Rob Verkerk PhD, ANH founder and executive & scientific director of ANH International and executive director of ANH-USA, joined Dean Mackin on his Monday morning TNT Radio show to discuss the recent study report released by ANH-USA. The report details its findings after testing, what's considered to be the epitome of healthly veg, kale, for potential PFAS contamination.

Dr Verkerk explained that like many Americans, the team became increasingly concerned reading reports about the extensive contamination of the environment with PFAS chemicals, and what this means for human health. The evidence of PFAS contamination is mounting with it being found in drinking water, prescription drugs, in the air, in food packaging, and in pesticides. Yet, the US Food & Drug Administration has continued to claim that the vast majority of foods it's tested don't contain PFAS.

PFAS chemicals are already being linked to a wide array of serious health effects, including cancer, thyroid disease and decreased immune function and there are over 12,000 different PFAS chemicals in circulation.

Our aim is to effect an outright ban on the entire class of PFAS chemicals in the US, along the lines of the one being brought in by the European Union. Over to Dean and Rob — from 28 minutes into Dean's radio show.

>>> Download a copy of the study report: PFAS in Kale Pilot Study

Join the conversation

Transcript

Dean Mackin

Welcome back to the program. I'm immensely blessed this afternoon. I've got to talk to another one of my favourite doctors earlier, Dr Ian Richard, and he and his world of Wellness. Somebody who advocates for natural health is just like my next doctor. And all the best doctors do. They do because they see it. They see it, they understand it. They don't just have a degree, they have a high sense of intuition and they see what works and they know that all the answers can't be found in chemicals. There are natural solutions. My next guest, Dr Robert Verkerk, founded the Alliance for Natural Health International in 2002 and he's acted as the executive and scientific director since that time. He's directed legal actions to protect the right to natural health and has campaigned on diverse issues, including against toxins in food supply and in drinking water. Don't get me started on fluoride and in the environment. As well as against genetically modified foods, gene editing and transhumanism. Yes, these are all real things that we have to combat thanks to, you know, companies like Monsanto and all them. But luckily we've got in our corner Dr Robert Verkerk. How are you, doctor?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Hey I'm incredibly well and you mentioned fluoridation and of course what we're going to be talking about today is very closely related because it's about carbon and fluoride bonds in these PFAS chemicals.

Dean Mackin

Now, if you don't mind me saying, and of course you don't need to agree with me and I'll wrap my head in tin foil as I say it. But I've noticed, since I was a young fella, I'm 54 now, people seem to have become not quite as smart as they used to be. They have been dumbed down and they’ve been fluoridated. I don't buy things based on what they tell me. I look at what I see? I look at what I see, so they fluoridated the water decades ago. The world seems to have gotten increasingly more stupid as time goes by, as seen by some of their political decisions and whatnot. As we move forward and if I Google fluoride and the effects on the human brain, it's not a positive, is it? And for those who would say ohh, but it protects your teeth. I mean, I'm not buying that argument as to why they should put it in the water supply.

Rob Verkerk PhD

It is the most peculiar decision that was ever made. The idea that you can put a drug through the water supply and in turn titrate the right dose. You know, if you're an athlete and you're consuming 5 litres of water a day, you're definitely going to be above the limit the US Environmental Protection Agency regards as the safe level, but we now have this additional burden. It's been the best kept secret of the chemicals in the environment world is this whole idea of a new group of fluoridated chemicals, these perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl compounds that are just everywhere and it's just emerging the amount that they've used tobacco industry tactics to prevent the public from knowing about it. Regulators have said no, no, don't worry, this is the stuff in non-stick cookware. It's very isolated around say DuPont factories or 3M factories. But as you look deeper into it, even the CDC in the US has been saying now for the last 10 years, it's pretty much in every American. 10 years ago, they found that 97% of American people had it in their bloodstream, it's not even being stored in fat. It's running around in the blood, so it's basically affecting every cell in our body, but more recently they've found it in everyone, and of course they're found in polar bears in the Arctic. So it's everywhere and it's really, really difficult to break down the carbon fluoride bond in a PFAS compound. It’s actually one of the strongest bonds known in chemistry, so it's a really big problem and we're just getting to understand the full extent of it.

Dean Mackin

So you've basically got two chances, Buckleys and none of getting this out of your system. Or are there ways to reduce the amount of it in your system?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Well, we will get rid of it slowly if we stop putting it in, but the problem is it's i's everywhere. So there's about 12,000 of these compounds out there. They don't appear on the labels of products because they're used as excipients and other additives. They're in the waterproofing. They're on furniture coverings in carpets, that lovely new car smell that everyone likes. That's full of PFAS and of course, we're now finding it in pesticides and it's now within the drinking water supply the aquifers are poisoned with it. So irrigated water going on to crops, that was one of the areas that we've been looking at recently. We took 4 samples from 4 different states in the US, we sampled kale in regular supermarkets. We had members of our team in four states. We said right? Guys go and get some organic kale and some conventionally grown kale. And according to the FDA data. We should have found nothing. So we were just testing their null hypothesis because they've said, OK, of the foods we've been looking at for the last three years, 97% of them are completely free. And mainly we're finding it in seafood and a bit of meat, so the vegetables the most important part of our food should be clear. And of course we found it in 90%, seven out of eight of the samples, and worst of all, 100% of the organically grown samples.

Dean Mackin

Well, I mean, I mean that's frightening. It really is now before we even get on to some of the possible side effects that one might suffer from this. I would suggest it's probably not gonna be too terrific for your IQ.

Rob Verkerk PhD

No, look, the relationship between fluoride and the nervous system is very, very well known. Of course if we look at fluoridation of the drinking water supply, we can also see that fluoride accumulates in really important glands, particularly the pineal gland. And of course it's been related to skeletal diseases, osteoporosis and a range of different cancers. And it's a very, very similar picture when you look at PFAS. It's a range of cancers. It's thyroid disease. Again, it accumulates in the glands. So the endocrine system, the hormonal system gets completely thrown out of balance, but of course you're coming back to your question earlier about the seeming reducing intelligence of the population. The bottom line is that there are so many things happening in the world today that all work together as a big symphony that is affecting it. The education system is breaking down, but we're being exposed to probably around about 20,000 different industrial chemicals every day if we live in in an industrialised country. We're also being bombarded by new to nature EMF's, you know, electronic electromagnetic radiation sources that are that living systems have never been exposed to before, and these are. All kind of together.

Plus people are under extreme psychosocial stress. So you work all of that together, it's not surprising people are having trouble in this age in which people are just massively exposed to information that they can't cope with anymore.

Dean Mackin

I do say, this is partially tongue in cheek but, people such as the Armish these days, their lifestyles aren't looking quite as absurd as others would have us believe, are they?

Rob Verkerk PhD

You have it. There's so many elements of modern life that we take for granted. One of the biggest problems is the way governments assess what is safe and what is not safe, and they continue looking at everything in isolation. So they'll look at a study on one chemical in the knowledge that we're actually exposed to 20,000 of them. So in the work we were doing with Sydney university years ago when I was working with the total Environment Centre in Australia, because we were very much in the forefront of seeing the ban on organochlorine compounds. You remember that they were using agriculture they used on termite [control] and of course that was the problem.

Back then that that these compounds work together, they're relatives of DDT. They accumulate in the body, particularly in the fat. So you can measure them in the fat. The problem with PFAS is that they don't just accumulate in the fat. They're everywhere, which is one of the reasons you can find them in the bloodstream. They're actually quite attracted to protein in the body. All the peptides and enzymes that we use for communication, all the hormones, they're all proteinaceous. So it has this massive impact on a whole range of systems.

Dean Mackin

Now I'm no doctor, but I would suggest if I was to ask you for a full list of the possible side effects, we'd probably be here for the next 8 hours.

Rob Verkerk PhD

We're beginning to understand as the whole thing is unpacked. A lot of this work goes back to studies specifically around one of the biggest DuPont plants in the US, where major contamination was found and they set up a, C8C8 is one of the PFAS compounds that that is. A by-product in making Teflon, and because Teflon is a PFAS compound and of course they're related very specific types of of cancer and thyroid disease, autoimmune conditions and of course when we open the door on autoimmune conditions, you'll know Crohn's, for example, is an example of it with rheumatoid arthritis, et cetera. It's actually a group of about 100 different compounds and it is interesting when we look even at C19 vaccinations, for example. One of the things we're really beginning to see is this emergence of increased rates of autoimmune disease. Autoimmune diseases are the new pandemic and it is this interaction between the lives we live, the breakdown of these semi permeable membranes in our gut, in our blood brain barrier, together with an environmental trigger. And it can be a chemical, it can be an a new to nature compound, it can be stress that just breaks the back of the system and the body can no longer determine the difference between self and non self and bingo a whole plethora of different autoimmune diseases can result from that.

Dean Mackin

It really is very frightening. I mean, typically, you know, we've always relied on our government to tell us what safe versus unsafe. The last three years and certainly I don't have to preach to the converted to those listening, have proven that we cannot, absolutely cannot, trust them as to what they consider to be safe and unsafe. If you have experts with other opinions, not only were they silenced.

Rob Verkerk PhD

One of the reasons that what we're doing now, we dipped our toe in the water to test the FDA's view. We sensed that it was wrong. We sensed that what they were trying to do was prevarication around the extent of the PFAS problem, and so we just went straight into kale. It's got a reasonable protein content for a vegetable. It's pretty heavily irrigated. It's often grown hydroponically, so it's gonna involve a lot of water and bingo, we found this problem. So we're now gonna be doing much more extensive testing of the food supply and I think as a group of academics, that University of California, San Francisco, have recently found, they've been working their way through the documentation that companies like DuPont and 3M have been involved in, the major manufacturers of PFAS Chemicals, and Nadia Gaber, published a couple of months ago a study called ‘The Devil they knew: chemical documents analysis of industry influence on PFAS science’. Basically, they've shown industry knew about this for around 50 years that this stuff was really intractable. It had this incredibly strong carbon fluorine bond in it and it wasn't going to disappear and these guys were just dumping it into the into the ground, into the water systems, knowing also that when people use products that that contain PFAS, they're going to be exposed through contact, through inhalation. And obviously if it goes into the water and into the food you're going to be getting it into your body. So actually the CDC in the US is the one agency that normally we don't trust, but they have, through their own analysis been saying guys, it's everywhere, it's omnipresent is the term. That they use.

Dean Mackin

I'll tell you what, you know it's bad when the CBC is telling you it's bad. Dr Robert Verkerk, mate, if you've got a bit more time, I'd love to chat to you on the other side of this break.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Perfect, no problem.

Dean Mackin

And welcome back to the program. Back to Dr Robert Verkerk, who is a tremendous character. And who is a doctor, ho is all about natural and we love doctors who talk natural, and we're gonna get back to him right now. Sorry about the break, mate.

Rob Verkerk PhD

No worries at all. Turns out when you were in Enmore I was living in Leichhardt. Just round the corner.

Dean Mackin

Isn't it a small world mate? I love Leichhardt the best pizzas ever. Can you believe that? Norton St. And I don't know when you were here, but Norton St. was it? It was happening. It was like.

Rob Verkerk PhD

Ohh, totally absolutely yeah.

Dean Mackin

King Street, Newtown, right? It's a ghost town. You know, all the businesses are closing down. They've lost that, that Italian vibe is going away. Its soul has been destroyed post covid. But it's just not the same. If you ever come back here and I hope you do and wander down that street, it's just not the same. Having said that, King Street Newtown is really, really good. It's not the King Street Newtown that I grew up in, but I still just like being around that area. It's very, I don't know, cosmopolitan I just like the feel of it.

Rob Verkerk PhD

I'm so sad to hear that about Leichhardt because the Italian centre was what it was all about when I was there. And but of course I remember getting the best falafel rolls anywhere in the world in King Street, Newtown, back in the 80s/90s.

Dean Mackin

You're making me hungry now and for all of you in the UK who can't relate to what we're talking about, you have to come to Australia. You have to come and you've gotta go to King Street. I mean, you got Clems chicken. You've got the ? shops down in Marrickville, you've got the beautiful Italian places, we've got some terrific food and you know we had some of the best immigrants you could imagine coming to this country and they really did. Build an add to this country in the 60s and 70s and  I loved everything about growing up in in that area anyway, mate, I digress. But it's good to think about better days and some of the things we did in the places we went.

Rob Verkerk PhD

I just want to come back to one of the things we're talking about. Our friends at the CDC. I mentioned that the way these chemicals can affect the body is in a very wide range of ways because of the fact that they've got fluorine in them and they have this intractable bond. Of course, the immune system is a system that gets targeted. The CDC, one of their concerns about the impact because it's now very, very clear, is that it might make childhood vaccines less effective. But of course, what we're looking at is a much bigger problem for our immune system. This extraordinarily important system that maintains our relationship with the outside world and we've talked about autoimmune disease as one of the common failures of the immune system. So the CDC say the problem is decreased vaccine response in children. So it depends from what side you look at these problems.

Dean Mackin

That really is frightening. I mean, you know, as a doctor, when it's broke, you fix it. But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think is something that almost anybody would agree on. I don't know whether you're seeing this over in the UK, but just down the road from me, literally, you know, 20 minutes drive for the first time ever I heard of a young teenager with no known comorbidities dying of the flu. Another young girl up in Queensland recently passed away from the flu. I don't historically ever remember hearing this, and again in both cases no known comorbidities. Again, it could be something you know. Leading from what you're talking about?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Well, exactly. The range of effects that are already known on PFAS, we're looking at some birth defects. We're looking at decreases in birth weights, changes in liver enzymes and kidney and testicular cancer, the two cancers that have been identified initially, but we're also seeing a complete disturbance of blood lipid levels, so they're concerned about cholesterol, but of course they'll just go and put people on statins. That is not a solution to the problem.

Dean Mackin

So when your doctor says, hey, statins is for you, what would you suggest that those people go do?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Well, first of all the risk benefit equation on statins is not what most doctors say. Most doctors are given a financial incentive to prescribe statins. If you look at the risk benefit profile, it's always performed in the absence of looking at what else you might be doing and it's diet and lifestyle that basically causes our blood lipids to be unbalanced and it's also diet and lifestyle that sorts it out, so no one on this planet suffers from a statin deficiency and we would all say if someone you know has high cholesterol, you really have to understand whether it's a genetic issue because we definitely see very, very clear patterns where families can run normally and be completely healthy with higher levels of cholesterol. You also have to look at the high density versus low density cholesterol. But most important, you want to see if you have oxidised very low density lipoprotein particles, so oxVLDL. that test, is a test that all doctors should be performing and generally what we see is the integrative doctors. It's the functional medicine doctors that are running that test, and if you do have these very small particles that are oxidising, yes, your yur risk of heart disease goes up, but generally speaking the solution is about changing your diet. Eating more vegetables in particular, a small small amount of fruits, increasing the amount of antioxidants that you're consuming in your diet.

Dean Mackin

And of course, if your doctor doesn't suggest that you can go and ask them a couple of things that you just spoke about, the risk benefit analysis and that's something that should be, I mean again, it's something that you would notice being a doctor, you notice anomalies. You have common sense, you have intuition. You know that risk benefit analysis and of course you could always get a statistician to back up that which you good doctors notice all by yourselves. The other thing that you touched upon was incentives, and that is, I think one of the worst things. It's happening here immensely. What they used to do here. If you prescribe X amount of Company B products you would get a holiday very nice like a Hawaii or atop a nice ski mountain in Japan. And they kind of outlawed that. So what they do now here in Australia is that these doctors who qualify because they have prescribed a significant amount of these products now get to go to a conference in wait for it, either Hawaii or atop a very nice ski resort over. So it still goes on, doesn't it?

Rob Verkerk PhD

Ohh yeah, it it's the no free lunches. I just wanna clarify. I'm a PhD so research doctor, not a clinical Doctor. I work with doctors all around the world. I did my PhD and postdoc at Imperial College London so but that was really my wake up call to see how the medics that I was working with, how limited, how narrow they were, so we were looking at, for example, natural compounds within plants, many of which have cancer fighting properties. When we'd meet up with our medics and I'd say, do you know, we're finding these billions of compounds in cruciferous vegetables. You know the broccoli kale family. It's one of the reasons we were looking at kale in the US, by the way, because I've done a lot of work on those plants and these doctors, these oncologists in particular look at you as if you have 2 heads, they said you just engage with radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery, that's what we do as oncologist. So there's just this total breakdown in communication between those of us who are doing the research work, and that's really what we've been doing, is building this bra. Change between the research community and the medical community so that the citizen, the punter, can get a much better combination of therapies. And of course, that means generally not using mainstream allopathic medicine unless you've broken a leg or you've had a car accident.

Dean Mackin

Dr Robert Verkerk, mate, I very much appreciate your time this afternoon. You've opened up my eyes to a bunch of things that I had no idea about, that I shall subsequently commit to memory and talk about mate. I would love at some point to chat with you again, and we can talk about how people can go about leading healthier lives and what not, something that I'm sure that you would, that I'd, I'd love you to come on and do if you could.

Rob Verkerk PhD

It would be an absolute pleasure, it's been great talking with you.

Dean Mackin

Good on you, mate. And sometimes if you ever get down to Leichhardt again I'll shout you out. Peter, everybody, that's Dr Robert Verkerk terrific guy with the PhD and we'll get him on the program again. Your favourite announcer here for some of you. I know the lovely Katie Hopkins is coming up imminently. I'll be back tomorrow afternoon. 4:00 PM Australian time.

>>> Download a copy of the study report: PFAS in Kale Pilot Study

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