Are Toxins Disrupting Your Metabolism? (Michele Scarlet) | Ep 445
Are environmental toxins quietly slowing your body recomp? Or is the wellness industry selling you fear about things that barely matter?
Functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner Michele Scarlet joins me to separate science from hype around metabolism, hormone health, and detox culture. We unpack what the research actually says about pesticides, plastics, cosmetics, and endocrine disruptors, and whether they truly impact weight loss, muscle building, and strength training results.
We challenge extreme clean-eating rules, the fear around fruit and sugar, and the obsession with trendy detox protocols. Instead, we focus on practical, evidence-based nutrition and fitness strategies that support metabolism, liver function, and long-term body recomp.
If you’re lifting weights, dialing in your macros, and still struggling to lose fat or build muscle, this adds the missing layer.
Get Fitness Lab (20% off for listeners), the #1 coaching app that adapts to YOUR recovery, YOUR schedule, and YOUR body. Build muscle, lose fat, and get stronger with daily personalized guidance.
Timestamps:
0:01 – Fear-based marketing in wellness
5:43 – Accumulation versus dosage
8:48– Ingestion versus exposure
11:15 – Cosmetics and chronic absorption
13:48 – Endocrine disruption and fat storage
21:35 – Breast implants and immune activation
28:58 – Why fruit is not the enemy
32:39 – When functional lab testing makes sense
35:15 – Detox support through nutrition
40:02 – How liver detox and bile really work
47:48 – When functional lab testing makes sense
Episode resources:
The 3 Lab Tests That Changed My Life on True Health Podcast
Instagram: @michelescarlet_
Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/213894783148245
YouTube: @michelescarlet_
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Philip Pape: 0:01
You've probably seen the headlines, toxins in your water, chemicals in your food, plastics destroying your hormones. And then someone tells you, just buy organic, do a detox, you'll be fine. But what if both sides of this are wrong? What if the mainstream is ignoring real evidence that certain chemicals mess with your metabolism? While the wellness industry is selling you fear about things that barely matter. Today I'm talking to a functional health practitioner who went through her own metabolic crisis. And we are going to sort the science from the noise. Which environmental exposures actually affect your metabolism? Which ones are overhyped? And what are the few practical changes worth making? 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. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and I'm joined by Michelle Scarlett to discuss environmental factors and metabolism. 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. 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. So today we're discussing toxins, the evidence versus the hype. 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. The problem, I think, is that the science gets filtered through two equally unhelpful lenses. You've got doctors that often ignore it, and then you have the social media wellness industry that catastrophizes everything. 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. Welcome to the show, Michelle.
Michele Scarlet: 2:35
Thank you so much, Philip. 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.
Philip Pape: 2:48
Yeah. And a lot of it comes down to how can I scare you the most as a consumer to buy my product? Right. And so let's start there. Like, should the listener or the viewer be worried to some extent about what's in their food and water? I mean, let's start there.
Michele Scarlet: 3:03
Yeah, I mean, okay. 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. So I work with women mostly uh in its entirety. So I'll speak to women. They prey on women who feel desperate, right, to lose weight. They prey on this is no different than regular fitness for the last three decades, you know, that I've been alive. 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. 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. 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. Like in my head, your nervous system is like another toxin that you need to kind of evaluate. Do you know what I mean?
Philip Pape: 4:09
Yeah, yeah. The internally derived toxins from how we live. Yes.
Michele Scarlet: 4:12
Right, right. So, anyway, food and water. Should people be worried about what they're eating and drinking? A little bit. Should they be worried? Should they be aware? Maybe two different things. 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? Yes, I think that we should be aware of those things. 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. So, meaning they don't make a lot of money, right? And they need to keep things as cheap as possible. Are they going to use the cheapest ingredients? Probably, right? So if you think about it like that, you can understand why they would do that. What are those cheap ingredients doing to your body? What are those pesticides doing to your body? It doesn't necessarily automatically mean obesity, but does it mean metabolic friction? 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? Absolutely it can.
Philip Pape: 5:44
All right, good. We have a few directions to go in here, right? 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? Like there's no question that those are toxins, right? You mentioned restaurant food, you know, probably ultra-processed food. I also wonder about the dosage and how much these things matter. And again, this is this this can all connect together. 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. How much does do these things move the needle? And is it how much of it is a function of the doses and the exposure?
Michele Scarlet: 6:34
Sure. So I would say less about the dosage necessarily, because I mean, for instance, formaldehyde, okay, as a chemical, is a carcinogen, known carcinogen. It is likely in every single piece of furniture you have in your house. Okay. So are you sort of being dosed with it all day, every day? Yeah, we are, right? But we are not ingesting it, hopefully. So there is a bit of dosage. Now, I think where the trouble starts to happen is not actually dosage, it's accumulation. 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. And then they grow up, and now we have a more toxic world than we've ever had. 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. So, how can we say that if our world is not more toxic, how can it not cause this metabolic friction? You know what I mean? How can it not affect us metabolic? And again, I know we're not trying to fear monger here, and I'm not trying to fear monger. This is about awareness.
Philip Pape: 8:05
I totally appreciate that, right? And I love the nuance. 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. And the way I think of it is physiologically is there's a load. There's an input coming in that you have to deal with in some way. Your liver deals with it, you know, your cognitive function deals with it, like a lot of things. So it's it's a load. 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? And and and and or is it can we simplify what to do and really what the big hitters are to look out for? But we're trying to get to why first. That that's where I'm going at. So do we care most about a specific type of toxin? We want to dig into like obesogens, right? Endocrine disruptors, like there is there a class of toxins that are really the most important to be aware of?
Michele Scarlet: 9:00
So I feel less about the type of chemical, and I feel more about how we're exposed to it.
Philip Pape: 9:06
Okay.
Michele Scarlet: 9:06
So I feel more about are you ingesting? Like number one thing, are you ingesting this chemical? So is it pesticides, forever chemicals, BPAs? Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of some more things that we might be ingesting. Our our water quality, maybe it's dead water. You know what I mean? Maybe we've filtered it out so much there's just no nutrients left in it. Are we remineralizing to help ourselves? Our pollution, right? We're inhaling that. I would call that ingesting, right? 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. And so that is like a constant exposure, a big accumulation. Whereas I think of things like receipts. There's like a whole thing about receipts. And yeah, sure, you don't really want to be exposed to the chemicals on receipt paper.
Philip Pape: 10:07
You're talking about the ink?
Michele Scarlet: 10:08
Yeah. Or like just the paper in general. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't want to be exposed to it, of course. But like for me to like pull it from the, you know, the little ticket thing for two seconds. Yes. Like that's such a minimal exposure, right? 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. You know, people can get a little bit overzealous about that kind of thing. When really, if we just looked at the big hitters, like you said, your body can be resilient to toxins, obviously.
Philip Pape: 10:41
Okay, so the ingesting absorbing piece is a good frame for that, right? 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. But when they tested all the oatmeals in the world, even organic oatmeals had Roundup, right? Glyphosate. 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? Because, you know, the amount of oatmeal we were consuming was like gallons of it. And then things like, you know, I did a couple episodes in the past on cookware. Because again, I agree, like my wife will not use nonstick cookware. 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. So, like, you have to make those decisions. Cosmetics, though, let's talk about that because a lot of our audience is women, you talk to women all the time. I feel like this is one of those industry incentive or industry things like restaurants, right? 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. I'm guessing. 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. So that seems like a big one. Like that seems like one that's everywhere.
Michele Scarlet: 12:03
Yes. Um, okay. So I have makeup on my face right now. 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. And I've never been somebody who's been like, you know, a ton of makeup like all over my skin. So for me personally, I don't feel like it is my big hitter. Okay. For me personally. Do I try to source out the cleanest version that I can? Sure. But not only for me at this point. I've got two infants and a toddler. They are, you know, constantly licking my face in some way or another. And I don't want the exposure on them, not at such an early age. And that's not to say that I shouldn't be worried about me, but this is kind of part of it. Like pick your poison a little bit, right? I do try to source out the cleanest as I possibly can. It is kind of impossible for some products. And I just go, okay, I'm gonna do the best I can. And that's how I feel about makeup. I'm gonna do the best that I can. Do I go to Sephora? No, I will stay away from Sephora all day long. Everything in there is fragrance, everything in there is talc. Everything in there is just like crap makeup. They sell it for it is overpriced. Do not go there to buy it. 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. They don't have everything, but they have some stuff.
Philip Pape: 13:34
Cool. 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. Let's be honest, there's a reason these chemicals are in there and you have to make trade-offs. And like we said, it's the amount of the exposure and making those choices.
Michele Scarlet: 13:49
I would feel more strongly about people who do their nails weekly or every two weeks. Because that is like a constant on your body at all times, poison. Like ultimately, women are washing their face off before they go to bed. 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. Right. 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.
Philip Pape: 14:21
And what is actually happening? 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? Are we again, are we talking about endocrine disruption specifically or other mechanisms going on here?
Michele Scarlet: 14:38
Well, there's a few different things that can happen inside the body. 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. But mold can be a disruptor too. It's almost like they can imitate like what your estrogen is supposed to be doing inside of your body. 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. It can become thick, it can become sluggish. And now your whole body's detoxification system backs up. And so things can start to uh recirculate in the body, right? So it's not that endocrine disruptors equal obesity, right? That's not exactly what it what it does, is it kind of happens downstream. 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.
Philip Pape: 16:11
Okay. 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? Which is why I mentioned obesogens before, because they're a little bit complicated to understand, right? 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. Um, you mentioned BPA, I think, and the stuff in um what did we just talk about? Cosmetics that that do all this. And then there's a lot of complicated mechanisms. But what about fat cells and body composition and metabolism and all that? Like, does it really just is it a function of altering like your thyroid function and insulin signaling? And is that really what's happening? Or is there some other mechanism? Yep.
Michele Scarlet: 16:59
No, that's exactly what's happening. 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. Well, that in nature is going to have a widespread effect across your body. We are constantly in feedback loops to keep our body into homeostasis, right? And so when your hormones, sex hormones are off, it's going to start signaling to thyroid. It's going to start signaling to adrenals, it's going to cascade throughout your body. 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. I need to conserve this energy because something chaotic is happening. 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.
Philip Pape: 17:45
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. It's being pushed, it's being stressed. And the resiliency is kind of like one of the things that combats it, right? Is what we can get to eventually talking about lifestyle, but also awareness and avoidance. 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? 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? For men. Um, for women too. And for women. So yeah, and breast cancer and all that. So what what would be the next big category, do you think?
Michele Scarlet: 18:29
Yeah, I would say things that you are like kind of just, yeah, near every day, not necessarily actually ingesting, would be my next. And things that you obviously can't control. 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. You know what I mean? I'm not necessarily going to be able to control that. So I just say things like I do the best that I can. When it comes to cell phone radiation EMFs, you know, I haven't done the research. I don't know if I want to do the research. Um I have a uh a girlfriend who believes wholeheartedly in those like EMF stickers.
Philip Pape: 19:09
Yeah. Yeah.
Michele Scarlet: 19:10
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. I'm very skeptical of it. How can a sticker, like, what is the sticker? It says it gives 19 feet of, you know, whatever.
Philip Pape: 19:23
Protection, yeah.
Michele Scarlet: 19:24
Right. 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. Is it doing something that it shouldn't be doing? 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. And my brain immediately was like, Don't put that next to her head. But I don't know why. Don't know if it is overhype. I don't know if it is, you know, if it's real. It's kind of scary to think that this device that is literally attached to our bodies at all times.
Philip Pape: 20:01
I know, no, I hear you. Uh me too. 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.
Michele Scarlet: 20:07
Do you, do you know? Do you have like I can't do that?
Philip Pape: 20:10
I really don't. I have the same skepticism as you, and like you you can't follow what influencers say. They they're all just it's like third hand information. And they're getting paid. Electromechanics. So I'm an engineer by background, and like one of the hardest courses I ever took was in electromechanics. It's very, very complicated. And you know, you think of like Faraday cages, for example, those little pouches that you can put your phone in to protect it. You'd literally have to like put your whole body in a pocket of some kind to protect it. But hey, I would never buy a house like next to a giant distribution station or a transformer or something like that. 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. Right. So I'm I'm just I'm I'm like with you. It's just do what you can. You know, if you can help where you live or what you live by, great. 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.
Michele Scarlet: 21:08
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? Like we don't have control over everything. So control what you can control. I am a very big fan of once you are metabolically healthy, you should be supporting your detox organs. 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? Supporting your detox organs.
Philip Pape: 21:47
Yeah, I want and I want to get there, but before we do, there's a couple other areas I want to explore. And then also I do want to rule anything out that's like nonsense because I that's always a fun thing to do. Yeah. Um, but When I think of women and women's bodies, I think breast implants, I think IUDs, I mean, what else? There's so many things that are like in and on your body all the time. And I know you have personal exposure story related one of these, but tell us about those.
Michele Scarlet: 22:12
Yeah. So I wholeheartedly agree. 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. And the reason I had them out was because I was struggling massively with breast implant illness. And so that has become more mainstream, has been uh, there's a lot more information about breast implant illness. 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. 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. And now my immune system is activated.
Philip Pape: 23:04
It's activated, yeah, yeah. Like an autoimmune response, yeah. And it is now but it's not auto, it's it's to the foreign thing. Yeah.
Michele Scarlet: 23:11
Yeah. And if you think about it, like it is in your body 24-7. It's warm, right? And that makes a difference. That's like heating up plastic, right, with your food on it or or uh like Teflon or whatever. 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. And it was no wonder that my health had totally tanked. My hormones were post-menopausal levels at 34 years old. Right. My gut inflammation was off the charts, and I say off the charts based on lab results that I had run on myself. 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. I had them out in March and I was pregnant by July. So obviously, my body, you know, coming back into homeostasis when I removed that toxin or I removed that stressor.
Philip Pape: 24:25
Yeah. And I wonder how many people have the equivalent of that from something else. Yes, Botox. Which, which, well, well, I always even go in there, but you're right. We can talk about that. And there's a new show called The Beauty that's crazy about that goes in the extreme about this. But uh, we could talk about Botox. 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. But yeah, go ahead, Botox.
Michele Scarlet: 24:49
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. And somebody suggested I like niche down into breast implant illness. And I didn't really like it because it's not that relatable for a lot of people. 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.
Philip Pape: 25:29
It's a great analogy for it. It really is. It like visualizes it because you're like, this is a foreign thing that your body can't handle. 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. 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. 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? Going back to signals like we talked about on your show.
Michele Scarlet: 25:58
100%. And when it comes to gluten, so my position on gluten, so I am gluten-free. I am not celiac, but I am gluten-free because I eliminated it, saw the difference, put it back in, and immediately reacted.
Philip Pape: 26:14
Exactly. Yep.
Michele Scarlet: 26:15
And I was like, nope, I'm good. Don't need to do that again. And so for me, that's my take on it. And when I work with women, we start by taking it out. Let's see what happens to your body when you take that out. And I don't just mean digestively, I mean like cognitive function. I mean like inflammation, swelling. How do your clothes fit? How do your rings fit all of a sudden? You know, are you able to carry a conversation without tripping up on your words all the time? Because you can't silo inflammation, right? It's not going to be just to your gut. It's going to be everywhere.
Philip Pape: 26:45
It's going to be everywhere. 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. I think we talked about that. 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. Something like gluten, right? Um, I I've actually had clients who had histamine reactions. They weren't specifically gluten reactions, they were histamine reactions. Like, how do people tease that stuff apart? Because that's where it gets really confusing. Where like, okay, I started eating more food and all of a sudden my face got puffy. You're like, okay, now we need to go an interest down an interesting rabbit hole. That's your body responding in some immune reaction, isn't it?
Michele Scarlet: 27:27
Yeah. So 100%. That's exactly what it is. And so how I look at that is we have to take the issue out first. You can't heal in the same place you got sick, is kind of my thought process there.
Philip Pape: 27:39
Sure.
Michele Scarlet: 27:40
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. By the time you do that, you're eating ice all day, every day.
Philip Pape: 27:51
Broccoli, I've heard apparently.
Michele Scarlet: 27:53
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. Okay. You heal the gut that you have like your tight junctions. 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. So your broccoli is not going to have an issue, right? 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. And now everything is getting in. So you are reactive to all kinds of foods that you shouldn't be reactive to. Okay. Our bodies physiologically should be able to handle a whole array of foods. 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.
Philip Pape: 28:58
Yeah, that's a great way to put it. That's a great, and that's where the nuance is, and that's where the individualization is, is somewhere in that space. 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? Okay. 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. Yes. 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?
Michele Scarlet: 29:44
I think fruit.
Philip Pape: 29:46
Oh, yes. I think fruit fruit and fructose, yes.
Michele Scarlet: 29:49
I think that people uh confuse fruit. Like, okay, so every morning I have a yogurt. I I have dairy. Hey guys, I healed my gut and now I have dairy and it's totally good. One of the big heavy hitters, right? So I have protein yogurt with all kinds of fruit. 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. And I get my fiber through my fruit. 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. That's way too much sugar. 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. 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. So I think fruit is probably um something that I think is demonized that absolutely should not be.
Philip Pape: 31:01
That's a good one. That's a good one. And the the pithy response you you sometimes hear, which I kind of agree with, is like nobody ever gets fat eating fruit. You know, that whole concept of let's put things in perspective, right? Some anybody who's worried about fruit, there's probably something else they're doing or eating that's really the problem.
Michele Scarlet: 31:18
Oh my goodness. The amount of people that I have said, like, okay, we need to increase your protein. 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. That literally the pushback, like that's way too much protein.
Philip Pape: 31:31
Oh, I'm gonna gain a bunch of weight because I'm gonna eat more, right? Yeah, yeah. That's their pushback.
Michele Scarlet: 31:35
That can't be good for me. But the bag of chips that you're eating at the end of the day, that's like that's not the deal breaker. You know, we do have to put it into perspective. And not yes, at the very fundamentals, calorie is a calorie, but like, what are you actually absorbing? Like, you know, what is the meat that you're eating? What is the what are the minerals and vitamins, vitamins you're taking in from your fruits, fruits, and vegetables?
Philip Pape: 31:58
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? In in fruit and plants that isn't on the label. Like it's not on the label. It's chemicals, good chemicals that are in. 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. And many of them are are great for you. 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. 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. Like, what's the biggest one there that people should avoid?
Michele Scarlet: 32:56
Lab test. Is that what you're saying?
Philip Pape: 32:57
Yeah, lab test, the Dutch test, GI map, like a hair mineral analysis. There's so many. Like, is there one that's jumps out as waste of time, waste of money?
Michele Scarlet: 33:06
Okay. So I'm gonna actually say no, but there's always nuance. I use lab testing as a contextual tool, not as a diagnosis. Okay.
Philip Pape: 33:17
Okay.
Michele Scarlet: 33:18
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. 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? No. Do I think you need to start with the foundations? Absolutely. 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. If things are not shifting, then you can look deeper. And that's my take on functional lab testing. And I wish I could give you something really juicy to be like, this doesn't work for everybody. 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. You know, no wonder you, you know, you're not sleeping, you're not, you know, whatever. As we put it into context or as we look at the patterns to their habits, to their symptoms. And now we have real data. I am such a data freak. The more information, the better. And it just helps guide how to give them the right outcomes.
Philip Pape: 34:42
That's great. 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. 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. And it's even hard to say in isolation what any one of those things mean, right? You know, your albumin over here and your CRP over here. 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. Okay, so that's the stay away from stuff or put things into context. Now let's talk about what people should do, right? So now I get to the meat of it. We've teased people long enough. For someone listening who understands they need to get the basics in, because we we're not going to make that the solution here. That should be a thing that everyone's doing. 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. Where do they start?
Michele Scarlet: 35:45
Yeah, I mean, like the biggest thing for me is you need to start with nutrition. I mean, food is medicine. So if somebody is already kind of doing the basic things, let's say they just have like a regular balanced diet, right? So they eat their protein, they eat their veggies, like generally a whole foods diet is what somebody is already doing. So protein is phenomenal for uh increasing bile flow. So maybe start looking at increasing like denser meats. So things like steak, things like lamb, things like bison, that kind of stuff, that can really increase bile flow and um stomach acid. So those are those are things that are just like really good for your body. Uh vegetables, cauliflower and broccoli, things that really help support the liver. 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. So if we talk about the basics of food, those are where you can start. 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. I am a big fan of sauna. But if you can't, if you don't have access to sauna, get outside and go for a walk in the summertime. Like sweat, you know? Um, it doesn't need to be excessive. It doesn't need to go by, you know, the latest biohack uh sauna blanket thing. Like it can be simple, but sweating is something that's really important. I have a client right now who actually told me the you know the other day that she does not sweat like at all. 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. She's like, not even a little bit. I was like, something's up, something is blocked up. We need to get your lymph moving. You know what I mean? 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. So sweating is big. I don't know how alternative your audience is.
Philip Pape: 37:55
Let's challenge everybody because I'm open to everything. Let's talk about it.
Michele Scarlet: 37:59
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.
Philip Pape: 38:13
Okay, coffee enemas are are definitely one I'm I'm skeptical of. Um castor oil, maybe less so.
Michele Scarlet: 38:19
Okay, let's talk about the coffee enema. 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. 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. I was skeptical at it at first as well. And then I realized that I was struggling a lot with mold illness after I had my breast implants out. 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. So I introduced coffee enemas and it was life-changing. It was life-changing. 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. Right? Um, it increases bile flow. So that detoxification just happens more efficiently, a little bit faster. It's not something that I recommend to anybody who may be caffeine sensitive. You know, if we are talking about Crohn's or any kind of like ulcerative colitis, I wouldn't necessarily go down that route. Definitely not somebody who is struggling with cancer. 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. It's not my not my scope, but I do know that detox can accelerate the cancering process. And so that's just not my not my recommendation. But overall, if you are looking for that, you know, deep detox, it has been life-changing for me and clients.
Philip Pape: 40:03
Okay, let's go deeper on this whole detox thing with related to bile, since you keep mentioning it, right? Because the listener wants to understand this. 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? And then that get allows it to go into your intestine to eliminate from your body. 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? And why do we need other things coming in intentionally to help it?
Michele Scarlet: 40:39
Yeah, great question. So short answer is no, it hasn't evolved to be able to handle how toxic our world has accelerated to.
Philip Pape: 40:49
So it's overloaded. Okay, that's the premise. It's overloaded.
Michele Scarlet: 40:52
Yeah, big time.
Philip Pape: 40:53
So you're you're trying to offset the overlow with more bile.
Michele Scarlet: 40:56
Yes.
Philip Pape: 40:57
And the body does that.
Michele Scarlet: 40:58
I mean, do we bile, right? Like your bile can become sluggish. And that's when you start to look at like uh gallstones and that kind of stuff when things get like clumpy, right? Um, and things are not like free flowing.
Philip Pape: 41:11
And do we, is this measurable like through labs or through some sort of stool test or something?
Michele Scarlet: 41:15
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There are markers on both the Dutch and the GI map that taught that show you like your phase one and phase two detoxification. 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.
Philip Pape: 41:34
Yeah.
Michele Scarlet: 41:34
And then if you correlate that to symptoms, so if somebody is constipated, right? Then you can, you know, it goes like bowel, colon, liver, you know, if you want to go up the body like that. If somebody is constipated, they definitely are struggling with bile issues.
Philip Pape: 41:50
Got it. You see, I like the nerdy questions. I want to understand the next level deep. And okay, so I don't need an excuse to eat more steak or lamb, but I'm glad you gave me one. And Christopher's vegetables are awesome. So, like, you know, steak and broccoli for dinner is great. But so some of the things you mentioned, those the lemons and bitters, certain supplements, sweating and sauna. And I definitely see more and more evidence these days of like benefits of sauna, and there's nothing wrong with it. So if you enjoy sauna, go for it. I don't have one, but one of my friends just joined a gym that has one. I'm jealous of him. 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. And there's lots and lots of marketing phrases that don't mean anything. And then there are some that do. I've had a couple, I had a rancher on who was talking a lot about that. It was pretty fascinating how stuff can easily get twisted on like even fresh packages like meat in the labeling that they use. So, what are your thoughts, like the the big hitters, organic or something else that people can change when they grocery shop?
Michele Scarlet: 42:58
Yeah. 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? Things like oranges, things like bananas, things where there's like quite a thick peel.
Philip Pape: 43:15
Rind, yeah. Yeah.
Michele Scarlet: 43:16
You don't necessarily need to go organic on those things because it's just not penetrating, right? So things like apples, I would go organic, things like grapes, cherries, anything that you're just like throwing in your mouth, right? If you can't go organic with your fruits and vegetables, it is costly. Like that it sucks, but it is. Then you're gonna want to soak it in baking soda and water when you get home. And so, you know, we don't always have available organic produce. 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. Then into the fridge ready to eat. So that's that's a big one.
Philip Pape: 44:03
What about okay? So that makes sense for produce. Like packaged foods maybe gets a little more confusing because there are a lot of plant-based products and packaged foods. I mentioned oatmeal, which is kind of packaged in a way. Is there anything else that stands out as people consume a lot of it and maybe they should look for what they're buying?
Michele Scarlet: 44:18
Uh so yeah, I mean, like we already kind of touched on the oatmeal piece. If you can find glyphosate-free oatmeal or oats, like go go for that, obviously. 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. Right? So yeah, grass-fed, grass-finished. Uh, same idea on eggs, right? Like free range. Um, what is the word?
Philip Pape: 44:52
Well, there's vegetarian, there's cage-free, there's free range.
Michele Scarlet: 44:55
Yeah, I feel like they say they like pasture, pasture raised. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Free range is not exactly free range. Pasture raised is like they truly are in the open.
Philip Pape: 45:06
They eat bugs and everything.
Michele Scarlet: 45:08
Yes, yeah. They have their like true diet, which would make them the most healthy ultimately.
Philip Pape: 45:13
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. Are they orange? Are they deep orange, they're dense, like so good. And then you get grocery store eggs and they're like pale, you're like, where's the yolk? You know, the difference.
Michele Scarlet: 45:30
You know what? I had um, so my husband and I uh moved into the house that we're currently in. I want to say it'll be two years in July. And we had our first garden this past summer, and I was so excited about it. And we had like so many zucchinis that like took us right into the fall. It was incredible. 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. I had a store bought zucchini the other day. It was gross, like bland, like flavorless, flavorless, like tasted like nothing. And my husband and I are big on eggs. We eat eggs all the time. Our house goes through like a carton of eggs every morning. 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. Like there's live, they're so so pale yellow. And I looked at the package and it was just like, you know, your generic egg, you know, the cheapest one, whatever. Like she didn't put any thought into it. And I was like, wow, there is a real difference in the way things taste when you go for quality. And for me, I have, you know, a deep value that food is medicine. And so maybe not everybody has that. 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. But yeah, no, having that quality food is gonna be the biggest impact on somebody's health.
Philip Pape: 46:58
Yeah, good. I'm glad you said that because you're right, you have to make trade-offs or decisions. And going to restaurants is very, very expensive. 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. Saves a lot of money. And then you get to have fun learning recipes and cooking and cooking in bulk, right? Like buy in bulk, buy family-sized things. 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.
Michele Scarlet: 47:31
We do that. 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.
Philip Pape: 47:39
Yeah, it's another way to save money. I mean, it just takes intention. So, okay, let's wrap it all up with this is a whole topic and you cover it on your show all the time. Where can somebody who's listened to all this start? And ultimately, you know, obviously you have a whole business built around helping women with some of these areas. You know, what's the order of operations? Like, we've talked to the listener and said, okay, the basics are important. You can listen to our shows on how to do that. We talk about it all the time. We've talked about what to be aware of and simple decisions you can make today, starting today and tomorrow. What's like the next thing for someone's, okay, I want to take this seriously. What should I do?
Michele Scarlet: 48:15
Uh, at that point, like if you want even more optimal health, I would be going down some functional labs. I would be, I'd be like, okay, let's dig a little bit deeper. And so I have the three foundational functional labs, like I mentioned, the hair, the stool, and the urine hormone tests. 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. 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. 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.
Philip Pape: 49:09
Big time, yes.
Michele Scarlet: 49:11
You know, if things, if you are true to yourself and it has not shifted in three months, then I would be digging deeper.
Philip Pape: 49:20
Yeah, it's a great approach.
Michele Scarlet: 49:21
Yeah, that would be the functional labs for sure.
Philip Pape: 49:23
And is there an episode on your podcast, which is the true health podcast, by the way? If I didn't already mention it, apologies. 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? Or we can add it later.
Michele Scarlet: 49:37
Yeah, no, I do. 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. And I go into de I go, yeah, I go into deeply.
Philip Pape: 49:46
That's what it's called. Yeah, as I'm looking at it right now.
Michele Scarlet: 49:48
And it really did because I was that person. 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. And then when I had my own health crisis, I didn't even know where to turn. And when I, you know, realized that this piece was the next piece, these were the three that I ran. And it changed literally everything. And now I run these actually every year on myself just to keep myself a baseline. But yes, there is an episode. It's called That These Three Labs Changed My Life. It's only 10 minutes long. 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. If you just like, you just want the bullet points. But if you're interested in those, go listen to that. It's a good one. And it just kind of gives you the, hmm, like, is this something that I maybe need?
Philip Pape: 50:37
It's a great approach. Again, I I love the nuance and the reason behind this. It makes a lot of sense. We talk about physique engineering here, and that's that's what it is. 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. Um, you know, we have something in engineering called the five Y, which is like a root cause. It's not just engineering, but where you say, why is something happening? It's because of this. Okay, why is that happening? It's because of this. 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. But then this stuff is gonna move the needle even further. So we're gonna point the listener to that episode and your podcast. Where else do you want folks to find you?
Michele Scarlet: 51:20
Yeah, I so podcast, that episode, and I hang out on Instagram probably all day long. You can find me at Michelle Scarlet underscore um over there on IG.
Philip Pape: 51:29
At Michelle Scarlet underscore on Instagram and the podcast, True Health Podcast. And by the way, she has an episode with me on there as well. So definitely check all of those out. Michelle, it's it's been so awesome recording these with you and keep doing what you're doing. It's been great to have you on the show.
Michele Scarlet: 51:44
Thank you, you too. Thank you so much, Philip.
