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Dec. 10, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

40:28

Fran Drescher on Toxins and Cancer Schmancer

Actor Fran Drescher, President of SAG-AFTRA, discusses toxins, pollution and public health with RFK Jr in this episode. For more info on Fran Drescher's book and nonprofit organization, Cancer Schmancer, visit: https://www.cancerschmancer.org/

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	Hi, everybody.
	I want to start out this podcast by telling people that I'm now on Telegram and I put stuff on Telegram.
	I put little videos and links to articles that I think people will find interesting.
	So if you...
	If you have that option, if you want to follow me on Telegram, of course, I've been kicked off of Instagram, so I don't really have another way to communicate with our group.
	And then, of course, I'm on Twitter.
	So people who don't get enough of me on here, which I'd be surprised about, can find me on those other sites.
	I am really excited today to have one of my old and very, very close friends Fran Drescher, who I've known for more than 20 years, and who's been a big activist and supporter on environmental issues.
	We've partnered on a lot of environmental issues in the past.
	And let me give you, I actually, Fran, I have your biography, which is great, but I actually read your Wikipedia.
	And anybody who wants to entertain and ought to read I thought I really knew you and knew everything about you, but there's so much stuff in this.
	It's about 20 pages, and it's really, really interesting and fun to read.
	I don't know if you've read it, but I really had fun reading it.
	Fran is best known for her portrayal of the beloved Fran Fine in the hit television series The Nanny, which she created, wrote, executive produced, and of course starred in.
	She was nominated for two Golden Globes and two Emmy Awards for Best Actress in a Comedy Series.
	Of course, she was in Saturday Night Fever, which I did not remember that.
	I have to go back and look at it.
	I did remember you in Spinal Tap, which is, you know, the cult classic by Rob Reiner and one of my favorite movies, really an extraordinary movie.
	And my wife at that time, Cheryl, who you know well, another comedian and actor, was Rob Reiner's personal assistant.
	This is before she got the job on Curb Your Enthusiasm at the time that he made Spinal Tap.
	And that's just one of many, many areas where kind of our paths cross.
	Another is that I did not remember that you were in Ragtime.
	And the home that I lived in when my son Bobby, who you know, was born, was the Ragtime house where the film was shot in Malkiska, New York.
	It was their kind of recreation of Yonkers.
	I don't know if your scene was in that house.
	And then the other thing, the other really close connection that you have kind of with Cheryl is this long relationship you've had with Ray Romano Where you went to Hillcrest High School in Queens together, and then both made TV shows about your experience at that point of your life.
	And at one point, I think you do, I think in The Nanny, you did a fake high school reunion where Ray came to the reunion.
	And Cheryl is very, very close.
	Ray was in one of his early movie with him.
	And she plays and she was in The Grand also with him.
	And she plays poker with him almost every Tuesday night.
	Wow.
	You know, you've also been an amazing activist.
	You've been amazing on the public health issues.
	And you had...
	This extraordinary battle yourself, and you developed very early on this philosophy about taking care of your own health, that we all need to be our own doctors, because you were told by eight different doctors that you did not have cancer before actually getting a proper diagnosis.
	And you've been really outspoken about taking control of our own recovery, of our own health.
	You've also been great on one of the issues that you and I have worked on, which is plastics.
	And every day we're finding more and more really disturbing, troubling things about plastics, about the phthalates.
	The biphenyls and plastics, which we now are suspected carcinogens, but we know that they're endocrine disruptors.
	They disrupt the development of children's sexual behavior, their sexual development.
	They reduce sperm counts.
	And we're fighting more and more every day about the incapacity of the human digestive system and metabolic system to process plastics.
	And of course, when you drink water from a plastic bottle, you're getting microplastics in your body that have all of these deleterious effects on them.
	And you've been amazing on that issue.
	Your bio goes on and on.
	I'm going to come back to it, but let's talk about what you're doing with cancer.
	You're also best-selling New York Times author.
	Well, let's just dive in.
	Enough about me.
	Okay, now talk about yourself.
	I'm also the president of SAG-AFTRA now.
	And I did start something called Green Council, since you were talking about plastics, because I do think that it's time that our industry galvanized as one entity, all the different members that make up a production, all the different unions and producers, And come together under one umbrella, which we call Green Council.
	And we're making our mission number one, an industry-wide ban on single-use plastic, both on camera and behind the scenes.
	And I think this is particularly important because it's a very effective way that we can leverage the visual normalizing of single-use plastic and change that narrative.
	So it's really a big vision.
	It's really important to me as the first environmentalist who's president of this entertainment union.
	And we have a lot of very high-profile members that are at the ready to help push this commitment by the industry to all the viewers around the world.
	And really make the influence of this action bigger than the sum of its parts.
	So that's one thing that I'm very excited about.
	Cancer Schmancer, we have our annual Masterclass Health Summit this year on January 21st.
	And it's at the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica.
	And it's kind of an all day thing with different speakers and breakfast and lunch.
	And we do it every year with different themes.
	And actually this year, it's the environmental impact on your health.
	Because many people do not associate with how you live, with how you feel.
	And there's really no wiggle room.
	It's actually a direct line.
	And we have to start when you talk about all of these things from agrochemicals and plastics and hormones that are in food.
	So all of these things impact our children's health.
	And there's a reason why there's so much autoimmune problem that is escalating.
	And that has a lot to do with the agrochemicals that you actually went up against Monsanto with some of that stuff, the weed killer.
	And it's really important that we eat very pristine food.
	And if we don't, what we're doing is creating health issues.
	Because the agrochemicals like glyphosate, that is making tiny little holes in your gut.
	So you develop leaky gut.
	And that leaky gut is what's creating all the autoimmune problems that we see.
	The level of obesity from the GMO Corn syrup sweeteners that's hidden in so much, particularly food that's targeting children.
	I think that one of the big missed conversations, unfortunately, through the pandemic, not with Cancer Schmanza, but out there in the zeitgeist, was that this is really an opportunity to see that we're actually a very unhealthy nation.
	And we have a lot of these secondary health conditions that made getting the virus even more of a complication.
	Whereas people that really aren't fighting a lot of these secondary conditions, in many cases, I mean, they got it and they got well from it.
	And I think that when we look at how many people in this country Have, you know, diabetes and obesity and asthma and heart conditions and inflammation.
	And my experience has been, and I've sort of been on this path since my own cancer survival, that the cleaner you live, the healthier you are, the less sick you get, and the quicker you heal if you do get sick.
	So for me, food is medicine.
	Medicine is food.
	And living very pristinely makes a huge impact on your health.
	And people are mindless consumers for the most part.
	They're enabling these sociopaths that are just hurting us, hurting us, hurting our children, hurting the planet, hurting our pets, all for the bottom line.
	But when making money at the expense of all things of true value is what you're doing.
	The air you breathe, the food you eat, the earth, all of our health, everything is sacrificed for the bottom line.
	We're living in a very dangerous time.
	But who is enabling that?
	We are.
	We're the biggest consumers on the planet.
	Stop buying it.
	Because at the end of the day, manufacturers really don't want to kill us.
	They want to sell us.
	And they'll sell us anything that we're willing to buy, which right now is anything.
	So we at Cancer Schmancer really are very much on the cutting edge of not looking for an end fix to the end symptom, which ultimately the end symptom to inflammation is cancer.
	And a lot of organizations, nonprofits like my own in the health space, they're very much focused on how to cure cancer.
	But it's much more practical to identify causation of cancer and eliminate it.
	So we educate, motivate and activate our followers and teach them through events like the Masterclass Health Summit, which does stream and get chopped up into a home video which does stream and get chopped up into a home video course that is also offered for But then you can make a small donation for your digital download.
	And it's just people say that it really changes their life because they don't hear this stuff from their regular doctor in most cases.
	Unless you're with a very progressive alternative medical doctor who is really looking at the whole body as a system and not just the part that's broke and trying to fix that, but understanding why it broke in the first place.
	I think it's the future of medicine.
	And there's a large population of doctors that are reassessing all the systems in the body and really digging deep to see where the deficits are and how your lifestyle is contributing to that.
	And I'm just here to try and convince people to live more precisely.
	I mean, you're so motivated to help children's health, and yet there's so much targeting kids, and they're really not very discerning consumers.
	But also when they go to school, What are they cleaning?
	What industrial cleaning products are they cleaning desks with?
	And what are they spraying on the playing fields that they say you can't go on it for 24 hours?
	So do I want my kid on it?
	In hour 25?
	I don't think so.
	It's like, what is this?
	Why are we in bed with the chemical industry?
	It's all repurposed war chemicals imposed on civilian life.
	And I don't know.
	I think we're very easily brainwashed.
	Everything got wrapped up in the 20th century in what's modern and convenient.
	And the idea of just getting down on your hands and knees and pulling out weeds, people don't think about that anymore.
	I remember when I asked my friend who's a partner of Cancer Schmancer and the founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, well, what do you put on like a bowl of food that you want to put into the refrigerator?
	And she said, instead, in lieu of like saran wrap, I couldn't think of what else I could use.
	And she said, we use wax paper.
	And I said, ah, wax paper?
	And we use parchment paper instead of aluminum foil?
	Because that also gives off noxious gases.
	When it's heated, and I grew up, they were wrapping up the potatoes and the corn at the barbecues, and my mom would roast a big turkey and be tented in this big aluminum foil disposable pan and aluminum foil over the top.
	And you can't really cook with that anymore because now they know that it releases things that aren't good for us.
	So once you take a deep dive into this, we call it a cancer schmanza detox your home because the home is the most toxic place we spend the most time in and ironically have the most control over.
	And it's more toxic than living across the street from an oil refinery.
	So once you take this dive and you bring your family into it and you start reading labels and replacing things with other things, it becomes a lifestyle, truly.
	And you start to see how your quality of health begins to improve because we're slowly eroding our immune system.
	And that's what all this stuff does.
	It compromises our immune system.
	It makes it crazy.
	It doesn't know where to look first to try and fix it.
	And then something really alien comes into the picture that the body has never seen before, like COVID. And it just goes nuts.
	So...
	It's our job to do it.
	And if we stop buying it, we will be better for it.
	And manufacturers will have to be forced to be more responsible about their impact on the environment as well as the consumer.
	Yeah, you mentioned aluminum, and I was thinking that when I was a kid, and you know, I've been sober for a long time, and I haven't had pot in 40 years, but I used to make the pot pipes out of a toilet paper roll and a little piece of aluminum.
	You'd put pinholes in and then smoke, and I shudder to think, literally heating up aluminum with a Zippo lighter and inhaling it.
	And now I know a lot about aluminum.
	And one of the things we know about aluminum Is that human beings have never been exposed to aluminum before.
	Other metals are mobilized in the environment, like lead, etc.
	And our body is accustomed to them, but literally 100% of the aluminum in the world was locked into bauxite.
	And we only started releasing it really just at the beginning of World War II, and not much until the revolution in air travel, because they needed aluminum for airplanes.
	And then we started finding all kinds of uses for it.
	And I grew up eating and drinking and cooking with aluminum pans.
	And, you know, particularly when you cook something acidic, now we know, like tomato sauce or spaghetti sauce, and those pans have mobilized the aluminum and it gets into your body.
	And aluminum is the one thing that they know is linked to the epidemic in Alzheimer's.
	Totally.
	When they do autopsies on people that had Alzheimer's, they have huge amounts of aluminum in their brain.
	But it's also from aluminum chloride, from antiperspirant.
	It's from aluminum cans.
	I mean, aluminum at one point became all the rage and everybody started using it.
	It was convenient.
	It was disposable.
	They're still using it.
	If you go into restaurant kitchens, people's homes, caterers, there's always those disposable aluminum pans that food comes in and stuff.
	And I try, Bobby, to not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
	I try not to be really difficult constantly.
	But I do have a lot of control over everything in my own home.
	And I do try and support restaurants that use very, very...
	Pure purveyors.
	But it's not always easy, depending on where you are, where you're traveling to, whose home you're going to, what you're invited to, whatever.
	So that's also a balancing act.
	Because you can get so nuts about all this.
	Meanwhile, these are the times we're living.
	We're not going to ever see another world besides this, you and I. This is it.
	So we have to somehow learn how to live within it and try and modify it or at least change ourselves, each one and then each one to each one.
	I find that when people get extremely overwhelmed by all that's wrong with the world, And there's so much.
	I mean, I'm just so nauseated by the most recent mass shooting in Colorado Springs.
	And I just don't know how we're ever going to climb our way out of this terrible time.
	And I feel like when people start fighting each other, that's the divide and conquer philosophy.
	Yeah.
	So somebody is benefiting from the divide of the World Economic Forum.
	They want us all fighting each other and not noticing that they're stealing everything that we own, including our children's health, commoditizing our landscapes, our kids, our health, and then militarizing and monetizing public health.
	I think you found out when you had cancer.
	You and I are both friends with Woody Harrelson.
	Woody Harrelson and his wife, Laura Lee, visit us sometime in the summertime up at the Cape.
	And the first thing they do is they go out and they buy all new pots and pans because they won't cook in any of the stuff that I have in my house.
	So now I have, you know, we use a lot of the old irons because even if you get rid of the aluminum, this is what you said about making a The perfect, the enemy of the good.
	It's really hard to live in a way that keeps all of this stuff away from kids.
	But then you get into the Teflon and these coatings, which are really, really bad.
	Those are all forever chemicals.
	There are PFASs, PFOAs that are incredibly harmful to you.
	We do a lot of our cooking now on the old-style iron skillets that are a little harder to clean, and you get more sticking to them, but there are many, many generations that worked with that pretty well.
	Yeah, I would never use non-stick and I try and convince my parents and my mom sometimes.
	And you see these commercials, the egg slides right out of the pan and everything like that.
	And they're all about trying to convince you that you can't live without this thing.
	But I find that the food does stick to the pans that I use, but I don't clean it after I use it.
	I fill it up with hot water and a little bit of dish soap, and I let it sit overnight.
	And then in the morning, it comes right out.
	So I think that it's just creating different habits and learning how to live within the margins of the things that are actually more important.
	Healthy for you.
	But maybe not as, in the short run, convenient.
	In the long run, extremely inconvenient because of its long-term impact on your health and the environment.
	And I just don't know, when are we going to get out of The chemical business.
	I mean, why is our government always turning a blind eye?
	Why does the European Union eliminate things, you know, by the thousands?
	And we eliminate things by the tens.
	One of the things that I would say to people, so that we don't depress them, is that I know a lot about glyphosate because of the Monsanto cases and because I've been working on those issues for many years.
	One of the things about glyphosate that is very encouraging, if you stop eating, If you start eating organic food, the glyphosate disappears from your body almost immediately.
	And because of what I do, I have many, many parents of kids who have autism diagnoses or have behavioral issues, ADD, ADHD, and many, many other issues.
	And what they almost universally say to me is, when we start feeding our kids organic, their behavior gets much better.
	They feel a calmness.
	Several years ago, I started having memory problems.
	I had a photographic memory, but I lost it and began having word retrieval problems.
	I couldn't remember it.
	People's face is that I did a lot of different, you know, medical tests to try to figure out what was going on.
	And I found out at that point that I had enormous mercury levels.
	I had 10 times EPA considered safe.
	And I ended up getting the mercury chelated out.
	So I got it removed, which you can do with mercury.
	And there's a number of different ways to do it.
	But there is no real way that is of removing aluminum.
	Were you eating a lot of fish and sushi and stuff like that?
	Mercury doesn't hold in on men as much as it does on women and children because they don't have as high a fat content.
	Yeah, but mercury is a lot worse for men than it is for women.
	And the reason for that is that testosterone amplifies the neurotoxicity of the mercury molecule, whereas estrogen tends to wrap the mercury molecule and protect the human brain.
	And it's an antioxidant, and it's the only antioxidant that's found in every cell of the human body.
	The only one.
	I get sometimes, you know, an IV... For glutathione, it's really good.
	Anyway, there's a lot of...
	That's fascinating.
	The woman who did those studies was a really brilliant scientist called Jill James.
	Who was an NIH scientist for a long time.
	But anyway, she did those kind of initial studies.
	And then there's a lot of studies that link testosterone to mercury injury.
	Women with high mercury levels tend to get depression.
	There is some link.
	There's a Yale study that links it to eating disorders that affect you in life.
	But the men tend to get immediate and really devastating or the boys really devastating brain injuries.
	That's fascinating about the eating disorders.
	A lot of people that eat a lot of sushi in the Western world don't really know how to eat sushi the way Asians do.
	And they look at the wasabi or the pickled ginger just as condiments.
	I don't like it.
	I want it.
	I'll have a little soy sauce, whatever.
	But actually, there's very scientific basis for why those are eaten along with eating raw fish.
	That, of course, the Japanese know from a millennial, but we in the Western world, and we give it to our kids, too, don't really understand that the wasabi kills The bacteria in the gut from the raw fish because it creates like a fire in the belly.
	As with many cultures that eat spicy food or hot food or food that creates fire in the belly.
	And you're supposed to have that with every piece of fish.
	And then when you eat the pickled ginger, that has all the good gut bacteria, all the probiotics in it.
	Because anything that's fermented like that has a lot of good bacteria.
	And so then you eat that and you refortify the gut so that you have a strong presence of the healthy bacteria.
	And this balancing act of our internal microbiome Is key to our health.
	And we, you, me, and everybody listening, is basically the thermostat of our body.
	And we have to kind of like step outside of ourselves and observe what is happening around us that may be considered an interference or For keeping a healthy, like that, 72 degrees on your thermostat.
	You know what it feels like when you feel great.
	Unfortunately, most of us have lowered the mean of what we consider feeling okay.
	And we're very drug dependent, and we get tired, or we have cognitive problems, or...
	Skeletal problems or muscular problems or intestinal problems, all of these things.
	And we're not really thinking that that's not really the way we're supposed to be feeling.
	We're getting used to it.
	But it's not really the right way to feel.
	And so we have to take control of our own bodies and start to think, okay, I was in this elevator and some dude was coughing all over me.
	So maybe by the time I get to my office, I'm going to amp up on some vitamin C. Maybe I'll have a little cup of green tea, I'll wash my hands, whatever, to offset the interference.
	Or you get into a fight with someone or your boss yells at you and you didn't feel like you deserved it.
	So now you're stressing.
	That too will challenge your immune system.
	Stress very quickly will upset the immune system to not work at an optimal.
	So then you've got to think to yourself, okay, I don't want to get sick from this.
	So I'm going to take some empty accidents.
	Maybe I'll take a walk because that'll de-stress me.
	Or I'll lie down for 10 minutes and close my eyes.
	Or I'll look around the room that I'm in and really take it in like I haven't ever seen it before to bring me into the present so I'm not up in my head or having arguments that I was over already.
	So this is us being in charge of our own body and understanding that the gut microbiome...
	Now, when we talk about systems in the body and why an alternative doctor is so plugged into this, gut is brain and gut is immune system.
	If your gut bacteria is out of whack, And you don't have a really good population of healthy gut bacteria.
	It's going to affect your brain.
	It's going to affect your immune system.
	Everything can affect the immune system.
	And that's what we constantly have to be on top of.
	And that's why I'm always telling people, All of the products that we use, the household items that we clean with, the gardening things that we use, everything, all our personal care items, including oral hygiene, and all the foods that we eat and the beverages that we drink and the vessels that they all come in have to be re-evaluated.
	And that's just the tip of the iceberg because if that shirt you're wearing is a no-iron shirt, It could be 100% cotton, but it's been doused with chemicals.
	And 10 years after, it's still off-gassing.
	So it's a problem.
	And it's so pervasive.
	It's everything.
	The fabric.
	It's the flame-retarded on our kids' pajamas and upholstered pieces and curtains.
	It's all becoming this cacophony of Of toxins and carcinogens that went all together from the minute you wake up and even after you go to sleep.
	I mean, I turn off my Wi-Fi at night.
	I need to give my brain a rest from the electromagnetic fields.
	It's a big commitment, but it's worth it because you immediately see change.
	Let me ask you something.
	When you ran for AFTRA, you were...
	I was approached to run SAG-AFTRA. I wanted to run as an independent because I don't really understand what parties are doing in a union.
	When really the opposition is the people on the other side of the negotiating table and not each other.
	And I even told the people that asked me to run, I don't think you realize that I'm much more radical than you expect.
	And they said, we really don't care.
	As long as you're open to hearing all sides, all points of views, then the union...
	You need somebody of your presence.
	It's time to take that step.
	And I do have a lot of experience in Washington, which I think made me extremely qualified for the job.
	And I am a visionary.
	And I have big ambitions for it.
	And I don't care.
	I'm really running a nonpartisan admin because I don't really care what your association is.
	Just tell me what your beef is and if it makes sense to me, I'll go to the mat for you.
	And then I'll go to the mat for anybody that I feel is being unfairly marginalized.
	And I do that all the time in life.
	And I do it in the union too, much to the shock or chagrin of some people that would rather I didn't.
	I want to point out to our audience that George Bush appointed you a senior diplomat in his administration on women's rights.
	Yes, there was a bill that was floating around, and this was a few years after my gynecologic cancer survival, and it was the Gynecologic Cancer Education and Awareness Act.
	Ultimately, that's what it was called in the Senate.
	And I was invited to try and help push it through.
	And it was really going nowhere fast.
	But I went and actually didn't leave.
	And your Uncle Teddy was instrumental in helping me.
	You have Republicans.
	You actually passed that bill by acclamation with...
	Yes, by unanimous consent, which means all 100 senators said yes.
	And that never happened.
	So that really shows somebody who- It was quite a feat.
	And that's why the Bush administration offered me a public diplomacy envoy position, which took me to do my health talk to all of our allied nations and military bases.
	And it's a vetted position.
	It's a great honor.
	I was really thrilled to participate in our government in that way.
	And they leveraged because my celebrity is around the world too.
	So it made it a nice presentation that I was representing the United States, but everybody knew me as the nanny.
	And as a cancer survivor, I had a lot to talk about in terms of taking control of your body.
	And being your own best advocate and becoming better partners with your physician, recognizing what the early warning whispers of diseases that could affect you or cancers that might affect you.
	And then understanding that Genes have 27 different ways of expressing themselves.
	So even if you test positive for something, like I test positive for rheumatoid arthritis, but I'm not active, even though my mom is, But she doesn't do anything environmentally to stop the gene from expressing itself in that way.
	And it's usually environmental that's going to kind of zhuzh it in a bad direction if you're not really careful.
	About how you're abusing your body, how much you're forcing it to be exposed to in these vastly unhealthy, unnatural times that we're living.
	We have to stop it.
	And it's up to us, the consumer.
	That's what it all comes down to.
	We can blame everybody, but if we just stop buying it, they'd stop making it.
	If everybody stopped drinking cola today, they'd stop making it tomorrow.
	It's as simple as that.
	So when people get overwhelmed, I say to them, you know, just start in your home.
	Follow the Cancer-Transit Detox Your Home program.
	Just start there.
	Because if you do it, and your neighbor does it, and your sister does it, and your parents do it, it only takes 10% of a population to shift a paradigm.
	And that's what we need to kind of try and get to.
	I mean, you're always fighting them, which is great because you've made tremendous impact.
	And I'm always trying to wake up the consumer to go from being a mindless consumer to being a mindful consumer.
	And once you wake up and smell the coffee, it's hard to go back to sleep.
	Yeah, I have the genes for spasmodic dystonia, and other members of my family do too, but theirs did not manifest.
	And mine started manifesting when I was 42 years old after an environmental insult.
	So, you know, a lot of times if you can protect yourself, for example, one out of every four people who smoke cigarettes for 20 years is going to get lung cancer.
	But three are not, because they don't have the genetic vulnerability.
	Right, right.
	The people who have that vulnerability don't need to get lung cancer.
	If they just don't smoke that cigarette, most of them won't.
	Anyway, that's true with all of these things.
	We need to avoid the exposures.
	We have to be smarter.
	Listen, nobody is going to tell you that if you don't bring a lot of toxins into your home, you're going to stay healthier.
	If you eat better, you're probably not going to need as much prescriptive drugs.
	And all of this stuff that actually good health is not as expensive as we think if we're really willing to change up a lot of things.
	Not always.
	But in many cases, it is environmental, and it is this constant attacking of the quality of our immune system and the level of health that we're getting used to living at.
	Rand, thank you for everything you do, and thanks for joining us.
	Thank you, and thanks for all that you do.
	You know, Bobby, I'm grateful that you have the courage to speak out on so many things, and you make such a difference.
	So you live your family's legacy well.
	Thank you, Fran Drescher.

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