Culture & Clothing: How What You Wear Shapes Your Health

Nick Urban [00:00:05]:
What if the clothes that you’re wearing are silently and slowly killing you? I know it sounds far fetched, but our guest this week wrote a book called Dressed to Kill. And in it, he explores exactly this. He is a medical anthropologist, meaning he studies the way culture influences disease? If you ask me, we need more independent researchers like him because he doesn’t have a horse in the race here? He’s not beholden to any special interest groups that supply his funding or anyone else, really. He’s just concerned about cause and effect regardless of how unpleasant it may seem? In this episode, we discuss topics such as compression and how compression garments impact bodily systems, the role of our fabric’s material and the dyes and synthetic chemicals and how those interact with the skin? We discuss some little known hacks to improve sleep quality that I’ve been using successfully for multiple years now as well as natural and often overlooked means of bringing the level of your thyroid hormone up naturally or bringing it down naturally? We discuss medical research in the US and abroad and how the outcomes can vary drastically from 1 country to the next despite them studying the same or similar things as well as the incentive issues around studying the cultural causes of disease versus molecular causes and biochemical causes? Our guest also shares his experience with animal research Mind medicine, and how the findings of animal research often don’t actually carry over into actual human Anthropology? Mind the implications that has on things that pass animal safety tests before they go into humans? But perhaps my favorite Mind the most important part of our entire conversation is rather than fearmongering all these things that are dangerous and bad, it’s the small, simple, and easy things we can do at home to address all of these different concerns? After receiving training in biochemistry and being awarded his master’s degree in anthropology in 1981 from Duke University, Sydney Ross Singer, aka Sid, decided to pursue a career in the new and emerging field of medical anthropology? He then went on to complete 3 years of medical school at the University of Texas to become one of the 1st medically trained anthropologists in the United States? In 1994, he founded and currently serves as codirector of the Institute For the Study of culturogenic disease with his wife and coresearcher? Using an integrated approach from the fields of biochemistry, anthropology, medical humanities and medicine? Sydney Singer has made numerous medical discoveries into the cultural causes of various common diseases? As a lecturer and author, when I was reading his research papers, I also found his humor, wit, in clear writing style to be quite entertaining and much needed to bring some levity to these otherwise very heavy conversations? If this conversation piques your interest, I suggest you check out his collective works and or his code, Breast Kill. I’ll put a link to some of the articles of his that I read and enjoyed in the show notes of this episode, which you will find at mindbodypeak.com slash the number 146 This podcast is brought to you by the Outlier Longevity Challenge. If you wanna live the highest possible quality of life into your final days without wasting time, money, an energy on ineffective biohacks? This is the foundational strategy for you. In this micro course, I send you an email every day with just the most important, highest impact things you can do for your longevity so that you look, feel, and perform at your best every single day consistently? These are the things that are often neglected and that longevity experts behind the closed doors, often agree, are the very foundations. I’ve intentionally made this very affordable because longevity isn’t one of those things that should belong to the ultra wealthy and elite. So if you want to learn more, there’ll be a link in the show notes of this episode, and feel free to drop a comment or send me a message, and I’ll get back to you. Okay.

Nick Urban [00:05:07]:
Ladies and gentlemen, sit back, relax, and enjoy this eye opening conversation with Sydney. Sid, welcome to MINDBODY Peak Performance.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:05:17]:
Oh, it’s great to be with you. Let’s get going.

Nick Urban [00:05:20]:
Yeah. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a couple years now since I first came across your work, And I think it’s a topic that has largely flown under the radar, unfortunately, but I’m looking forward to diving in with you. Let’s start off by defining what it is that you do? Because I think that will lead into the conversation nicely.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:05:42]:
Well, I’m actually a pioneer in what do. I hope a lot of people start doing more of it, but I am a medical anthropologist. So I combine my background in medicine, anthropology, and biochemistry Mind, try to understand how our culture makes us sick, because we all know lifestyle is killing us, but nobody really studies it? And when you hear about lifestyle, it’s sort of like 5 things that’ll come to mind, diet, exercise, you know, simple things like that. But I talk about the actual details of what we do that we take for granted, that we don’t even think about, and that even thinking about them URBAN sometimes is even taboo. And then when I come up with an idea of how disease is connected to those lifestyles, I ask people to try lifestyle, experiments on themselves And see how it makes them feel. Usually, your body gets better when you remove the cause of the disease, so that’s what I try to do, find the cultural cause.

Nick Urban [00:06:35]:
I like your your title. Your title, you told me, is independent medical anthropologist, and the independent art is huge? You don’t have a bias to or for or against something. So the fact that you’re independent, you’re not accepting funding for a lot of your work, at least the funding isn’t powering your work, speaks a lot to your credibility? Because a lot of these types of issues, if there’s funding introduced that will usually skew the outcome in some way?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:07:05]:
Oh, yeah. You saves a product to sell of some sort. To be honest, there’s a lot of gratification, feeling like you’re adding to a field and and and adding correcting a big error? And that’s that’s a large part of my motivation. I I feel like I have some answers that I need to get out so that I can correct some of these things in the field and help things progress.

Nick Urban [00:07:25]:
Yeah. Before we dig into that, which will be the main topic of today’s show, first, what are the unusual nonnegotiables you’ve done so far today for your health, your performance and your bioharmony?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:07:39]:
I don’t have any dogmatic approach to things. I am open minded. I realize that everything that we think is conditioned upon concepts which are all constriction, And they’re based on reality, but they aren’t reality. And we live in this mental world of constructs That could be very wrong based on strange assumptions. So I try not to get dogmatic about anything. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of Singer, as life goes on and you get more experience? So I think it’s important to keep open minded. That’s maybe that’s one of the things. Stay open minded.

Nick Urban [00:08:18]:
There’s a famous quote, a medical school quote, and it’s by some professor at a big name school, and he said that at any given time, 50% of what I teach you will be false? The problem is we just don’t know which 50% that is.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:08:32]:
Oh, in my school, it was 90%. This insane thing? Yeah. And it’s true.

Nick Urban [00:08:38]:
It’s just the way it goes, and it’s interesting to see if you look actually look into the research, a lot of it is based on assumptions? We assume, for example, that omega threes are really good Mind important important for us, but it might not actually be the omega 3 in the fish oil. It might be one of the other odd chain fats or something like that, but, like, so much research is built on certain assumptions? And if one of those assumptions, which there’s surely multiple assumptions that are actually gonna turn out to be false, if one of those is overturned, then we look back at all the research that was built on top of those, which can be thousands of papers, and all of that is so so it should be called into question at breast. Maybe it won’t wouldn’t be, but it should

Sydney Ross Singer [00:09:17]:
be. I agree with you, and I think that even bigger than that, The biggest flaw that underlies all of medicine, which is why I left medicine, is it’s reliant on nonhuman animal research. They do vivisection. I mean, that’s that’s what started the father of physiology was Claude Bernard in the 1800 who, without anesthesia, would work on live dogs for days. I mean, there there was his neighbors complained about screaming dog sounds from his house. That’s the father of medicine, and I couldn’t go through a day of medical school without references to instance, to the origin of the information being done in animals. So, like, if you’re studying how the eye works and develops, They’ll study it by sewing the eyelids of kittens shut. I mean, the kind of things that you you wouldn’t even imagine a scientist would think to do, they do.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:10:05]:
So, medicine attracts those kinds of people and vivisection, animal research, is the core of it. You can’t. It’s required. It it’s such a core, and it’s become so institutionalized even though there are better ways of studying things. It’s like mammograms are required for breast, you know, exams, but they’re not necessarily the best thing? You know, there’s it just things get institutionalized. A lot of it, it’s it’s all economically driven. That’s the problem. And that’s what I’ve experienced on the thing that I’d worked on the most For 30 years, I’ve worked on many of these lifestyle cause diseases where I’ve discovered a lot of, a lot of easy to understand and test on yourself, ways to prevent disease that is based on the things you’re doing? And the biggest one is bras and breast cancer and I did the world’s first study On the link between breast cancer and bras? They knew about it in the thirties, but they didn’t do a study on it.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:11:02]:
At least I haven’t been able to find a study specifically on that. They they they did know also that when you interfere with the lymphatic system, which is your immune system’s path circulatory pathway that drains fluid from the tissues and it goes to lymph nodes and Filters it looking for cancer cells and and viruses, whatever. It’s your immune system Mind all your fluid in in the breast, most of that fluid, that bathes your tissues, that comes out of the bloodstream to with nutrients, the the Health, are bathed in fluid and that fluid comes out of the bloodstream capillaries and Waste products are exchanged across the the membrane with the cells and and and and they absorb what they need, And then the waist and, and any other cancer cells or cancer cell markers, because cancer cells actually release chemical markers, chemicals that let you know the body know, oh, there’s cancer cell there. It’s, like, specific for them and the body knows. And that goes through this lymph fluid that you, If you have a blister, a blister is made up of lymph fluid. So that’s the fluid that’s in your tissues. And that goes to the lymph nodes in the armpit for the breast mostly. And if you have a, if you interfere with that, you don’t allow the communication of the fluid to the lymph nodes and the breasts sort of get backed up with fluid, The toxins in your system, including stuff you took in your your food, the plastics I’m talking about, they get into your bloodstream, they get delivered to your tissues, and then they have to be flushed out with lymphatic system. And if you impair the lymphatic system, those tissues are getting those toxins are getting concentrated within the breast Mind because that’s that’s constricted.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:12:35]:
In fact, Of all the cancers women have, breast is number 1. And of all the organs, of all the clothing that she wears, bras are the tightest Mind bras are the most Intimately worn to her body and the result of that changing your shape with a bra and pushing on the breast to make them move into different positions Pushes on these delicate lymphatic vessels like capillaries in the breast that have no pressure in them, and it stops the circulation. So when a woman takes off a bra and they have these marks around their breast that everyone’s seen in a woman when she takes off her bras, and I’ve seen it for years You’re cutting it’s your the bra is pressing in and cutting off this drainage. And then these women wonder why their breasts are tender and that why they get cysts which is backed up fluid. That’s why. And when their period comes, their body swells because of the hormone estrogen makes you retain water and they get bigger and their breasts actually are bigger and they’re wearing Same bras, which is even tighter now, so they have more pain before their period. So a lot of women say, oh, I can tell my period’s coming because my breasts are getting tender Mind sensitive and sore Mind some of them are really sore. I mean, they these women can’t move.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:13:50]:
It’s like they have to stay home for a week. They can’t lift. They’re really in pain. That was documented for a documentary in 2000 in the UK called bra called Bras the Bare Facts. They followed women with breast pain like that and they had them get rid of their bra Mind it’s like it changed their saves? It’s incredible. It’s like as soon as the constriction is gone, The breast code flush out the fluid, the pain goes away Mind it heals, the lifts that lift and tone because the all that heavy fluid Makes the breast heavier Mind if you’re artificially supporting them in a bra, it’s like a harness and the natural ligaments in the breast Peak. Like if you put your shoulder in a in a in a sling, your shoulder ligaments would get weak over time if you kept it there. Well, women are wearing this contraption from puberty on every day.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:14:35]:
12 hours or more? Some of them don’t even take them off except to shower. And their breasts become dependent on the bra. They’re you have weak ligaments Mind they take the bra off, their breasts hurt? They’re filled with fluid. They set so they put them back on because they feel like it’s sort of like a compression holding them in place. The thing is, They’re completely stagnant and they’re starting to deteriorate because either you circulate or you deteriorate. Your body has to circulate. It has to. And you have mechanisms for detoxifying.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:15:01]:
You have livers, kidney, and all that liver and kidneys and the intestines and the lungs. There’s and and sweat. We have ways of detoxifying, but, you can’t detoxify if the toxins are trapped in the body by tight clothing, which medicine completely ignores? Like, it’s as if you see, that’s the problem. They study animals.

Nick Urban [00:15:23]:
Everyone would agree that humans are different to some extent, but I think that the argument is that that we’re similar enough, at least in terms of our, like, metabolism and certain components within the human body versus animals? I mean, it seems ridiculous, but isn’t that like the basis of a lot of animal research? It’s like it’s much cheaper. We can do things on animals that we can’t in humans, and because we’re similar enough Nick quotes, then it should translate or it may translate? It seems like even animal research, when it’s done to the very best possible, extent possible? It still is gonna have some fundamental flaws, and it won’t oftentimes carry over to humans.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:15:59]:
That’s correct. And what they do is they try species because it’s different in different species and then they figure, well, if it’s, in this case, in so many of these animals Mind maybe not in these, but in a lot of them, maybe it’s that way in humans. But, and this is interesting, they will use that information to then promote so they’ll do the drugs, let’s say, in a rat And then they will say, okay. In the rats, it seems to solve this disease. Now, first of all, the rats don’t get the same diseases. They have to simulate that disease in a rat. So they create a model for a disease, an animal model, which is not the same thing. So they’ll create a line of rats that easily get tumors in their breasts and they’ll use them as a model for breast cancer Mind then they’ll put a drug and then they’ll say, oh, wow.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:16:48]:
It reduced the number of deaths a little bit in these rats And they they do enough of those studies to satisfy the FDA that they wanna do human trials now. And then they’ll try it on people And then they’ll see what the side effects, if it works or if it doesn’t work. They then approve the drug. This is happening right now. It’s not even a drug. It’s with acrylamide. This is a more interesting situation. Acrylamide is is in your food and it’s, made by baking.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:17:15]:
When you heat food over 248 degrees Fahrenheit, which I mean, water boils at 212, so it’s a little bit above water. It’s like actually the temperature that a, pressure cooker would reach, but much less than usual baking at 300 or three twenty five or Nick? At 248, a chemical reaction occurs called a Maillard reaction, which gives The flavor and smell of baked foods is delicious. But one of the side effects of that reaction is the production of a toxic chemical called acrylamide? It’s just part of the chemical reaction at that temperature. So if if the food tastes that way and Smells good like that. It also has acrylamide. Acrylamide is a nerve poison and a cancer it’s a carcinogen, but they’ll say There are no human studies to prove that it does those Singer. All of those studies on cancer are done in animals because you can’t You can’t ethically give it cart you know, give it to a human. So they don’t want any of this exposed, but that is the fundamental flaw in medicine is that it sees us as biological entities equivalent to dogs, rats, or even petri dish cultures That they could culture a, a a Health and come to conclusions that they think are relevant.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:18:33]:
Now some of those conclusions on a biochemical and I was a biochemist. On a biochemical level, you can make some compression. Although animals do have different enzymes, they have different ways of operating, they have they don’t all work the same way, But there are some similarities, basic themes that are the same. The problem is when you most of our diseases, and they told me this in med school, most of them, like over 70% and the World Health Organization says this, is caused by lifestyle? It’s not caused by biochemistry. It’s caused by lifestyle. So do rats wear bras? No. If you are thinking about how Tight clothing can interfere with physiology because humans have this thing called culture, which makes us do really weird stuff from circumcisions and and appendectomies and tonsillectomies and cosmetic surgeries and all these other alterations of the human body? So all of the medical research on breast disease to date in the United States has ignored bra usage, how tight and how long a day? And what we found in my study that we did, the first study in the US Mind 1991 and 93, We interviewed over 47 100 women, half of them had had breast cancer, and we asked about their bra wearing habits Mind we found out the longer and tighter you warm, the higher your rate of breast cancer. And bra free women bras free women have about the same risk of breast cancer as Mind, but a woman who wears it 247, doesn’t take it off, she has a 100 times higher incidence.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:20:11]:
And that’s about the difference between men and women Mind breast cancer incidence. Men can get it too. You know, there is a small component that is biological? There’s that the gene, the genetic component they say for women that’s like 5%, but they don’t know what’s causing over 30% of the cases. And now in countries like Iran, they know bras are causing breast cancer. They have a study that came out saves that, and now they’re asking in studies on breast cancer, not just family history? They’ll ask things like bra usage, the same way you’d ask family history, and it’s a bigger effect, by the way, than family history.

Nick Urban [00:20:48]:
Yeah, I mean, a hundred x the increased risk is pretty close to a smoking gun. I don’t know how much higher you’d have to get for it to be obvious. It is epidemiological, but then again, you can’t have a randomized placebo controlled study on this because by the nature of wearing a bra, is makes it impossible to run that trial?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:21:09]:
One of the most powerful reasons that this issue is still alive is because women URBAN test it for themselves. And it doesn’t prove the cancer link, but it proves every other aspect of bras hurting them. And so I’m actually doing an ongoing international bra free study. I started in 2018 when my book, I wrote the book Dressed to Kill to describe my first study, and that was in 1995. I’ve updated it over the years, but 2018 is the most recent Mind edition is called, and, Dressed to Kill, Lincoln Breast Cancer and Bras Mind edition. And it includes all the new studies that have come out and how the re how the industry has responded, including the medical and lingerie industry. There are a lot of bras now with patents, based on our research, so they’ve tried to come up with less constrictive designs Mind They’re trying to adapt, but the medical industry is still pretty insistent that they they don’t want to Peak with this issue at all.

Nick Urban [00:22:03]:
And also, I had never even thought about so many of those different things that you just mentioned, such as you have in a tight fitting garment around about the rib cage, how that’s gonna constrict breathing, which can activate the sympathetic nervous system, which can impair digestion, relaxation, a lot of really important processes?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:22:21]:
The heart as well. It can increase blood pressure. It’s stressful. It’s like your body is stressed by a tight garment. That’s because in code, you you if you have a tight on all the time, look what that thing it it it digs into your tissue. We are soft tissue creatures. We’re not like a crab with an exoskeleton with a shell. We need to respect the fact that We have soft tissue that needs to circulate all tight bands, tight clothing, anything like that, any compression garments even for men, anything that is tight? Men, neckties.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:22:55]:
Neckties are known to cut off brain flow from the head. It imprages on the veins draining the bras, which are on lower pressure than the arteries supplying the brain. So the compression from the, necktie around a tight collar is going to first impair the veins before it does the arteries? So the problem is your brain will get the pressure, But it won’t be able to drain it as Health. So the result is an increased pressure in your Health, which is gonna cause all sorts of problems, glaucoma, sleep apnea, Alzheimer’s, all sorts of problems associated with increased brain pressure? I did sleep research. Having the bed elevated, the head of the bed elevated, Actually, the ideal is 30 degree head of bed elevation, but you can get wedges for for, like, hiatal hernias and other gastric issues because they want the head elevated. Gravity is an important thing. Gravity keeps things flowing in one direction downward. It pulls down.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:23:51]:
So if we have circulation going, we’re circulating within a field of gravity, and when you lie horizontal versus standing vertical, The relationship between your head and your heart vis a vis gravity has changed? When you’re vertical, your head is above your heart. The heart has pump against gravity and gravity assists the drainage Mind the flow happens to good Optimization? When you lie down, Now your head and heart are on the same level and your heart is pumping right into your head and there’s no gravity to help it drain and there’s no gravity resisting that pumping. So the result is your heart pumps weaker at night so you don’t give yourself a stroke and blow a blood vessel in your brain from pressure. And, in fact, most strokes occur at 3 in the morning because people are lying down with pressurized heads and they’re pumping it. Now if you raise the head of the bed, Now you have some gravity and you get that circulation going. So raising from the waist up or the whole incline plane will get your feet a little congested. But if you do heads from the waist up on a wedge or you cancer put, like, blocks under your bed about that high To create a slight incline plane, you’ll feel it the next morning or get an adjustable bed if you got Sydney, and you’ll feel it the next morning, your legs should be up a bit and your head should be up and you’ll have less congestion in your Health, your sinuses will be clearer, you won’t have to sleep as long, you’ll wake up alert and ready because your brain Got the rest it needed? It didn’t just get choked all night lying down. You know, if you did a headstand and you did and you did that all night, you would die, period.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:25:25]:
You cannot hang upside down. Bats can do it. They have different valves in their neck, but we don’t. We would die with our heads down.

Nick Urban [00:25:33]:
I heard you mention this maybe about 4 years ago, and I tried decided to try myself a little hack to increase the ahead of my bed about 3 inches with using risers, maybe not the Optimization degree angle, but it still was something I could test out pretty easily, pretty cheaply? I did it, and I have to say the very next morning, I woke up with more energy. I slept better. I slept deeper. I didn’t sleep quite as long because I just woke up feeling good to go and, yeah, less sinus issues? It was like a pretty immediate shift for me, So that was one that I was pretty excited about, and it’s it’s so simple. It’s either cheap or very cheap or free depending on your resources, and it’s something you can actually test and implement because I don’t have a bra to take off to comment on that, but I could test this out.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:26:23]:
If you were to stand All day, gravity is constantly pulling the fluid down, and by the end of the day, your legs are gonna be puffy, your feet will be puffy, you know, there’s like a more Excessive fluid because gravity has been working all day to keep that fluid down, and your head is sort of less fluid than it needs, just sort of low pressure in your head, high pressure in your feet? You lie down Mind that allows equalization of the pressure, but you don’t want the head to get too much pressure URBAN it’s not a pressure issue as much as a circulation issue? You’re horizontal leaning on parts of your body. That’s why sleeping is so uncomfortable. So, a, you don’t wanna wear clothes. You don’t wanna constrict anything while you’re sleeping, especially a bra, Any underwear. Nothing constrictive. For men, tight underwear is constrictive. Anything tight belts are bad. In fact, You know, the lymphatics have to drain against gravity below the Health, all your body below the heart when you’re standing, lymphatics have to drain the tissues against gravity, back up to the Health, all of the elastic clothing? Think of how elastic holds on.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:27:29]:
Then there’s the ACE bandages. I see people with, like, elbow problem or breast problem Mind what do they do? They put an ACE bandage on it. They think that’s supporting well, I guess it is for the moment, but what is it doing to the circulation around that joint and downstream from the joint? Because if you put something on your wrist on your elbow, everything down here has to go against that pressure so my hand’s gonna get puffy. And What’s gonna feed if I need if I have a damaged elbow, how is that gonna get, a, clean up the damage, remove tissue debris and and have the immune system do all that kind of stuff and create new tissue which needs oxygen and nutrients? I mean, We need optimal circulation to repair and heal.

Nick Urban [00:28:18]:
Would it have, like, a hormetic effect, say, you apply, like, compression gear for, like, 10 minutes or 20 minutes or something like and then you take it off? Is it gonna cause, like, a beneficial change because it was, like, very short term, and the body has to, like, adapt or, like, pump the fluid more with more force?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:28:32]:
Like a compression? Yeah. A compensatory hyperemia?

Nick Urban [00:28:35]:
Yeah.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:28:36]:
I don’t know if if maybe, but I’m not sure if that’s gonna improve performance. I think, you know, we’re there’s a lot of it’s there’s just money. It’s just people trying to come up with better ways to hack the body. But I think the breast way is to stop hacking yourself out of health by all these stupid things that we could prevent Instead of trying to add these Singer. And the problem is they’re all coming from people trying to make money. The health food industry, I don’t I don’t have very much respect for them either even though they’re typically they’re the ones that Support bras and breast cancer more. I mean, they’ve always been my my best advocates because they understand medicine is messed up, and they understand the lymphatics and they get it? But then I’ve had some of them come up to me with products saying, gee, I wonder if you put a magnet in the bra. Would that make it any better? That’s what magnets were Thought to be really great for, you know, things back in the in the nineties.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:29:28]:
They were really into magnets. And I I don’t know if they are as much these days. But I I I don’t know how that would overcome constriction, you know. Mind another person said, is there a good herb that you could take or some other supplement, a vitamin that would improve lymphatics? It’s like they all wanna take something. I said, I don’t know how that’s gonna overcome a mechanical problem. This is a mechanical problem. You know, it’s not a biochemical problem. It’s mechanics.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:29:53]:
Medicine is biochemistry. That’s what drugs are. Their whole job is to figure out the biochemical steps so they cancer interfere with a step and change the process either by inhibiting it or whatever. That’s what they’re trying to do. They need to define it in biochemical terms because the people running medicine sell and make make and sell drugs. So their method is drugs. That’s with drugs. I mean, chiropractors are different.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:30:20]:
They have a mechanical model, a chiropractor. To them, mechanics is what it’s all about. I mean, they don’t care about biochemistry, although they’ll they’ll be into nutrition maybe and and other things to spread out and sell some Tough. But they they’re basically the history of them Mind osteopathy is actual manipulation of the body. They believe the mechanical forces on the body have an effect. OsteoPads, they know about bras and breast cancer. NaturePads know about it, chiropractors. Alternative Health people got it, And a lot of doctors do too, a lot of them, but they’re afraid to talk about it.

Nick Urban [00:30:53]:
Yeah. So we’re gonna start to wind down now, but let’s talk a little bit about harm reduction? Because I want people to leave here not just feeling scared, but also feeling empowered that they can start making a difference today whether or not they decide to ditch the bra, ditched the really tight ties and colored shirts and anything else that might be compressing the body in a way we just discussed, how that would be harmful to lymphatics, to immunity, and to so much more? So let’s just walk through. You’ve mentioned a couple different things in passing, such as the importance of choosing the right types of clothing, be it organic, cotton, and nonsynthetic fabrics, the importance of loosening it as much as possible, and what else is important to keep in mind for women and for men?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:31:41]:
Well, shoes, of course, are a big thing. You really don’t want any tight shoes. You don’t want them to be realize how many chemicals are in shoes. They’re crazy. And women’s so try to wear nontoxic shoes if you can, and don’t make them tight. Don’t make them constrictive, make sure they give your feet enough room, and don’t wear tight socks. Those are a big thing. You might wanna get diabetic socks because They make them so that the top doesn’t dig in because, you know, if you look at the average sock, the the top is like this this narrow And you’re supposed to fit that around your leg.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:32:17]:
That thing is sticking in there when you so if you take your socks off and you got a groove in there from the top of your socks, It’s too tight Mind you’re gonna give yourself foot fungus. And and if you’re older, you don’t do it enough, you get ulcers in your feet Mind break down the tissue. You can’t do that. So the the tight you know, you don’t want that. Try to do without underwear. You really don’t need underwear. And if your outerwear is is, natural fibers and comfortable, That should be, you know, that’s that’s the thing. Men might want suspenders instead of belts because it it’s much more comfortable, I found.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:32:48]:
Suspenders are much more comfortable when I have to wear long pants. But I live in Hawaii, so I’m I don’t have to do that too often. I would be be naked as much as you can. Get a lot of sunshine, on your body because all this clothing robs your body of sun. And we are we were created within a, an atmosphere that is plentiful with sunshine and ultraviolet? Mind if we don’t get enough ultraviolet on our bodies, because this is a related topic too, which is sunscreen, which causes skin cancer, and people cover their skin With sunscreen like it’s a claw like it’s clothing, it’s actually like plastic, putting a plastic cover coating on your skin to try to keep out the sun. Well, All of these things we’re covering ourselves with leach chemicals onto us and keep our bodies from enjoying the benefits of sunshine. The UV from the sun is essential for making vitamin d, and, and and vitamin d is known to be involved in more than just bones. It’s involved in immunity and in mood and all sorts of Singer? So seasonal affect disorder could be a vitamin d Singer, But oral vitamin d is not the same as getting you from the summer.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:33:57]:
It includes a lot more benefits for you. It’s natural and you get the heat and the warmth Mind It’s a whole Performance, and so I encourage people to, not let clothing dictate, you know, beyond them all the time. I mean, we we aren’t meant to be wearing clothing as much as you are. It’s an invention.

Nick Urban [00:34:14]:
One of the things that I love that you said that I hadn’t thought about, but it makes perfect sense, and that is trying to solve a mechanical problem with biochemistry? Exactly. Because, like, yeah, you can be taking these supplements and things that boost blood flow, that can be designer molecules, the fanciest. Might have tons of research behind them, but if you’re trying to approach it from a way that won’t necessarily matter because you’re trying to override a mechanical issue, it’s interesting to think about how backwards a lot of medicine is when if you just start with lifestyle Mind you start with looking at the bigger picture, and then you make the little tweaks from there, that’s a much more sound approach that’ll yield better results than trying to do it vice versa?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:34:55]:
Absolutely. You have you have to remove these lifestyle causes to see what your basic health is underneath because your Body constantly dealing with it. It’s like dealing with an with a, a stressor, and you gotta remove those stressors, those those problems, and give your body a chance. Yeah. But Nick, you’re not gonna solve problem with biochemistry, and if you’re taking all these great things and you’re and you’re there’s a particular organ that’s congested and stagnant, Then those things you’re taking in aren’t even gonna get there. It’s not gonna properly circulate in that area. If you want that area to be treated, you need good circulation. You need to get it in there.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:35:31]:
And then the problem is any chemical waste, you need to be able to get out. Circulation is the bottom line. Circulate or deteriorate. And and that, you know because your body has a lot of biochemistry itself. The liver is amazing. It knows what to do. It detoxifies. We live in a really, really polluted world.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:35:49]:
The fact that we’re not all dead after all we do? You know, you can go out to McDonald’s and drive on the freeway and and, you know, breathe all this stuff and eat all this stuff, and you survive? That’s because we have really powerful enzymes in our bodies that detoxify, but that’s only if we could get those chemicals out of our bodies, out of the tissues without a mechanical interference with circulation? That is the bottom line. Medicine is ignoring the mechanical interference that clothing provides to the Body, and with that oversight, All of the research they do that ignores that, especially in breast disease, is erroneous. It’s flawed. It how can you that’s why all these studies after 1,000,000,000 of dollars of breast cancer funding. Why is it we still don’t know. The deaths the incidence is the same it was for 30 years despite billions and pink everythings, we still don’t they don’t know anything new? Well, maybe that’s because they they continue refusing to look at the most important variable, which is whether or not a woman is wearing a bra, How tight it is, how long she wears it every day, and how many years she’s been doing it? And the longer tighter? Of all those things, the worse, and you cannot compare 2 groups of women without knowing how their bras are affecting their breasts? That is such a big difference. Like, how can you compare 2 lungs without knowing if 1 person’s a smoker or not? I mean, it’s a big, big difference.

Nick Urban [00:37:23]:
One more thing I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this because it kinda just shows the way you think in some of your work that I found surprising and very interesting? Before we wrap up today, tell me about the link between thyroid and the voice.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:37:38]:
Well, that’s another medical oversight. Medicine doesn’t approach the body As having, any type of design that makes sense, like it’s there for a reason? And they think of evolution, But they don’t think of, they also think of some of our organs as vestigial and they might we don’t even need them, that we’re gonna evolve to lose them. So they think of the body as having errors built in and, therefore, they don’t really think of relationships like why would this be with that? Like, why would the thyroid gland, which controls metabolism, be on top of your voice box, your your larynx, which vibrates like crazy? If you put your finger right here is my thyroid and my larynx vibrating as I speak. Now the thyroid is filled. It actually stores thyroid hormone, thyroxine, and it releases thyroxin according to medicine, and this is true, Through the release of thyroid stimulating hormone from your pituitary gland in your bras, and the thyroid hormone controls the thyroid’s release Mind then the thyroid, releases thyroxine, it goes through your bloodstream Nick to the bras, it tells the brain, we increase the thyroxine, and then the thyroid hormone Shuts, lowers the Optimization? So thyroid stimulating hormone goes down and then that down regulates the thyroid don’t have to produce as much. So if it gets too low, it is a feedback loop. Okay? That is the 1st endocrine feedback loop that they the hormone feedback loop that they discovered In medicine. So they love that one, and they use that as, like, a example of a classic Hormone feedback loop, and they think that’s the only way to stimulate the thyroid? Completely not even considering the effect of the location of the thyroid? Like, why would we take such an important organ? Because if you have low thyroid, I mean, everything is low.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:39:36]:
Immunity is low, energy is low, Everything is low. High thyroid is the opposite. I mean, not necessarily immunity being high, but your metabolism is high and and a whole bunch of things get out of whack. Why wouldn’t you put such an important URBAN, like, inside your chest or where it could be protected by the ribs or something like that? It’s a small organ. You could fit it somewhere, but it’s on your throat right here on the voice box. So, Clearly, vibration oh, well, I should add one further factor. The internal part of the thyroid is sort of a jelly like material Mind that stores the thyroxine? And massage therapists know that if you rub a person’s throat, you can actually make thyroxine come out. So they don’t they don’t give throat massages to people with thyroid problems, because you release thyroid, especially high hyperthyroid.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:40:27]:
So there is a mechanical release ability for these, which you never hear about. And in in regular medicine, I mean, I’ve only heard of massage therapist you know, you never even read about that, not to massage it. You know, you can stimulate your thyroid just by doing this. Well, the thing is, If you cancer stimulate it mechanically that way, then what about the vibration of your voice box? So, I then developed a theory about this and I ran into people and it was being confirmed. People who yell a lot overstimulate the their thyroid. I mean, if they especially if they’re yelling in recent history. Like, There was a guy who moved here in Hawaii. He was living along the the coastal road where I live, and he was yelling at people who were driving by too fast.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:41:11]:
And He was new to the area. He doesn’t know the local driving speed issues and so forth, and he was yelling at Peak. Slow down. And he did that for months, and then he developed hypothyroidism. Mind, he went to the doctor. They they tested with radioactive iodine Because the thyroid, is like a magnet for iodine because iodine is in thyroxine. And, of course, radioactive iodine Is what they also use to burn off your thyroid when they wanna put you on thyroid medication? So a little bit lets them see how active it is. Like, is it taking up a lot of iodine or not? And then if they wanna get rid of it, they just give you more radioactive iodine Mind by that time, you’re on thyroid medicine the rest of your life.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:41:52]:
So, it would be nice if people tried this first. So what I what happens is just stop stop yelling. Give your voice it’s like you overstimulated your thyroid compared to your normal vocalization. I think we develop baseline of normal Optimization, that’s a normal Optimization? A lot of animals have their thyroids on their voice box and they make constant chatter. I think life is noise. When we are living, animals, they grunt, they they bark, they purr, they do all sorts of things that Health stimulate thyroids, And it could be that that’s as one of the I I believe it is and and people don’t, by the way, when they understimulate. Like, I had a nun contact I’m doing radio shows and a nun contacted me after one of the shows and she said, we have we have to do, like, seclusion and be quiet and not speak for a couple years. And she said, like, we developed hypothyroidism, low thyroid.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:42:42]:
So and deaf mute people who are born unable to speak, they can’t vibrate their thyroids, and they develop thyroid disease, low thyroid? So that sort of confirmed it for me. I wrote about this saying to people to try it. I mean, if you feel if you have low thyroid, talk hormetic, stimulate your voice. And I found a lot of people like women get low thyroid. It’s usually in a time of their lives, in their fifties when they get a lot of times they’ll be divorced, they’re alone, they get depressed, Singer through menopause, they could be breast, and all that. They don’t talk as much. A lot of people used to sing on a choir and they stopped singing Mind then they discover their thyroids are going are are less active because they had a more active vocal life? And now all of us these days, we’re we’re texting more. We’re We we don’t we write more rather than talk.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:43:33]:
We don’t do community sing alongs like we used to, like sing along with Mitch. I mean, we don’t do those things. We used to do a lot more vocalization. If you look at old movies, people used to just sing together, used to go dancing, they used to do things like that. Now we’re all computer connected and we do it all that way. So the result is we have less vocalization, so more people are getting low thyroid. And the way to cysts read out loud, a Singer again, talk more, and you’ll Do whatever you can to vibrate. You might even wanna massage your your your voice box on your thyroid.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:44:06]:
Do that do that a little bit. Try and see if after a few weeks of that, because it takes thyroid a little while to respond, the thyroid hormone. It’s not URBAN immediate actually the hormone has to go into the nucleus and DNA stuff. So it actually is not an immediate hormone like adrenaline. It takes a while to see its effects. So give it a little Mind you’ll discover that if you were low thyroid and you weren’t talking very much, talking more will stimulate your thyroid, and if you’re high thyroid, talk less, Be quiet, whisper for a while, give your thyroid a chance to Health. But if you go to the doctor, they’ll immediately they don’t think of the thyroid as ever getting better. I they always just try to put you on treatments right away because that’s what they do.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:44:47]:
So they actually are testing your thyroid with radioactive iodine, and that burns the thyroid too? You know, the radioactivity is energy being right there Mind it’s right near your bras, so it’s not a really good thing to have. And when you’re hot like that, they even tell you why you’re under the treatment. Stay away from kids for a while, because for 8 days, the half life is 8 days. So they say rapid half life stuff is good with a in medicine when they give you radio radiomedicine Mind they give radioactive stuff to people for tracers, They like to use short, short half life tracers. They because they figure it’s out of your system fast. The problem is if it’s short half life, That means all the reactivity is coming out real breast, so it’s actually greater intensity over a shorter period. All of those things are dangerous.

Nick Urban [00:45:36]:
Yep. Since I learned that from you, I’ve actually worked with a number of people who were about to go on thyroid medication, and they wanted a more natural approach first? They’re looking into supplements, t two, and different things they could do to try and rev up their thyroid Mind, in a couple cases, actually tamped down the act like overactivity? And so far, in a 100% of cases, this has made a difference. Like you said, it it’s not usually instant. It can take 2, 3 weeks for them to see, like, the result they’re looking for, but there, so far, has been a 100% effective result from that. Yeah.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:46:09]:
Oh, that’s so great to hear. That’s awesome. So tell me, what what kind of things did you tell him to do to vocalize?

Nick Urban [00:46:14]:
To talk more, to sing to to cancer, just things that would, like, have them vibrating their vocal box more? And the people who were overactive? I’d tell them to try and reduce that a bit temporarily and see if that made a difference. And and did it how long did it

Sydney Ross Singer [00:46:30]:
take for the reduction to to take effect?

Nick Urban [00:46:32]:
It was a little faster.

Sydney Ross Singer [00:46:32]:
Did they tell you that oh, no kidding. Really? Wow. That’s very interesting.

Nick Urban [00:46:37]:
Well, Sid, we gotta wrap this one up. If people want to connect with you, to follow your work, to read some of your papers, how do they go about that?

Sydney Ross Singer [00:46:46]:
Well, I guess I code provide a link with you to my academia dotedu website. If you want more specifically on bras and breast cancer, I have a website called brasandbreastcancer.org. If you wanna join a bra free study, it’s free. We just will tell you you know, ask you to get rid of your bra and tell us what your experiences are, And we’ve had we have women from 38 countries involved already, and that’s at bra free study.org. So hopefully, you can give links in in the constriction. And then, yeah, and if anybody wants to contact me or any questions or whatever.

Nick Urban [00:47:19]:
Well, Sid, it’s been a pleasure hosting you. I’m glad we had this conversation. I learned some things today that I didn’t even realize beforehand? I have a game plan going forward with some changes I’m gonna make in my own personal life, And I will put a link to everything you’ve mentioned, some of the research that you’ve conducted and compiled in the show notes along with everything else we discuss, And really appreciate you coming on the show today. I’m Nick Urban here with Sid Singer signing out from mindbodypeak.com. Have a great Peak, and be an Outliyr. I hope that this has been helpful for you. If you enjoyed it, subscribe Mind hit the thumbs up? I love knowing who’s in the 1% committed to reaching their full potential. Comment 1% below so that I know who you are.

Nick Urban [00:48:03]:
For all the resources and links, meet me on my website at mindbodypeak.com. I appreciate you and look forward to connecting with you.