actually engage in environmentalist behaviors and environmentalist solutions and bring the most brilliant minds into it. So, I was really excited to reframe the discussion and bring it there. It’s not that I need everybody to understand environmental medicine, I just need everybody to understand the stakes of environmentalism—that it’s not just about saving the whales. It’s about you feeling okay in your body.
James Maskell: And I think also, the education that you’re providing helps to create a more nuanced and balanced view of environmentalism. If you haven’t been in this world, you could just be stuck on, we’ve got to reduce our carbon footprint. You’ve got to be focused on CO2. Whereas if you’ve been in this world, you might think, well, what about glyphosate and what about ecocide and what about plastics in the environment and that kind of thing. And it alerts you to a more nuanced view of what’s actually important because you’re always going to have the people who will say, “Well, the trees eat carbon dioxide.” And so, you’re not always going to be able to make the progress you can with that. Whereas obviously ecocide and toxicity affecting the core things that you just mentioned is a much easier conversation to have for most people because it’s objectively happening.
Dr. Zandra Palma: And you can only keep a couple of things in your head at once. And when one of them is nagging you from a health perspective every day—you’re feeling that your thyroid isn’t working every day—and you link that to the environmentalism discussion, it’s going to be top of your mind. Whereas the CO2 thing, it’s easier to forget for people. And I was really excited—
James Maskell: How’d you get environmental medicine? How did you pitch this topic and what did you think that you were going to talk about and where did you do your TED Talk?
Dr. Zandra Palma: So, at first, I was going to lead in with an immune system like pandemic hook, and then they told me that that was cheesy and overdone. I was like, “Okay, you’re right.” So, I didn’t talk about COVID at all. But my original hook was going to be: How would that pandemic have gone down if everybody didn’t have these factors that are affecting their immune system? That are really significantly now we can see how much affecting our immune systems. So, I wanted to do that. I got connected to the people who were doing the TEDx event in Ibiza, in which I’ve lived for a couple of years. So, it’s a Spanish island, I lived there, and it was just going to be a nice little community event, and I was really excited to do it.
James Maskell: So, then what happened?
Dr. Zandra Palma: Did the TED Talk, everything went okay. Really well, actually. It was a nice turnout. People were laughing at most of my jokes. I bombed one or two at the beginning, but people laughed at most of my jokes. My comedy friends have told me that you have to bomb, so had to bomb. And then, we were waiting for the TED Talks to be fact-checked and edited. And because I knew they had to be fact-checked and mine was fact heavy, I sent them all the references and the script to the talk with hyperlinks so they could see every single reference. They could click into it. So, it was really easy for them to fact check. And it was still taking a long time. It was taking a long time for everybody.
And slowly, other talks from the conference started trickling out, but mine was still not coming, still not coming, still not coming. And then, eventually, I received the news that my talk had been censored. It had been posted on a hidden link. At least it was posted because then I was able to rip it. But it had been posted on a hidden link and the disclaimer on the bottom of the link was… All of my lawyer friends called it defamation. It was really aimed at discrediting me, and they left MD off after my name, and that was the one that made my blood boil. I think maybe I would’ve just abandoned the whole thing and moved to greener pastures completely if they hadn’t left MD off after my name.
But when I noticed that they didn’t put MD after my name, and I asked the woman who threw the whole event, “Can you just at least talk to them about putting MD behind my name? I’m a medical doctor. This is just… Come on.” And she refused. And that just made my blood boil. So, then I just went to Hulk mode and then I sent you a text and then you gave me the pep talk I needed to fully activate Hulk mode. And then the whole time I knew that this was a blessing in disguise, but I just felt like wallowing that day. So, I had a good eight hours of rage where I did not fully appreciate the blessing in disguise. I just felt sorry for myself and angry at whomever left MD off after my name.
James Maskell: Well, it’s interesting, and I think one of the things I shared with you there is that I remember in, I think 2013 or 2014, Terry Walls gave her talk and it had a very similar thing on it. And I remember interviewing Terry, I think 2014, ’15, and at that point, her sharing that, ultimately, she had been banned from the MS society and she wasn’t ready to talk and they didn’t want her talking about it because it was giving false hope. And then you moved forward, what? Eight years from that, nine years from that. And now she speaks at those societies, and they’re testing her protocol for MS at the VA and trying to work out how to scale it.
And that’s because she’s unstoppable and that she used that moment as a… I don’t know to what degree she was as affected by the TED Talk thing, but certainly I’ve said to her, she’s like the Mick Jagger of MS now—Terry Walls. And she’s achieved something incredible and has now gone to work to take it to the masses. And I just think it’s a great inspiration. Because it’s not new news, what you’re talking about. I guess maybe as a starting point you could share: What do you think are the things that are the most controversial in your talk that would’ve shunted it in this direction?
Dr. Zandra Palma: So, full disclosure, I knew my talk was more controversial than I was letting on, but I didn’t think they would pick up on it. Because one of the main points of my talks, my talk basically elaborates five pieces of advice about how to protect your immune system from substances that can poison it. And I put it together in a very afterschool special kind of way, which is like, “Hey, take the lid off your coffee cup, take your shoes off when you get home.” I didn’t think anybody would pick up on the subtle political controversy that I was hinting at. Really hinting at. It was very implicit, but I implicitly drew attention to some sketchiness in US regulatory activity around chemicals that make people sick, particularly plastics, particularly BPA. And the way that I did that was just by mentioning what Europe has done, and the implied antithetical is that the US hasn’t followed suit and hasn’t done that.
So, I mentioned that EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, recently changed the recommendation around plastics. So, the last time they put out a statement about this was 2015, and they lowered the tolerable daily intake. The amount of BPA that is safe to go into a human mouth in a day, they lowered it by, at the time that I gave the talk, it was a hundred thousand times. About a month later, they changed it to only 20,000 times lower than the original recommendation. But that’s still, to follow either of those recommendations, Europe would have to take BPA and plastics out of food production and storage completely. So, it’s a huge change. It would be a huge disruption to food production and processing, as well as to five giant chemical companies and some others that produce BPA-based plastics, as well as probably the petroleum industry as this is a petroleum-based chemical.
So, it’s a lot to swallow for a lot of people who have financial interests. And that’s why this information has been so slow to come out. They weren’t new studies that they were looking at. In fact, EFSA based this new recommendation on only six years of research. Research between 2013 and 2018, and some of my colleagues argued that if they had looked further back into the research, if they had looked at research that they’ve considered before, they would’ve lowered it even further. But they looked at only six years of research and they looked at a lot of studies conducted actually in the US under this consortium, under this agreement called CLARITY-BPA. And CLARITY-BPA actually, it was supposed to create a paradigm shift in how we look at toxic chemicals. And it was a really good idea.
It’s just that the US federal regulatory agencies that were involved in CLARITY—because part of it wrapped up during the Trump administration and some other things—they didn’t make good on their agreement to all look at the data together. So, CLARITY brought together some federal regulatory agencies and some independent researchers because there have been ongoing disputes for years about the industry standard, so the federal regulatory standard of how poisons are investigated in the laboratory. They decided, “Okay, we’ll get everybody together. They can do research, sometimes on the same animals, sometimes on the same samples, and then they can all talk about it at the end.” So, the people they got together were the FDA, the National Toxicology Institute, and the National Institute for Health Sciences, and they put them with a lot of independent academic researchers who had a history of doing really well at BPA studies. Over 10 years, all of these studies were conducted.
And during that 10 years, the independent researchers who were the highest level of academic science, were seeing what the FDA was producing and saying, “This isn’t right, that methodology is not right. They’re kind of cooking the books. They’re using animals that they bred specifically to not be prone to these problems.” There were all these issues. And the main issue and the main reason CLARITY was created in the first place was that the way that those agencies study poisons is really old school. It was developed around the 1950s, and it’s basically assuming that the dose response curve is straight. So, they take the highest tolerable dose that a human can tolerate, they look at a couple doses around there and they assume everything down from that is okay, basically. They examine the high range. What they don’t examine is the very low range. Because they say, if there’s nothing in the middle, then there’s no effect down here.
And listen, there’s two arms of the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. There’s the food arm and the drug arm. Guess which one of them is better at science? The drug arm. They deal with this concept, non-monotonicity and non-monotonic response, all the time. They have to investigate tamoxifen. They have to investigate drugs that interact with hormones, and in drugs that interact with hormones, there are often things like a U-shaped curve of dose response where there’s a big response down at the very low end of exposure and there’s a big response at the high end and nothing in the middle. So, the drug arm fully accepts that that is a possibility. The food arm hasn’t gotten there yet. And because of all of these debates, they put the food arm of the FDA up with two other agencies then with all these independent researchers, and they said, “Okay, everybody, go do your research. Let’s talk about it.” 10 years later, everybody’s supposed to get together, share their research, comment on each other’s stuff, and that part, that rehash, didn’t happen.
James Maskell: That’s super interesting. You can imagine. I’m just sitting here thinking, if you think of, let’s say the glyphosate trial where there’s a nine-figure settlement to a guy who’s been drowning in glyphosate his whole career. It’s one thing to say you’ve got to change the way that you make your plastic-based Tupperware. It’s another thing to say, this is actually having a significant impact on human health. Because the cost of that and the historic cost of lawsuits, class action lawsuits, whatever, you could see why if I’m working for a petroleum company or a plastics company, the number one thing that I don’t want to happen is for people to realize that there’s environmental illness because the amount of money that you’re talking about, these are the most ubiquitous products in society. If one person can prove that their illness comes from this, then it sets up almost the biggest possible existential threat to that company. So, I could see why—
Dr. Zandra Palma: And what I love that EFSA did, the European Food Safety Authority is… So, you’ve heard about BPA from an endocrine-disrupting standpoint before. So, we know the term endocrine-disrupting chemicals coined by my friend Pete Myers, and that’s mainly been the discussion around BPA. Listen, BPA has a lot of negative effects. And at the time when the US FDA gave it the thumbs up again in 2018, they were disregarding 10,000 different studies showing effects to the metabolic system, showing that it was an obesogen, showing effects to the neurological system, behavioral effects, showing the effects that we know across the reproductive and urinary systems in males and females. But, what I love is that EFSA said, “Okay, this discussion about BPA messing up hormones, being an endocrine disruptor, has been raging for a while. Let’s change the direction. Let’s not even talk about hormones. Let’s talk about the immune system.”
So, they changed their recommendation by so many thousands of times, based on immune toxicity, not based on any other metric. And if they had taken into account other metrics, again, they might’ve changed it even more. But they made that 20,000 fold reduction in the amount of BPA that they say is safe for a human to ingest, based on only one really easy to study endpoint. So, this one doesn’t follow non-monotonicity. This is really easy to study, which is that BPA increases TH17 cells. So, these cells are associated with autoimmunity. And the reason is, this is a T cell, so it’s a part of the immune system. It’s a bad guy, T cell, and they release a cytokine. Everybody knows what cytokines are, hopefully, after a couple of years of talking about COVID.
They released an inflammatory cytokine called interleukin-17. And from there, a lot of other inflammatory cytokines get stimulated, TNF- α, interleukin-1, interleukin-6. But because they do that, they have pleotropic effects, meaning effects across tissue types. So, that’s how it ends up hitting the metabolic system, the immune system, the neurological system, the reproductive system. And so I love… And actually, Germany was a big critique of EFSA’s decision. So, it’s the only European country that is really coming hard at EFSA for this decision. And the BFR, which is like Germany’s FDA, is saying it really doesn’t like that EFSA used what they call a median endpoint. So, it’s not the end end point, it’s a middle endpoint that’s like a star in the map to all these other endpoints. They don’t like that. And EFSA basically said—
James Maskell: They have the whole petroleum industry or the plastics industry in Germany too.
Dr. Zandra Palma: EFSAs response was, “That’s completely valid. This is a completely okay way to do this research and make this recommendation.”
James Maskell: Well, it’s interesting now that you say all of that, I can understand why you wanted to talk about it in the context of the immune system because, ultimately, there’s this mosaic appearing of why America did so badly in the pandemic. And a part is the sedentary lifestyle and a part of it is the food. But then a big part of it is how the immune system has been affected by just total lack of regulation when it comes to environmental toxins. And that affects some people that ended up so bad that they, for those reasons, show up in your office. And it affects everyone else a little bit less than that, but we’re not really sure how much less.
Dr. Zandra Palma: And again, it comes down to that mitochondria connection. So, environmental toxins and toxicants exert their effect via the mitochondria. And when we see mitochondrial damage, the first three systems that are affected are the immune system, the neurological system, and the endocrine system. Everything else follows because every tissue has mitochondria. But tissues that use a lot more energy tend to go down first. And so, in environmental toxins to mitochondria to immune dysregulation is a huge correlation. It’s one of those well-trodden pathways.
James Maskell: Tell us about how our community of practitioners can support your Hulk mode to get the word out about this because I know that these patients are coming into many other practitioners who listen to this and deal with these kind of issues. So, how can you help? We’ll definitely put obviously the talk in the show notes, but what’s the plan right now to use this to have a little bit more of a conversation on a wider level?
Dr. Zandra Palma: I think, right now… So, the scientists making this research are in touch with the FDA and the EPA and other federal regulatory agencies, and they’ve been trying to get their ear and lobbying them for years with no effect for 20 years now. And I think, right now, the only way that things are going to change is through a more grass roots sort of movement. So, it’s really getting the word out to people. And when people end up in my office… So, there are things that you can do on the individual level to help them sort of “detox” or rid their body of different chemicals. But when it’s BPA, it’s a really tricky one. And the reason is that it’s hard to scoop water out of the boat while there’s still a lot of holes in the boat and waters still coming into the boat. So, you can up-regulate somebody’s glucuronidation pathways and support elimination through the gut so things don’t get reconjugated and reabsorbed. And you can open somebody’s drainage pathways so they’re eliminating as much as possible.
But you can still do all that, and if they’re still getting a lot of BPA into the system, which is what we know about BPA, it’s a constant in. It’s a constant out, yes. But because it’s a constant in, there’s a constant level and it’s constantly disrupting the immune system, disrupting the hormones, disrupting the metabolic system, disrupting the neurological system. So, this one has to happen at a grassroots level, but then it’s not just people protecting themselves and protecting themselves from plastics. Eventually, this does have to go to a community level because the organizations that are there to protect us, some of them even have protection in their names, need to be making these decisions because not everybody is going to be able to screen whether this can lining has bisphenols in it. But yes, if people can direct people to see the original TED Talk that I gave, it has really simple strategies on how to protect yourself, and then some strategies about how to make decisions that will end up affecting your communities.
James Maskell: Beautiful. Well, I appreciate it. I don’t let anyone in my family use the lid of the coffee cup since, I think Tom O’Brien was the first guy who just grabbed me at an IFM conference, took it off my coffee and threw it in the trash. And we had a chat about that—
Dr. Zandra Palma: Because when it’s hot, the BPA comes out way more. So, a coffee lid, it’s hot, the coffee’s acidic, it’s liquid. Everything about it is like you’re getting the most… If you had a recipe to get the BPA out of that coffee lid, that would be it.
James Maskell: Well look, hey, I want to say I appreciate you starting this journey of leading this conversation. I think you have so many allies in our community who have been talking about this and working with their own patients. Some people choose to really just focus on getting people better and working with people in their community, and some people feel called to go and really get the word out at a larger level. I think it’s all valuable. It’s all valid. It’s all important, as you said. So, I’m here in solidarity and support.
Dr. Zandra Palma: Thank you.
James Maskell: I’m really excited to see what comes from it and wish you the best of luck. And thanks so much for being part of the podcast.
Dr. Zandra Palma: Thank you. Thank you so much, James.
James Maskell: I will just take this moment to just give a shout out actually, because coming up in October, we have this conference that we’re doing in partnership with the A4M in Park City, and there’s going to be Hayman and Shoemaker and a bunch of people, all on the mitochondria and looking at chronic inflammatory syndrome. So, if you are called to this nerdiest of nerdy topics, then come and join us in Park City, and we’ll have all the details there.
Dr. Zandra Palma: I’ll come to Park City, let me know. This is my thing.
James Maskell: All right, well thanks so much for tuning in. This has been the Evolution Medicine Podcast, been here with Zandra Palma. Check out her TED Talk. We’ll put it in the show notes. And thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools, like the Group Visit Toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
Subscribe
Download
Click here to download this podcast
music provided by intomusic.co
