Immune Health: Why Our Environment Matters with Dr. Irina Rozenfeld
How Toxic Exposure Affects Chronic Illness and Immune Health
If you're living with chronic illness, toxic burden may be silently driving your symptoms — and most people never connect the two.
In this episode of the Fast Metabolism Matters Podcast, Haylie Pomroy sits down with Dr. Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, APRN, to break down exactly how environmental and lifestyle toxins compromise immune health, disrupt physiological balance, and make chronic illness harder to manage and recover from.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
- How toxic burden builds up through everyday environmental and lifestyle exposures
- The body's natural detoxification pathways — and what happens when they get overwhelmed
- Practical strategies for reducing toxic exposure during travel, sauna use, and daily routines
- Why patient-practitioner communication is critical for restoring immune and physiological balance
- What toxic exposure actually does to your microbiome — and why it matters for chronic illness
- How to identify and navigate toxic workplace environments
Why This Matters for Chronic Illness and Immune Health
For people managing chronic illness, the immune system is already under stress. When toxic load increases — through air quality, food, products, or environmental exposure — the body's detoxification system can become overwhelmed, triggering inflammation and worsening symptoms. Dr. Rozenfeld's clinical expertise bridges the gap between environmental medicine and immune health, offering actionable guidance grounded in real patient care.
About the Guest
Dr. Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC is a Nurse Practitioner at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine, specializing in complex chronic illness, environmental medicine, and immune health.
Listen to the full episode of Fast Metabolism Matters: Immune Health: Why Our Environment Matters — available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript Below:
FMM EP137 Video Podcast
Haylie Pomroy
This is all about bringing hope and help and education to you guys. And I think if I don't get anything else through to you, it's that healing your metabolism really, really matters. So when I was asked to do a podcast live, who in the world would I call?
Who would I want to kick off this new experience? And that was Dr. Edina Rosenfeld. Dr. Rosenfeld and I have a unique opportunity. I'm so fortunate, so blessed to get to work with her directly, to consider her as one of my dear friends. And I will tell you, when myself or my family has a health crisis, she's on speed dial. So Dr. Rosenfeld, thank you so much for being here during this live podcast. I think it's going to just bring a wealth of knowledge to everybody that has an opportunity to attend.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Thank you, Haylie. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you. It's like mutual education all over again every time when we're even free.
And I'm enjoying your company and your friends and your coaches. It's just such an enlightening community.
Haylie Pomroy
It is. We've had such a great opportunity to — what I always say is, my dream was to have a clinic without walls. When I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and I went through a ton of struggles, it was a very lonely process for me.
And also there weren't the conversations that are happening now about integrating medicine. You know, it was alternative at the time, and bringing really bright minds together to create ideas for the practice of medicine. And so today I want to — there's a million topics that you and I get onto every time we're together, but I want to focus on toxins, toxicity in the body, and how that impacts the body.
And so I guess, you know, my first question is, how does a body become toxic? You know, my dad had a chemical spill as a chemical engineer and got Bell's palsy that was episodic, but for most of us, what happens? How do we become toxic?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So I want to just add that I love when we talk about medicine and we include complementary — we don't call it alternative anymore. We like to keep it complementary. And most of the time when I work with a patient, sometimes I know the diagnosis.
Sometimes I don't know the diagnosis. Most of the time I want to learn as much as possible about the individual — where a person lives, what we eat, where we work, what is a hobby — because this is all exposures. All our life is exposures.
And I got lucky to be introduced to, and actually study and spend time in his clinic, one of the famous environmental medicine founders in the United States, Dr. William Rea. He's unfortunately already passed away.
However, he left a lot of literature and education. And I like the most important concept he left to us. It's called environmental load.
Living in a bubble is not possible. We all do not live in a bubble and we have different genetic predispositions and we live in different places in the world. Our exposures accumulate.
He coined the statement "environmental load." You can imagine like a big bucket and you keep adding — today you light a candle and there are some chemicals in this candle, and you drive to work every day and you're exposed to the exhaust of the cars, or you exercise and are running on the street. Sometimes I'm really concerned about people's actions when, in Florida, somebody is running and sweating on the street.
And there are six lanes of cars in each direction.
Haylie Pomroy
Or the cyclists.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Yeah, they're in traffic, in latex. My heart just hurts. Right.
I'm like, why don't you drive that road in the Everglades somewhere? Why do we need to drive on these six-lane, one-direction roads? But people don't feel it right away.
It's all accumulated, and you eat fish or you eat crab somewhere, and it's little by little. And everybody, depending on our genetic predisposition and environmental situation, at some point this bucket gets full and it can trigger disease. And disease can be — you're not going to predict what it is.
For example, like our colleague, geneticist Dr. Nathanson, when she's always talking about epigenetics — we have some genes expressed in multiple alleles and those alleles are responsible for detoxification. And some of them are working properly and some of them have a mutation and are not working properly. But if I'm never exposed to particular chemicals, the genes that I'm missing will not affect me.
But if I'm exposed, I can develop asthma because I was breathing something and I don't have a gene to activate the enzyme to fight against it, to detoxify it. Now, this is one part — where we're exposed, how many times we're exposed, and how much it's accumulated. And another point I want to stress right away about exposures, besides how we're accumulating this environmental load —
And sometimes people do it much faster than others. Then some of us have a genetic ability to detoxify. And then here's where complementary integrative medicine comes in.
When I talk with a patient, this is why it's important for me to know how we sleep, how we eat. If you don't sleep and at three o'clock at night you're not in a flat position in a deep sleep, it means your liver is not detoxifying. So it means everything you accumulate through the day — your liver, which is one of the major detoxifying organs we're going to talk about later — is not working.
And you know, you're going to be in the morning having an overload from yesterday. Now, diet is extremely important. I describe the liver for my patients like a big factory, and chemically, it's like its own chemical plant.
Right. To make this plant work, you need to put a lot of chemicals inside that all gather together to do the detoxifying work. And then I ask the patient, how are you moving your bowels?
And when a patient tells me they have constipation, it doesn't matter to me what chronic condition brought them to my clinic. I know that detoxification is not going to work because right now, at my intake level, regardless of the diagnosis, that constipation suddenly becomes my first problem — disregarding that the patient may be post-COVID or have chronic fatigue. But now I understand that while my patient has this problem — for the patient it may not be very important — for me it becomes the most important, because it's stopping me from everything else.
I know that he or she will not be detoxified. We're not going to be digested. The immune system is going to be either reactivated or suppressed.
This becomes my most important problem.
Haylie Pomroy
So if a person has external exposures, if they can't eliminate, then that environmental load that you talked about just gets compounded. Yeah, because they can't get rid of what they're exposed to.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
It's possibly helping them accumulate the bucket faster.
Haylie Pomroy
And there are people that have compromised capacity to detox, correct? And is it — you mentioned sometimes there's a predisposition or an epigenetic component — but is it also sometimes, if they've become toxic, then it begets not detoxifying really well?
You know what I mean? Like if a person — yeah, because it can impact the nervous system and it can impact the immune system.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So some toxins have particular problems. If I'm going to start with the most important and probably most common pollutant, it's air pollution. We call it particulate matter.
We're all exposed to air pollution and, surprisingly, it's a very interesting fact that in houses here in the United States, we use a lot of AC and in some households we never open windows, and actually air pollution inside houses and apartments accumulates. And it's really, really dangerous. I actually ask patients to open the window, let it air out your house.
Keeping air conditioned and completely enclosed without fresh air is not healthy. And of course, to address air pollution right away, it's really good to use HEPA filters. When you vacuum — and vacuuming is really good in the house — using HEPA filters is really, really important.
Haylie Pomroy
So Irina, like 10 or 15 years ago, I remember practicing and talking about clients that had come in and we were suspecting things like mercury toxicity or mycotoxins. And a lot of the doctors were very dismissive. And then it kind of was like, okay, well, this patient or this client is a canary in the coal mine.
They may be hypersensitive for whatever reason. But I feel like a lot of the air pollution, plastics, heavy metals — there's a lot of conversation around it now. Have patients come in more? I mean, I know you used to — or I feel like in practice it used to be like being a private detective, and, you know, convincing everybody.
But now, don't you think patients are more receptive or open to the fact that that could be impacting their health?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Yes. I think people are starting to understand, but still — I would say I have done a couple of cooking classes in Miami and there is a group of people who are not my patients. And I'm very recently doing these classes. I'm surprised that people are not aware of what we eat.
But it's the same as those athletes running on the road — I think they're not aware of what they're breathing in. There are people staying at home under only AC who don't know how much that's actually not so healthy. Some practices sound slow and normal and we think we're doing something healthy, but we are not.
And you know how tricky it is. And besides air, we have heavy metals and lead. You will be surprised — like, we always say, okay, it's all pain. Who sees it? But I see patients with high levels of lead. I see a lot of patients with arsenic and mercury, and recently, for some reason, thallium. Surprisingly — maybe in some supplements — people are getting it for some reason. I see high levels of selenium.
We do need selenium, but we don't need selenosis. We don't need double levels of it. So there's an investigation part to it. Then mycotoxins — there is particularly in Florida, but I think anywhere construction is done, not necessarily in the correct, healthy way.
There are a lot of empty spaces and some plumbing can accumulate some drips. I have colleagues and patients and friends getting into trouble. When we start having cardiotoxic effects, we have cardiovascular disease at 35 years old.
And then we have to investigate and find a lot of black mold somewhere in a house where someone lives and doesn't understand. And some people — some individuals — are very sensitive and they feel mold. It's because we have an allergic reaction, and the exposure to mold in a water-damaged building, the mold produces mycotoxin and we breathe in mycotoxin.
We can eat mycotoxin. Mycotoxin can be in different forms in different places, and we can eat it, we can breathe it. But not all of us are going to become sick.
Haylie Pomroy
So with toxins, how does it impact the immune system? So if a person — I know if a person already has something, maybe chronic like diabetes or autoimmune, that it can cause stress in the body. It can be a cause too, though, right?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So the toxin can affect the immune system in both ways. It can cause immunosuppression and it can cause immunostimulation. With immunostimulation, the patient will develop autoimmunity, allergies, this kind of condition.
And with immunosuppression, it is immune deficiency. And they're going to be exposed to any infection and it's going to cause illness because we don't have enough immunity to protect. And without the immunity — you are the expert.
You know how dangerous reactivation is when your immune system loses the tolerance to itself, practically. And that environmental trigger is triggering your immune system to attack itself. So the immune system is affected both ways.
The neurological system — a lot of neurodegenerative diseases are now documented and we know that Parkinson's disease, even autonomic dysfunction, can be caused by some environmental toxins. And there is exposure. We develop — and I want to mention that besides air, we have heavy metals, we do have mycotoxins, light, noise pollution — there are all kinds of electromagnetic fields.
We achieved probably something good with getting electric cars, decreasing the amount of some pollution through combustion. Although we don't know what's going to happen when we start utilizing used cars. We already know that there is a lot of pollution and actually medical conditions in countries abroad, outside of the United States, in Africa and in other countries where all the lithium batteries are produced, all the excavating is done.
Neurological defects. You can see young people with manganosis — this is a disease from high levels of manganese. And it's in young people who work on excavating this material.
Haylie Pomroy
I was reading an article about even sitting on the batteries with electric cars, that there is some concern with individuals. You know, it's one of those things where you just wonder, right? You just wonder the impact on your body.
And I always say, that's what neuroimmunology is about, right? How your body adapts, how the immune system — which is your most, in my opinion, adaptive system — responds to what is peripheral and what's within your body. In your clinic, what are the top toxins that you see? You said lead, arsenic, mercury — was it thallium that's the new one you're seeing more of?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I see thallium, not at high levels, but at kind of very low levels. I don't know where it comes from, but I like to do surveillance. And as you said, sometimes it's not very difficult — it just requires ordering a test.
The difficulty comes when you start investigating where it comes from. Sometimes I would like to go to a patient's home, and sometimes I just flip and tell patients, can you please read me the labels from all your canned fish?
Haylie Pomroy
And even things like deodorant or toothpaste. You know, we do a big detox of your kitchen, right? I say, if you feel like you have to have insecticides and pesticides and herbicides, I don't have them on my property or in my house. If you feel like you have to, put them in a tote with a lid in a garage, as far away from your home as humanly possible.
I have a client who's in the agricultural space. They like to use some herbicides and insecticides. I said, okay, we've got to get a storage shed on the back of the property and put it in there. And then when you guys are out of town for three months — and even then it makes me anxious for this person because of the really high level of toxins and the neurotoxic effect or impact that they had.
What types of things — like if you said, if you could go to a patient's house, what would be the hidden things that you would look for?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I actually like to send a very trained professional to the patient's house. There are certified trained professionals. We have an organization with lists and we can share those lists, and those professionals know where to look.
Mold is one of the most important parts in assessing your house. Something very simple — even when you're shopping for food, I always recommend everybody to avoid anything packaged, processed, and sitting in the middle of the store.
I always say — it's a very well-known fact — just shop by the perimeter and cook at home fresh, and don't save it for long. Eat fresh. It's lower in histamine when you just make it fresh and everything is cooked. There are ways to cook to kill mycotoxin, wash out mycotoxin, remove the toxin.
You can really feed yourself more healthily if you prepare food the appropriate way.
Haylie Pomroy
Dr. Rosenfeld, there are two pieces there. One is eliminating the toxins that come in from consumption. But the other thing is — it's critical — detox is an extremely nutrient-dependent process, right?
We don't just swallow lead and arsenic and then urinate out lead and arsenic. Or if we have good bowel movements, we don't swallow cadmium or a mycotoxin and then have a bowel movement and it's gone. There's a lot of nutrient exchange that has to happen and a lot of organs involved, correct?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Right. We have, of course, lungs. We breathe air with the lungs.
We also bring out toxins because we breathe out CO2, right? We have skin. Skin is one of the biggest organs that helps us to detoxify.
Of course, we have our most important liver and kidneys. The kidney — we have stages in the liver. I'm not going to overburden you with the chemistry, but there is a stage of detoxification in the liver where any toxic product goes through stages and we make it first water-soluble. The water-soluble toxins are going to be eliminated with the kidney, and then fat-soluble toxins are going to be eliminated with the feces.
This is how important it is that we don't have constipation. And so we have the gastrointestinal tract. We have skin, and the sweating through the skin helps us to remove a lot of toxins. Practically, lungs and skin and liver and kidney and gastrointestinal tract —
These are really important organs for us to be working properly so we detoxify. There are pathways, metabolic pathways, like the production of glutathione in the body, which is helping us to remove the products of our own metabolism. You know how it works because we live and our cells take chemicals and produce chemicals.
We need to remove those. If we're not removing them appropriately from each cell — the products of reactive oxygen — each cell has to remove its own waste.
Haylie Pomroy
Right. And so we take a toxin and we create a variation of that toxin so that our body can understand it and know how to handle it or deal with it. And the dream is that it releases and removes it.
If not, we store it and it can cause a whole bunch of problems when that happens. And that's that load, right, that we were talking about earlier.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Each cell in the body needs to produce product, create energy — whatever cells are specialized for — but we also produce some chemicals to kill bacteria or kill a virus. And some chemicals are produced just as a result of the metabolism, and those need to be removed too. And sometimes there is a disease process and it's not working and something accumulates, and this accumulation of inflammation and accumulation of toxicity is causing a disease process.
Getting all kinds of diseases and chronic illness is one of the most dangerous outcomes, because it's kind of in big numbers now.
Haylie Pomroy
And it's complex. It has diversity. One of my favorite things — and I don't know if I've ever told you this about traveling with you — is that we look at a lot of real-life situations where we see people having massive toxic exposures that maybe they're not aware of.
And you and I are big sauna fans. We love the sauna. And we were together and we saw someone going in there dripping sweat, and they had latex or — what do you call it — acrylic leggings on and plastic rubber flip-flops, and still makeup on. I almost had a heart attack.
Dr. Rosenfeld was like, look, look. And I said, should we strip her down and wipe her off? But I think, you know, we don't realize that when we open the blood flow with sauna, we're sweating, we are breaking down some of the barriers during the sweat — not only to detox, but also to allow ourselves more absorption and more exposure. And I think also a lot of times when we've traveled and we've been in different countries, we comment a lot, and I love that you share with me a lot of cultural history. But we comment a lot on how many other countries we've been in where they don't have the same food toxins. They don't have the same cleaning products.
You know, we can tolerate a hotel so much more. And I don't know — some of the older hotels in London, they feel moldy to me. But a lot of times we can tolerate it so much more because the sheets don't smell, the towels don't smell. They don't try to perfume their way out of everything.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
You know, we have different regulations. Like, plasticizers in the United States — FDA allows more than in Europe. Europe is more strict about BPA and phthalates. And there is a particular plastic which is approved by the European Union. The European Union is way more strict, I would say, than the FDA and EPA. The environment there calls for way more expensive products. But when you see this particular sign that says "bio" in Europe, it's really a clean product.
And in general, it depends on which country it comes from. I recommend my patients — depending on the disease process, like with patients who have histamine intolerance or allergies — they should only eat fresh or frozen fish, which is available in particular places. And everything in my view needs to be personalized.
Yes. And there's no general rules for everyone at the same time. I think it's just common sense to understand where the exposure is — and sometimes we don't know yet. I think I was practically just last week starting to think about this. I was listening to a lecture and I pulled the article and started reading about what's going to happen.
So just last week I saw a child — I feel the child was probably 16 or 18 years old — a boy with severe neurological disorders. He cannot walk by himself anymore because of exposure to manganese from excavating for electric cars. And this is why I decided, okay, let's invite the topic, let's study what's going to happen.
Visually, I do drive a hybrid and kind of enjoy it, but it's a hybrid. I'm not sitting in a pool — an electromagnetic pool. And I do have patients who cannot tolerate any electromagnetic exposure. They're super sensitive.
They cannot hold the phone in their hands. And it's a real disease. And we kind of trace it to when patients started the exposure.
And he was not the only one in his office — but he was exposed to big radars and got sick. And in Europe, we have guidelines for electromagnetic exposure illness. It very much reminds me of autonomic dysfunction.
And it's telling me that it affects the nervous system, because the autonomic neural system is sympathetic and parasympathetic — two parts. And when we become dysregulated, somebody will be very, very anxious and somebody will be fatigued.
Haylie Pomroy
So let me ask you — if a person has concern about heavy metal toxicity or chemicals or molds, is there one test? Are there several tests? And I may dovetail that into — because we get patients, you know, they've seen 20 doctors by the time they come into our institute.
And the first thing they walk in the door — yeah. So first thing, I mean, you walk in and it says we're a perfume-free facility. Nobody in my office even wears hairspray or deodorant. We just don't, because of limiting exposure in our work environment. But that's not the norm, right?
You know, you go to the doctor's office or, God forbid, the dentist, and there's Febreze in the bathroom. There are Glade plug-ins. I went to my chiropractor's office the other day and, boy, did I chew them up one end and down the other and said, what are you thinking?
And so how does someone approach — I know for our community we take a lot of action steps. We actively detoxify through nutrition and supplementation. But how can someone communicate to their doctor? Because I love it — I love that there's environmental medicine, a great organization. And they have tons of studies and white papers. So you can walk in the door — but what do you say to a patient that's been poo-pooed? I'm going to use that word.
But all those people that are out there struggling right now.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
You know, from the clinical perspective, we're sometimes in the same situation. You know, our institute kind of specializes in chronic fatigue syndrome, and we're an expert in that. And then we have patients from all walks of life. We have many doctors who didn't have an answer and they show up in our clinic, and we have a particular diagnosis.
I'm thinking sometimes walking into a room with a patient — I have a person with leukemia, I have a person with myasthenia gravis. And then actually this is where the magic happens. And this is what William Osler was saying — it's more important, not the diagnosis you know, but who your patient is.
It works for me in the cases when I walk in thinking I'm not a neurologist, I'm not a specialist in myasthenia gravis — why is this patient on my schedule? And then I walk in the room and we start a conversation. And most of the time I find a way to help.
Haylie Pomroy
Right.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Here's a way, kind of from a complementary medicine point of view — we start thinking about why this person becomes sick. Why is this patient having Parkinson's? Why is this patient having all kinds of conditions?
So why my dear patient — who we presented together in Europe and was published in a European journal — it was very interesting that the immunologist and rheumatologist there really wanted to hear about this patient who had already been given a diagnosis.
Haylie Pomroy
And it's different. Exactly. And it's different to manage care.
It is such — if you can find out as much as possible of the why, a lot of times that why reversed is the how you can start to get the body back into a better balance. And right now we're going to transition into our Q&A portion of the podcast. And you'll notice that we have live viewers asking us questions.
They're my Fast Metabolism members, and they get all kinds of amazing benefits like member discounts on my world-class supplements and shakes, every product every day, personalized guidance and support from myself and my team, and even the ability to ask questions of our podcast guests. If you have questions and want to get them answered, you should absolutely join my membership. And if you go to HayliePomroy.com/member, you can join for free for 30 days. Again, that's HayliePomroy.com/member. Join for free for 30 days. I can't wait to see you there.
We had a great question and it was from Sally, who asked us about suggestions for travel.
So I'm — and again, it's so fun that you and I travel together, because I don't even have to explain to you why I don't step on the carpet with socks or without shoes, because I don't want the surfactant on my feet. And it's one of the — I mean, think about it. It's a disinfectant. You have so much good microflora on the bottom of your feet. That's where you're supposed to walk in the dirt and on the grass and in the sand.
Right. But then you go and you walk around and you — it's like, oh. I did that one — it just kills me. But you don't even make fun of me when I do that when we travel together.
But what kind of tips — and this is from Sally, who seems to flare when she travels and it's difficult to travel due to exposures.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So for some very sensitive, chemically sensitive patients, maybe when you travel, you can buy at Home Depot or on Amazon some charcoal masks. They're like N95, but there is a mask, like a construction mask with charcoal filters. For some patients, it can be very life-saving.
So you're not going to accumulate on an airplane. There is exhaust, there is not very clean air, and there are a lot of chemicals and smells and odors. So a charcoal filter mask can help. And I see people traveling in them.
Haylie Pomroy
Have you ever seen one of those ion filter devices? It's almost like a necklace that you wear that just kind of purifies the air. It's got a filter on it.
I've used them. I personally enjoy them a lot. And then in the hotels — are there things? Like, I travel with my own soap. I don't use — again, think about the gut microflora. I think about all those surfactants, and I carry hand wipes. I personally do not use hand sanitizers with alcohol, but I'll use something like Seventh Generation diaper wipes because they have a soap, a surfactant in them. And it rinses really, really well. But if you look at a lot of hotels and stuff, they're all antibacterial soaps.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I do not like those soaps. What I personally like is a gel that stays on your hands. And as you said, I prefer those wipes because the process of wiping, I guess, helps my brain to understand that I did clean it.
That's true. That's true. If you have multiple chemical sensitivity, you definitely need to pack all your supplies with you, maybe in small portions. But do not get the exposure like I did in Mexico myself.
I did not expect to have an allergy. And there we go — I had an allergic reaction to something.
Haylie Pomroy
And one of the things that I started is, they're like an allergy bag — like what you would have at home for your pillowcases. And I just stuff things in it, you know, like my clothes. I usually put my sweaters that I'm worried about snagging or whatever. And then when I get to the hotel, I put it over my pillow so that I have my own.
And it just makes me feel better. You know, because you think about it — like Dr. Rosenfeld was saying, it's in the middle of the night that the lymphatics of the brain, that the liver is really active. Sleep is so important. And when I'm in a hotel, that really helps me a lot.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
For severe sensitivity, you can travel with a hypoallergenic pillowcase. Yeah, with such things. And it depends on the degree of allergies.
Some products we're not going to endorse here, but there are some things you can use to prevent reactions.
Haylie Pomroy
I'll say it. Metabolism Energy is my lifesaver because it has quercetin. I use that and vitamin C. Vitamin C for me — the Metabolism Vitamin C — helps mobilize and detox.
We're like little dispensaries when we travel. I'm like, here, eat this. Here, take this. But that really helps me personally. I don't tolerate things like Benadryl or other histamine blockers at all. It triggers more of my autoimmune response. I actually get like an inflammatory rebound from it. So that's why I like the Metabolism Energy — for me personally, it works fabulous.
When I travel, we have another great question. What about saunas? And I know we talked a little bit about this. Do you like infrared saunas? Do you like steam saunas? I know I love saunas and I love that you love saunas.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Do you have another hour? I'm really happy somebody asked my question.
I go to a very exclusive gym and we are so bad on the sauna etiquette. You know, my husband wrote a letter to the director of the whole gym. The point is, make sure the sauna is clean and you don't want to sit on somebody's sweat.
You use your own towel. Between you and the sauna should be towels everywhere — under you, everywhere. You don't put your legs — you don't want to be dressed up in your synthetic outfits in the sauna, because instead of detoxing and letting the toxins go out, you're going to suck everything out of your synthetic outfits, like Haylie already mentioned.
I like infrared. I do like a hot sauna and I can tolerate high temperature, but it's not easy for everyone, and it's a process when you're developing. So when you are visiting, back in Switzerland or Germany, where they have a long old tradition — like the Roman Irish baths — with farmers' springs for 200 or 300 years, or longer. So there are steps, and I recommend everybody follow them. I try to repeat it as much as I can in a regular American gym environment.
So you prepare yourself. First, you dry brush and you remove dry skin from yourself. And then you take a hot shower so your temperature center gets used to the hot temperature. And then I go to the steam room because it's not as hot as the dry sauna. And so your temperature rises, so when you end up going to the dry sauna, every time you clean yourself with a towel — with a cotton towel — and then you go to the hottest dry sauna. You don't need to sit there for a long time. You start sweating very fast.
So infrared sauna makes everything easier because in a shorter time, at a lower temperature, you can sit and read and drink water at the same time. It's not really so hot in an infrared sauna, but you start sweating faster. I think infrared sauna is very nice for patients. It's softer, easier to get the effect.
And the most important part — take a shower or clean yourself with cotton towels. Remove everything you sweat out. Remove it right away, because you sweat out toxins for sure.
Haylie Pomroy
Absolutely. And if you're doing it at home, try to have at least a chlorine filter on the shower that you're going to take afterwards, after the sauna. So when I have individuals that have really significant chemical sensitivity, we will do things like, I'll say, okay, pack your own towels. And then definitely wipe under the armpits, around the breast, behind the knees if you have to go home before you shower for some reason.
So there are a lot of these spas that show up where you can go in and get infrared sauna and you sweat and you throw your clothes on and you go home. I always tell people, bring a washcloth, jump into the bathroom, and do a little bit of cleansing of your skin before you throw your clothes on, if at all possible.
And I bring my own towel. I mean, I have them at my house, but I like to use my own towel if at all possible. Try cold plunge.
I'm not a cold plunge fan. Well, this is the thing — I love that people love it. I love it for them. I feel like if you feel amazing in a cold plunge, I am so happy for you. I have moved aside so cold plungers can have more space in the cold plunge.
My body is like, no.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I cannot take a cold shower after the sauna, but I love cold plunge. And I'm so happy right now. I just recently visited a gym or some health facility, and we had amazing infrared saunas, just regular dry saunas, and cold plunges. I was so impressed that people really believe in it and are doing it.
And I feel like my mitochondria are getting renewed.
Haylie Pomroy
And you mentioned the dry skin brushing before — that can amplify any sauna experience so much. I mean, my dream, when you talk about exercise, the best environment to exercise would be with no clothing on outside in the woods or in nature. Wouldn't that be great?
But vitamin D synthesis, the way our body metabolizes vitamin D with that sun exposure can help amplify any form of exercise into helping hormones come into homeostasis and really not just lowering inflammation, but anchoring inflammation at a lower level.
So anytime — you know, with the infrared, we're doing some mimicking of what we do in nature. And so the dry skin brushing or the stimulation of the skin prior to infrared can be amazing, can be incredible.
We have another question. We have someone that was working in a building that was built in 1920, and ever since she's been in that building — so what do you suggest when patients feel like their work environment is a toxic environment? And I don't mean just emotionally, because maybe the team's not cohesive. But how can — are there any testing kits that you can take into the work environment?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
If it's not a problem with the employer, I think there is ERMI — there is a test. Some laboratories, like Real Time Lab or, I think, US BioTek lab — we do have tests for the environment. Even in Home Depot, I guess you can buy a plate. Yeah, I've never tried one of those.
Put a plate next to your desk and try to see what's going to grow, or under the desk. You can be a little more discreet. But there is a test available to the clinician.
Haylie Pomroy
What about bringing an air purifier to work? Can that help — a HEPA filter or an air purifier in a work environment?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
We do have air purifiers in our offices and in the patient rooms. Yes, it will help. You can put it next to yourself and at least purify the air around yourself. But I would also put some plates and maybe buy some tests to evaluate it yourself.
And patients can be tested themselves for mycotoxins, heavy metals, all kinds of plasticizers, organic volatile compounds. We have many specialty labs. There are all kinds of testing available right now.
Usually urine tests — regular commercial labs' urine tests often tell us what the patient just ate, and that's an exposure from food. If there is something in the blood, it's more of a concern. In the hair, it's more of a concern.
It's a kind of level-of-concern scale. I take even urine exposure seriously. Sometimes for some reason people disregard it and say like, oh, you just ate something.
Haylie Pomroy
And it's just passing through. But I always say, it was just passing through. It's so funny.
I was just like, we all need to go back. We need to go back to basic biology and basic biochemistry. Yes, we have a tube, but everything is exchanged in our body.
What you consume is not what you excrete as a whole. Whenever they poo-poo urine tests, I'm always going, you know, are you sure that we all understand how blood work works? It's just a little frustrating sometimes.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I want to mention a little bit about this. So when I was telling you, okay, here's a patient with myasthenia gravis, for example, and I don't know what I'm going to be doing with this patient — then we do this environmental testing and metabolomics where we see how, in general, things are absorbed. And one important thing is, you take in vitamins, but more importantly, what is your body doing with those vitamins, practically?
What is your absorption like? Like we have pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Something just goes through us and something we do something with.
And it's important. My favorite test is a comprehensive stool test, because it gives you so much information. If your patient digests, if the gastrointestinal tract is inflamed, it means we're not digesting and it means we're not producing anything for the body.
The microbiome in our gastrointestinal tract is there for a reason. Those microbes are working for us. And if those are good microbes, they keep us lean, they keep us healthy and happy.
And we sleep at night. And sometimes when you wake up in the middle of the night, it's maybe because your microbiome is hungry. Maybe you gave them too much sugar in the evening.
And those bacteria behave like kids — they crash and wake you up.
Haylie Pomroy
Absolutely. The one thing that we were talking about the other day was, even with toxins and chemicals, sometimes we can test for things like we find in glyphosates. And I had a client that showed a lot of the neurological components of what we call glyphosate poisoning, where basically there's been that toxic load — one too many chemical exposures.
And their level wasn't that particularly high. I was surprised — if I were a gambling woman, I would have put money on it. But then we did a comprehensive digestive stool analysis.
And so the way glyphosates work is they don't work on a neurological pathway that humans have. That's why it's been deemed as okay for humans to consume. It's the shikimate pathway, where it works to kill a metabolic pathway that only bugs have. So it kills bugs and not humans is the theory.
The issue is, it kills human bugs that live in humans, that eat what humans eat, called the microbiome, right? So this person's glyphosate was actually killing the gut microbiome so effectively that the toxin wasn't necessarily pooling in the blood or in the tissue. But the gut microbiome, when we looked at it, was just completely trashed.
And so with toxins, not only can they store in the tissue — we talk a lot in our world of it migrating into the brain, impacting the thyroid — but it can just poison your internal ecosystem. And most of what we eat, we don't eat. Most of what we eat is feed for our gut microbiome, which we then eat, if that makes any sense. So we're kind of a secondary feeder, if you will.
And so feeding that is so important, and not insulting our immune system — because remember, that's what makes us adaptive. Not insulting our immune system in the process can be a huge key to keeping us healthy.
Dr. Rosenfeld, I cannot thank you enough for coming and answering everybody's questions.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
My pleasure. It's such a nice, enriching conversation. I had fun.
Haylie Pomroy
Well, we are so fortunate to have you in our world and in our community. And I will tell you, you have set the bar so high for what we should expect and appreciate and what should be the standard — the doctors and practitioners we get to see. People that are obviously intelligent, but thoughtful, and really customizing everything to the patient, because it's a complex body.
And when we try to reduce it down to a pill or even a toxin, it can be hard. So thank you. We are, as you know, huge proponents of feeding the body through detoxification.
I don't believe in stripping the body when it's such a nutrient-dependent process. But thank you so much.
How Toxic Exposure Affects Chronic Illness and Immune Health
If you're living with chronic illness, toxic burden may be silently driving your symptoms — and most people never connect the two.
In this episode of the Fast Metabolism Matters Podcast, Haylie Pomroy sits down with Dr. Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, APRN, to break down exactly how environmental and lifestyle toxins compromise immune health, disrupt physiological balance, and make chronic illness harder to manage and recover from.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
- How toxic burden builds up through everyday environmental and lifestyle exposures
- The body's natural detoxification pathways — and what happens when they get overwhelmed
- Practical strategies for reducing toxic exposure during travel, sauna use, and daily routines
- Why patient-practitioner communication is critical for restoring immune and physiological balance
- What toxic exposure actually does to your microbiome — and why it matters for chronic illness
- How to identify and navigate toxic workplace environments
Why This Matters for Chronic Illness and Immune Health
For people managing chronic illness, the immune system is already under stress. When toxic load increases — through air quality, food, products, or environmental exposure — the body's detoxification system can become overwhelmed, triggering inflammation and worsening symptoms. Dr. Rozenfeld's clinical expertise bridges the gap between environmental medicine and immune health, offering actionable guidance grounded in real patient care.
About the Guest
Dr. Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC is a Nurse Practitioner at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine, specializing in complex chronic illness, environmental medicine, and immune health.
Listen to the full episode of Fast Metabolism Matters: Immune Health: Why Our Environment Matters — available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript Below:
FMM EP137 Video Podcast
Haylie Pomroy
This is all about bringing hope and help and education to you guys. And I think if I don't get anything else through to you, it's that healing your metabolism really, really matters. So when I was asked to do a podcast live, who in the world would I call?
Who would I want to kick off this new experience? And that was Dr. Edina Rosenfeld. Dr. Rosenfeld and I have a unique opportunity. I'm so fortunate, so blessed to get to work with her directly, to consider her as one of my dear friends. And I will tell you, when myself or my family has a health crisis, she's on speed dial. So Dr. Rosenfeld, thank you so much for being here during this live podcast. I think it's going to just bring a wealth of knowledge to everybody that has an opportunity to attend.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Thank you, Haylie. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you. It's like mutual education all over again every time when we're even free.
And I'm enjoying your company and your friends and your coaches. It's just such an enlightening community.
Haylie Pomroy
It is. We've had such a great opportunity to — what I always say is, my dream was to have a clinic without walls. When I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and I went through a ton of struggles, it was a very lonely process for me.
And also there weren't the conversations that are happening now about integrating medicine. You know, it was alternative at the time, and bringing really bright minds together to create ideas for the practice of medicine. And so today I want to — there's a million topics that you and I get onto every time we're together, but I want to focus on toxins, toxicity in the body, and how that impacts the body.
And so I guess, you know, my first question is, how does a body become toxic? You know, my dad had a chemical spill as a chemical engineer and got Bell's palsy that was episodic, but for most of us, what happens? How do we become toxic?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So I want to just add that I love when we talk about medicine and we include complementary — we don't call it alternative anymore. We like to keep it complementary. And most of the time when I work with a patient, sometimes I know the diagnosis.
Sometimes I don't know the diagnosis. Most of the time I want to learn as much as possible about the individual — where a person lives, what we eat, where we work, what is a hobby — because this is all exposures. All our life is exposures.
And I got lucky to be introduced to, and actually study and spend time in his clinic, one of the famous environmental medicine founders in the United States, Dr. William Rea. He's unfortunately already passed away.
However, he left a lot of literature and education. And I like the most important concept he left to us. It's called environmental load.
Living in a bubble is not possible. We all do not live in a bubble and we have different genetic predispositions and we live in different places in the world. Our exposures accumulate.
He coined the statement "environmental load." You can imagine like a big bucket and you keep adding — today you light a candle and there are some chemicals in this candle, and you drive to work every day and you're exposed to the exhaust of the cars, or you exercise and are running on the street. Sometimes I'm really concerned about people's actions when, in Florida, somebody is running and sweating on the street.
And there are six lanes of cars in each direction.
Haylie Pomroy
Or the cyclists.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Yeah, they're in traffic, in latex. My heart just hurts. Right.
I'm like, why don't you drive that road in the Everglades somewhere? Why do we need to drive on these six-lane, one-direction roads? But people don't feel it right away.
It's all accumulated, and you eat fish or you eat crab somewhere, and it's little by little. And everybody, depending on our genetic predisposition and environmental situation, at some point this bucket gets full and it can trigger disease. And disease can be — you're not going to predict what it is.
For example, like our colleague, geneticist Dr. Nathanson, when she's always talking about epigenetics — we have some genes expressed in multiple alleles and those alleles are responsible for detoxification. And some of them are working properly and some of them have a mutation and are not working properly. But if I'm never exposed to particular chemicals, the genes that I'm missing will not affect me.
But if I'm exposed, I can develop asthma because I was breathing something and I don't have a gene to activate the enzyme to fight against it, to detoxify it. Now, this is one part — where we're exposed, how many times we're exposed, and how much it's accumulated. And another point I want to stress right away about exposures, besides how we're accumulating this environmental load —
And sometimes people do it much faster than others. Then some of us have a genetic ability to detoxify. And then here's where complementary integrative medicine comes in.
When I talk with a patient, this is why it's important for me to know how we sleep, how we eat. If you don't sleep and at three o'clock at night you're not in a flat position in a deep sleep, it means your liver is not detoxifying. So it means everything you accumulate through the day — your liver, which is one of the major detoxifying organs we're going to talk about later — is not working.
And you know, you're going to be in the morning having an overload from yesterday. Now, diet is extremely important. I describe the liver for my patients like a big factory, and chemically, it's like its own chemical plant.
Right. To make this plant work, you need to put a lot of chemicals inside that all gather together to do the detoxifying work. And then I ask the patient, how are you moving your bowels?
And when a patient tells me they have constipation, it doesn't matter to me what chronic condition brought them to my clinic. I know that detoxification is not going to work because right now, at my intake level, regardless of the diagnosis, that constipation suddenly becomes my first problem — disregarding that the patient may be post-COVID or have chronic fatigue. But now I understand that while my patient has this problem — for the patient it may not be very important — for me it becomes the most important, because it's stopping me from everything else.
I know that he or she will not be detoxified. We're not going to be digested. The immune system is going to be either reactivated or suppressed.
This becomes my most important problem.
Haylie Pomroy
So if a person has external exposures, if they can't eliminate, then that environmental load that you talked about just gets compounded. Yeah, because they can't get rid of what they're exposed to.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
It's possibly helping them accumulate the bucket faster.
Haylie Pomroy
And there are people that have compromised capacity to detox, correct? And is it — you mentioned sometimes there's a predisposition or an epigenetic component — but is it also sometimes, if they've become toxic, then it begets not detoxifying really well?
You know what I mean? Like if a person — yeah, because it can impact the nervous system and it can impact the immune system.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So some toxins have particular problems. If I'm going to start with the most important and probably most common pollutant, it's air pollution. We call it particulate matter.
We're all exposed to air pollution and, surprisingly, it's a very interesting fact that in houses here in the United States, we use a lot of AC and in some households we never open windows, and actually air pollution inside houses and apartments accumulates. And it's really, really dangerous. I actually ask patients to open the window, let it air out your house.
Keeping air conditioned and completely enclosed without fresh air is not healthy. And of course, to address air pollution right away, it's really good to use HEPA filters. When you vacuum — and vacuuming is really good in the house — using HEPA filters is really, really important.
Haylie Pomroy
So Irina, like 10 or 15 years ago, I remember practicing and talking about clients that had come in and we were suspecting things like mercury toxicity or mycotoxins. And a lot of the doctors were very dismissive. And then it kind of was like, okay, well, this patient or this client is a canary in the coal mine.
They may be hypersensitive for whatever reason. But I feel like a lot of the air pollution, plastics, heavy metals — there's a lot of conversation around it now. Have patients come in more? I mean, I know you used to — or I feel like in practice it used to be like being a private detective, and, you know, convincing everybody.
But now, don't you think patients are more receptive or open to the fact that that could be impacting their health?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Yes. I think people are starting to understand, but still — I would say I have done a couple of cooking classes in Miami and there is a group of people who are not my patients. And I'm very recently doing these classes. I'm surprised that people are not aware of what we eat.
But it's the same as those athletes running on the road — I think they're not aware of what they're breathing in. There are people staying at home under only AC who don't know how much that's actually not so healthy. Some practices sound slow and normal and we think we're doing something healthy, but we are not.
And you know how tricky it is. And besides air, we have heavy metals and lead. You will be surprised — like, we always say, okay, it's all pain. Who sees it? But I see patients with high levels of lead. I see a lot of patients with arsenic and mercury, and recently, for some reason, thallium. Surprisingly — maybe in some supplements — people are getting it for some reason. I see high levels of selenium.
We do need selenium, but we don't need selenosis. We don't need double levels of it. So there's an investigation part to it. Then mycotoxins — there is particularly in Florida, but I think anywhere construction is done, not necessarily in the correct, healthy way.
There are a lot of empty spaces and some plumbing can accumulate some drips. I have colleagues and patients and friends getting into trouble. When we start having cardiotoxic effects, we have cardiovascular disease at 35 years old.
And then we have to investigate and find a lot of black mold somewhere in a house where someone lives and doesn't understand. And some people — some individuals — are very sensitive and they feel mold. It's because we have an allergic reaction, and the exposure to mold in a water-damaged building, the mold produces mycotoxin and we breathe in mycotoxin.
We can eat mycotoxin. Mycotoxin can be in different forms in different places, and we can eat it, we can breathe it. But not all of us are going to become sick.
Haylie Pomroy
So with toxins, how does it impact the immune system? So if a person — I know if a person already has something, maybe chronic like diabetes or autoimmune, that it can cause stress in the body. It can be a cause too, though, right?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So the toxin can affect the immune system in both ways. It can cause immunosuppression and it can cause immunostimulation. With immunostimulation, the patient will develop autoimmunity, allergies, this kind of condition.
And with immunosuppression, it is immune deficiency. And they're going to be exposed to any infection and it's going to cause illness because we don't have enough immunity to protect. And without the immunity — you are the expert.
You know how dangerous reactivation is when your immune system loses the tolerance to itself, practically. And that environmental trigger is triggering your immune system to attack itself. So the immune system is affected both ways.
The neurological system — a lot of neurodegenerative diseases are now documented and we know that Parkinson's disease, even autonomic dysfunction, can be caused by some environmental toxins. And there is exposure. We develop — and I want to mention that besides air, we have heavy metals, we do have mycotoxins, light, noise pollution — there are all kinds of electromagnetic fields.
We achieved probably something good with getting electric cars, decreasing the amount of some pollution through combustion. Although we don't know what's going to happen when we start utilizing used cars. We already know that there is a lot of pollution and actually medical conditions in countries abroad, outside of the United States, in Africa and in other countries where all the lithium batteries are produced, all the excavating is done.
Neurological defects. You can see young people with manganosis — this is a disease from high levels of manganese. And it's in young people who work on excavating this material.
Haylie Pomroy
I was reading an article about even sitting on the batteries with electric cars, that there is some concern with individuals. You know, it's one of those things where you just wonder, right? You just wonder the impact on your body.
And I always say, that's what neuroimmunology is about, right? How your body adapts, how the immune system — which is your most, in my opinion, adaptive system — responds to what is peripheral and what's within your body. In your clinic, what are the top toxins that you see? You said lead, arsenic, mercury — was it thallium that's the new one you're seeing more of?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I see thallium, not at high levels, but at kind of very low levels. I don't know where it comes from, but I like to do surveillance. And as you said, sometimes it's not very difficult — it just requires ordering a test.
The difficulty comes when you start investigating where it comes from. Sometimes I would like to go to a patient's home, and sometimes I just flip and tell patients, can you please read me the labels from all your canned fish?
Haylie Pomroy
And even things like deodorant or toothpaste. You know, we do a big detox of your kitchen, right? I say, if you feel like you have to have insecticides and pesticides and herbicides, I don't have them on my property or in my house. If you feel like you have to, put them in a tote with a lid in a garage, as far away from your home as humanly possible.
I have a client who's in the agricultural space. They like to use some herbicides and insecticides. I said, okay, we've got to get a storage shed on the back of the property and put it in there. And then when you guys are out of town for three months — and even then it makes me anxious for this person because of the really high level of toxins and the neurotoxic effect or impact that they had.
What types of things — like if you said, if you could go to a patient's house, what would be the hidden things that you would look for?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I actually like to send a very trained professional to the patient's house. There are certified trained professionals. We have an organization with lists and we can share those lists, and those professionals know where to look.
Mold is one of the most important parts in assessing your house. Something very simple — even when you're shopping for food, I always recommend everybody to avoid anything packaged, processed, and sitting in the middle of the store.
I always say — it's a very well-known fact — just shop by the perimeter and cook at home fresh, and don't save it for long. Eat fresh. It's lower in histamine when you just make it fresh and everything is cooked. There are ways to cook to kill mycotoxin, wash out mycotoxin, remove the toxin.
You can really feed yourself more healthily if you prepare food the appropriate way.
Haylie Pomroy
Dr. Rosenfeld, there are two pieces there. One is eliminating the toxins that come in from consumption. But the other thing is — it's critical — detox is an extremely nutrient-dependent process, right?
We don't just swallow lead and arsenic and then urinate out lead and arsenic. Or if we have good bowel movements, we don't swallow cadmium or a mycotoxin and then have a bowel movement and it's gone. There's a lot of nutrient exchange that has to happen and a lot of organs involved, correct?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Right. We have, of course, lungs. We breathe air with the lungs.
We also bring out toxins because we breathe out CO2, right? We have skin. Skin is one of the biggest organs that helps us to detoxify.
Of course, we have our most important liver and kidneys. The kidney — we have stages in the liver. I'm not going to overburden you with the chemistry, but there is a stage of detoxification in the liver where any toxic product goes through stages and we make it first water-soluble. The water-soluble toxins are going to be eliminated with the kidney, and then fat-soluble toxins are going to be eliminated with the feces.
This is how important it is that we don't have constipation. And so we have the gastrointestinal tract. We have skin, and the sweating through the skin helps us to remove a lot of toxins. Practically, lungs and skin and liver and kidney and gastrointestinal tract —
These are really important organs for us to be working properly so we detoxify. There are pathways, metabolic pathways, like the production of glutathione in the body, which is helping us to remove the products of our own metabolism. You know how it works because we live and our cells take chemicals and produce chemicals.
We need to remove those. If we're not removing them appropriately from each cell — the products of reactive oxygen — each cell has to remove its own waste.
Haylie Pomroy
Right. And so we take a toxin and we create a variation of that toxin so that our body can understand it and know how to handle it or deal with it. And the dream is that it releases and removes it.
If not, we store it and it can cause a whole bunch of problems when that happens. And that's that load, right, that we were talking about earlier.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Each cell in the body needs to produce product, create energy — whatever cells are specialized for — but we also produce some chemicals to kill bacteria or kill a virus. And some chemicals are produced just as a result of the metabolism, and those need to be removed too. And sometimes there is a disease process and it's not working and something accumulates, and this accumulation of inflammation and accumulation of toxicity is causing a disease process.
Getting all kinds of diseases and chronic illness is one of the most dangerous outcomes, because it's kind of in big numbers now.
Haylie Pomroy
And it's complex. It has diversity. One of my favorite things — and I don't know if I've ever told you this about traveling with you — is that we look at a lot of real-life situations where we see people having massive toxic exposures that maybe they're not aware of.
And you and I are big sauna fans. We love the sauna. And we were together and we saw someone going in there dripping sweat, and they had latex or — what do you call it — acrylic leggings on and plastic rubber flip-flops, and still makeup on. I almost had a heart attack.
Dr. Rosenfeld was like, look, look. And I said, should we strip her down and wipe her off? But I think, you know, we don't realize that when we open the blood flow with sauna, we're sweating, we are breaking down some of the barriers during the sweat — not only to detox, but also to allow ourselves more absorption and more exposure. And I think also a lot of times when we've traveled and we've been in different countries, we comment a lot, and I love that you share with me a lot of cultural history. But we comment a lot on how many other countries we've been in where they don't have the same food toxins. They don't have the same cleaning products.
You know, we can tolerate a hotel so much more. And I don't know — some of the older hotels in London, they feel moldy to me. But a lot of times we can tolerate it so much more because the sheets don't smell, the towels don't smell. They don't try to perfume their way out of everything.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
You know, we have different regulations. Like, plasticizers in the United States — FDA allows more than in Europe. Europe is more strict about BPA and phthalates. And there is a particular plastic which is approved by the European Union. The European Union is way more strict, I would say, than the FDA and EPA. The environment there calls for way more expensive products. But when you see this particular sign that says "bio" in Europe, it's really a clean product.
And in general, it depends on which country it comes from. I recommend my patients — depending on the disease process, like with patients who have histamine intolerance or allergies — they should only eat fresh or frozen fish, which is available in particular places. And everything in my view needs to be personalized.
Yes. And there's no general rules for everyone at the same time. I think it's just common sense to understand where the exposure is — and sometimes we don't know yet. I think I was practically just last week starting to think about this. I was listening to a lecture and I pulled the article and started reading about what's going to happen.
So just last week I saw a child — I feel the child was probably 16 or 18 years old — a boy with severe neurological disorders. He cannot walk by himself anymore because of exposure to manganese from excavating for electric cars. And this is why I decided, okay, let's invite the topic, let's study what's going to happen.
Visually, I do drive a hybrid and kind of enjoy it, but it's a hybrid. I'm not sitting in a pool — an electromagnetic pool. And I do have patients who cannot tolerate any electromagnetic exposure. They're super sensitive.
They cannot hold the phone in their hands. And it's a real disease. And we kind of trace it to when patients started the exposure.
And he was not the only one in his office — but he was exposed to big radars and got sick. And in Europe, we have guidelines for electromagnetic exposure illness. It very much reminds me of autonomic dysfunction.
And it's telling me that it affects the nervous system, because the autonomic neural system is sympathetic and parasympathetic — two parts. And when we become dysregulated, somebody will be very, very anxious and somebody will be fatigued.
Haylie Pomroy
So let me ask you — if a person has concern about heavy metal toxicity or chemicals or molds, is there one test? Are there several tests? And I may dovetail that into — because we get patients, you know, they've seen 20 doctors by the time they come into our institute.
And the first thing they walk in the door — yeah. So first thing, I mean, you walk in and it says we're a perfume-free facility. Nobody in my office even wears hairspray or deodorant. We just don't, because of limiting exposure in our work environment. But that's not the norm, right?
You know, you go to the doctor's office or, God forbid, the dentist, and there's Febreze in the bathroom. There are Glade plug-ins. I went to my chiropractor's office the other day and, boy, did I chew them up one end and down the other and said, what are you thinking?
And so how does someone approach — I know for our community we take a lot of action steps. We actively detoxify through nutrition and supplementation. But how can someone communicate to their doctor? Because I love it — I love that there's environmental medicine, a great organization. And they have tons of studies and white papers. So you can walk in the door — but what do you say to a patient that's been poo-pooed? I'm going to use that word.
But all those people that are out there struggling right now.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
You know, from the clinical perspective, we're sometimes in the same situation. You know, our institute kind of specializes in chronic fatigue syndrome, and we're an expert in that. And then we have patients from all walks of life. We have many doctors who didn't have an answer and they show up in our clinic, and we have a particular diagnosis.
I'm thinking sometimes walking into a room with a patient — I have a person with leukemia, I have a person with myasthenia gravis. And then actually this is where the magic happens. And this is what William Osler was saying — it's more important, not the diagnosis you know, but who your patient is.
It works for me in the cases when I walk in thinking I'm not a neurologist, I'm not a specialist in myasthenia gravis — why is this patient on my schedule? And then I walk in the room and we start a conversation. And most of the time I find a way to help.
Haylie Pomroy
Right.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Here's a way, kind of from a complementary medicine point of view — we start thinking about why this person becomes sick. Why is this patient having Parkinson's? Why is this patient having all kinds of conditions?
So why my dear patient — who we presented together in Europe and was published in a European journal — it was very interesting that the immunologist and rheumatologist there really wanted to hear about this patient who had already been given a diagnosis.
Haylie Pomroy
And it's different. Exactly. And it's different to manage care.
It is such — if you can find out as much as possible of the why, a lot of times that why reversed is the how you can start to get the body back into a better balance. And right now we're going to transition into our Q&A portion of the podcast. And you'll notice that we have live viewers asking us questions.
They're my Fast Metabolism members, and they get all kinds of amazing benefits like member discounts on my world-class supplements and shakes, every product every day, personalized guidance and support from myself and my team, and even the ability to ask questions of our podcast guests. If you have questions and want to get them answered, you should absolutely join my membership. And if you go to HayliePomroy.com/member, you can join for free for 30 days. Again, that's HayliePomroy.com/member. Join for free for 30 days. I can't wait to see you there.
We had a great question and it was from Sally, who asked us about suggestions for travel.
So I'm — and again, it's so fun that you and I travel together, because I don't even have to explain to you why I don't step on the carpet with socks or without shoes, because I don't want the surfactant on my feet. And it's one of the — I mean, think about it. It's a disinfectant. You have so much good microflora on the bottom of your feet. That's where you're supposed to walk in the dirt and on the grass and in the sand.
Right. But then you go and you walk around and you — it's like, oh. I did that one — it just kills me. But you don't even make fun of me when I do that when we travel together.
But what kind of tips — and this is from Sally, who seems to flare when she travels and it's difficult to travel due to exposures.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
So for some very sensitive, chemically sensitive patients, maybe when you travel, you can buy at Home Depot or on Amazon some charcoal masks. They're like N95, but there is a mask, like a construction mask with charcoal filters. For some patients, it can be very life-saving.
So you're not going to accumulate on an airplane. There is exhaust, there is not very clean air, and there are a lot of chemicals and smells and odors. So a charcoal filter mask can help. And I see people traveling in them.
Haylie Pomroy
Have you ever seen one of those ion filter devices? It's almost like a necklace that you wear that just kind of purifies the air. It's got a filter on it.
I've used them. I personally enjoy them a lot. And then in the hotels — are there things? Like, I travel with my own soap. I don't use — again, think about the gut microflora. I think about all those surfactants, and I carry hand wipes. I personally do not use hand sanitizers with alcohol, but I'll use something like Seventh Generation diaper wipes because they have a soap, a surfactant in them. And it rinses really, really well. But if you look at a lot of hotels and stuff, they're all antibacterial soaps.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I do not like those soaps. What I personally like is a gel that stays on your hands. And as you said, I prefer those wipes because the process of wiping, I guess, helps my brain to understand that I did clean it.
That's true. That's true. If you have multiple chemical sensitivity, you definitely need to pack all your supplies with you, maybe in small portions. But do not get the exposure like I did in Mexico myself.
I did not expect to have an allergy. And there we go — I had an allergic reaction to something.
Haylie Pomroy
And one of the things that I started is, they're like an allergy bag — like what you would have at home for your pillowcases. And I just stuff things in it, you know, like my clothes. I usually put my sweaters that I'm worried about snagging or whatever. And then when I get to the hotel, I put it over my pillow so that I have my own.
And it just makes me feel better. You know, because you think about it — like Dr. Rosenfeld was saying, it's in the middle of the night that the lymphatics of the brain, that the liver is really active. Sleep is so important. And when I'm in a hotel, that really helps me a lot.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
For severe sensitivity, you can travel with a hypoallergenic pillowcase. Yeah, with such things. And it depends on the degree of allergies.
Some products we're not going to endorse here, but there are some things you can use to prevent reactions.
Haylie Pomroy
I'll say it. Metabolism Energy is my lifesaver because it has quercetin. I use that and vitamin C. Vitamin C for me — the Metabolism Vitamin C — helps mobilize and detox.
We're like little dispensaries when we travel. I'm like, here, eat this. Here, take this. But that really helps me personally. I don't tolerate things like Benadryl or other histamine blockers at all. It triggers more of my autoimmune response. I actually get like an inflammatory rebound from it. So that's why I like the Metabolism Energy — for me personally, it works fabulous.
When I travel, we have another great question. What about saunas? And I know we talked a little bit about this. Do you like infrared saunas? Do you like steam saunas? I know I love saunas and I love that you love saunas.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
Do you have another hour? I'm really happy somebody asked my question.
I go to a very exclusive gym and we are so bad on the sauna etiquette. You know, my husband wrote a letter to the director of the whole gym. The point is, make sure the sauna is clean and you don't want to sit on somebody's sweat.
You use your own towel. Between you and the sauna should be towels everywhere — under you, everywhere. You don't put your legs — you don't want to be dressed up in your synthetic outfits in the sauna, because instead of detoxing and letting the toxins go out, you're going to suck everything out of your synthetic outfits, like Haylie already mentioned.
I like infrared. I do like a hot sauna and I can tolerate high temperature, but it's not easy for everyone, and it's a process when you're developing. So when you are visiting, back in Switzerland or Germany, where they have a long old tradition — like the Roman Irish baths — with farmers' springs for 200 or 300 years, or longer. So there are steps, and I recommend everybody follow them. I try to repeat it as much as I can in a regular American gym environment.
So you prepare yourself. First, you dry brush and you remove dry skin from yourself. And then you take a hot shower so your temperature center gets used to the hot temperature. And then I go to the steam room because it's not as hot as the dry sauna. And so your temperature rises, so when you end up going to the dry sauna, every time you clean yourself with a towel — with a cotton towel — and then you go to the hottest dry sauna. You don't need to sit there for a long time. You start sweating very fast.
So infrared sauna makes everything easier because in a shorter time, at a lower temperature, you can sit and read and drink water at the same time. It's not really so hot in an infrared sauna, but you start sweating faster. I think infrared sauna is very nice for patients. It's softer, easier to get the effect.
And the most important part — take a shower or clean yourself with cotton towels. Remove everything you sweat out. Remove it right away, because you sweat out toxins for sure.
Haylie Pomroy
Absolutely. And if you're doing it at home, try to have at least a chlorine filter on the shower that you're going to take afterwards, after the sauna. So when I have individuals that have really significant chemical sensitivity, we will do things like, I'll say, okay, pack your own towels. And then definitely wipe under the armpits, around the breast, behind the knees if you have to go home before you shower for some reason.
So there are a lot of these spas that show up where you can go in and get infrared sauna and you sweat and you throw your clothes on and you go home. I always tell people, bring a washcloth, jump into the bathroom, and do a little bit of cleansing of your skin before you throw your clothes on, if at all possible.
And I bring my own towel. I mean, I have them at my house, but I like to use my own towel if at all possible. Try cold plunge.
I'm not a cold plunge fan. Well, this is the thing — I love that people love it. I love it for them. I feel like if you feel amazing in a cold plunge, I am so happy for you. I have moved aside so cold plungers can have more space in the cold plunge.
My body is like, no.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I cannot take a cold shower after the sauna, but I love cold plunge. And I'm so happy right now. I just recently visited a gym or some health facility, and we had amazing infrared saunas, just regular dry saunas, and cold plunges. I was so impressed that people really believe in it and are doing it.
And I feel like my mitochondria are getting renewed.
Haylie Pomroy
And you mentioned the dry skin brushing before — that can amplify any sauna experience so much. I mean, my dream, when you talk about exercise, the best environment to exercise would be with no clothing on outside in the woods or in nature. Wouldn't that be great?
But vitamin D synthesis, the way our body metabolizes vitamin D with that sun exposure can help amplify any form of exercise into helping hormones come into homeostasis and really not just lowering inflammation, but anchoring inflammation at a lower level.
So anytime — you know, with the infrared, we're doing some mimicking of what we do in nature. And so the dry skin brushing or the stimulation of the skin prior to infrared can be amazing, can be incredible.
We have another question. We have someone that was working in a building that was built in 1920, and ever since she's been in that building — so what do you suggest when patients feel like their work environment is a toxic environment? And I don't mean just emotionally, because maybe the team's not cohesive. But how can — are there any testing kits that you can take into the work environment?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
If it's not a problem with the employer, I think there is ERMI — there is a test. Some laboratories, like Real Time Lab or, I think, US BioTek lab — we do have tests for the environment. Even in Home Depot, I guess you can buy a plate. Yeah, I've never tried one of those.
Put a plate next to your desk and try to see what's going to grow, or under the desk. You can be a little more discreet. But there is a test available to the clinician.
Haylie Pomroy
What about bringing an air purifier to work? Can that help — a HEPA filter or an air purifier in a work environment?
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
We do have air purifiers in our offices and in the patient rooms. Yes, it will help. You can put it next to yourself and at least purify the air around yourself. But I would also put some plates and maybe buy some tests to evaluate it yourself.
And patients can be tested themselves for mycotoxins, heavy metals, all kinds of plasticizers, organic volatile compounds. We have many specialty labs. There are all kinds of testing available right now.
Usually urine tests — regular commercial labs' urine tests often tell us what the patient just ate, and that's an exposure from food. If there is something in the blood, it's more of a concern. In the hair, it's more of a concern.
It's a kind of level-of-concern scale. I take even urine exposure seriously. Sometimes for some reason people disregard it and say like, oh, you just ate something.
Haylie Pomroy
And it's just passing through. But I always say, it was just passing through. It's so funny.
I was just like, we all need to go back. We need to go back to basic biology and basic biochemistry. Yes, we have a tube, but everything is exchanged in our body.
What you consume is not what you excrete as a whole. Whenever they poo-poo urine tests, I'm always going, you know, are you sure that we all understand how blood work works? It's just a little frustrating sometimes.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
I want to mention a little bit about this. So when I was telling you, okay, here's a patient with myasthenia gravis, for example, and I don't know what I'm going to be doing with this patient — then we do this environmental testing and metabolomics where we see how, in general, things are absorbed. And one important thing is, you take in vitamins, but more importantly, what is your body doing with those vitamins, practically?
What is your absorption like? Like we have pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Something just goes through us and something we do something with.
And it's important. My favorite test is a comprehensive stool test, because it gives you so much information. If your patient digests, if the gastrointestinal tract is inflamed, it means we're not digesting and it means we're not producing anything for the body.
The microbiome in our gastrointestinal tract is there for a reason. Those microbes are working for us. And if those are good microbes, they keep us lean, they keep us healthy and happy.
And we sleep at night. And sometimes when you wake up in the middle of the night, it's maybe because your microbiome is hungry. Maybe you gave them too much sugar in the evening.
And those bacteria behave like kids — they crash and wake you up.
Haylie Pomroy
Absolutely. The one thing that we were talking about the other day was, even with toxins and chemicals, sometimes we can test for things like we find in glyphosates. And I had a client that showed a lot of the neurological components of what we call glyphosate poisoning, where basically there's been that toxic load — one too many chemical exposures.
And their level wasn't that particularly high. I was surprised — if I were a gambling woman, I would have put money on it. But then we did a comprehensive digestive stool analysis.
And so the way glyphosates work is they don't work on a neurological pathway that humans have. That's why it's been deemed as okay for humans to consume. It's the shikimate pathway, where it works to kill a metabolic pathway that only bugs have. So it kills bugs and not humans is the theory.
The issue is, it kills human bugs that live in humans, that eat what humans eat, called the microbiome, right? So this person's glyphosate was actually killing the gut microbiome so effectively that the toxin wasn't necessarily pooling in the blood or in the tissue. But the gut microbiome, when we looked at it, was just completely trashed.
And so with toxins, not only can they store in the tissue — we talk a lot in our world of it migrating into the brain, impacting the thyroid — but it can just poison your internal ecosystem. And most of what we eat, we don't eat. Most of what we eat is feed for our gut microbiome, which we then eat, if that makes any sense. So we're kind of a secondary feeder, if you will.
And so feeding that is so important, and not insulting our immune system — because remember, that's what makes us adaptive. Not insulting our immune system in the process can be a huge key to keeping us healthy.
Dr. Rosenfeld, I cannot thank you enough for coming and answering everybody's questions.
Irina Rozenfeld, DNP, MSHS, APRN, ANP-BC
My pleasure. It's such a nice, enriching conversation. I had fun.
Haylie Pomroy
Well, we are so fortunate to have you in our world and in our community. And I will tell you, you have set the bar so high for what we should expect and appreciate and what should be the standard — the doctors and practitioners we get to see. People that are obviously intelligent, but thoughtful, and really customizing everything to the patient, because it's a complex body.
And when we try to reduce it down to a pill or even a toxin, it can be hard. So thank you. We are, as you know, huge proponents of feeding the body through detoxification.
I don't believe in stripping the body when it's such a nutrient-dependent process. But thank you so much.
