Have you ever wondered if there's a natural way to lower your high blood pressure,

guard against Alzheimer's, lose weight, feel better?

Well, it turns out there is.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today we discover how eating a plant-based diet offers less exposure to the industrial

pollutants that bioaccumulate up the food chain.

We lack robust safety data on most of the estimated 30,000 chemicals in wide commercial

use registered under the U.S. toxic substances control act, but the greatest concern may lie in the long-band legacy

chemicals that continue to contaminate the food supply, known as plops, persistent lipophilic organic

pollutants.

These include dioxins, PCBs, and insecticides such as DDT.

How do we drop the plops? Today, most DDT comes from meat, particularly

for fish. The oceans are essentially humanity sewer. Everything eventually flows into the sea.

Haxochlorobenzene is another banned pesticide that may be carcinogen, but is more evenly spread among animal food sources,

whereas PCBs are also mostly a fish thing.

PCBs are a different set of banned chemicals, we once widely use as insulating fluid and

electrical equipment.

I studied more than 12,000 food and feed samples across 18 countries, found that the

highest PCB contamination was found in fish and fish oil,

followed by eggs, then dairy, then other meats.

Salmon may have the highest concentration with farm-race salmon,

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