The Hidden Toxins Aging You Faster (and How to Fix It) | Dr. Chris Shade

Hey there, I'm Claudia von Boeselager, a former investment banker turned entrepreneur, longevity coach, biohacker, and mother of two. Once burnt out and overwhelmed with chronic health issues, I've transformed my life and helped thousands of people do the same. I've even reduced my biological age by 17 years. Yes, I'm 26 again. Now I'm here to share the tools, strategies, and inspiration to help you live healthier, happier, and longer. On this podcast, I interview world-leading experts in health, biohacking, mindset, and performance, and share personal stories and learnings to bring you the latest insights and tips. Think of this as your go-to space for real talk about all things health and optimizing your life. Ready to unlock your best self? Let's dive in. This is the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast.

My guest today is Dr. Chris Shade, founder and CEO of Quicksilver Scientific and an internationally recognized expert on mercury detoxification and liposomal delivery systems. Growing up in a toxic steel town, Chris began asking big questions about environmental sustainability early in life, questions that led him into organic and biodynamic farming and later to complete his PhD in environmental science and aquatic chemistry. His groundbreaking research on mercury speciation led to the creation of Quicksilver Scientific's Mercury Tri-Test, the only clinical test that differentiates between mercury forms and evaluates the body's detox capacity. Dr. Shade also pioneered Quicksilver Scientific Delivery Systems, a cutting-edge nanoparticle technology that dramatically enhances supplement bioavailability and now serves as the foundation for the company's innovative approach to detoxification and metabolic health. And also, dear audience, Dr. Chris will be giving away Quicksilver Scientific's ErgoThion Plus to 3 lucky winners. So keep an eye out for how to win. Jumping in quickly, it's Claudia von Boeselager. I absolutely love bringing you these conversations for free each week, and I can do that thanks to the generous support of our sponsors. These are brands I've personally vetted and believe in, and I think you'll love them too. Supporting them means you're also supporting the show and your own longevity journey. Thanks for supporting them. Now, here's today's sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Pendulum. If you've been listening to this podcast, you'll know that longevity isn't about quick fixes. It's about supporting your body at the root. And one of the biggest realizations I've had from talking with experts is that so many foundational systems, from your energy and metabolism to immune health and even mood, all start in your gut. That changed the way I approached my own health, and it's exactly why I'm such a fan of Pendulum. There a science-driven company pioneering a whole new approach to gut health. In fact, Pendulum is the first company to bring live akkermansia to market. This is a game changer. I recently started taking their Metabolic Daily, and I can tell you I'm already noticing a real difference. My digestion feels smoother, I have more consistent energy, and I love knowing that I'm supporting my gut at such a foundational level. For me, this is a cornerstone of longevity. If you're serious about your health and lifestyle, this is where to start, because Because when you support your gut, you support your entire body. And for you, dear audience, get 20% off your first Pendulum membership order by heading over to pendulumlife.com/claudia. That's pendulumlife.com/claudia20. The discount is automatically applied at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Carole Bike. Did you know that one of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you live is your VO2 max? VO2 max? It's a key indicator of your cardiovascular fitness. The challenge is VO2 max naturally declines by about 10% every decade after age 30. As someone who's always looking for the most efficient ways to optimize my health and longevity, I knew I needed something that fit into my busy schedule. That's where CAROLBIKE comes in. Backed by published research, this isn't just another stationary bike. Carol uses AI-powered reduced exertion HIIT, or re-HIIT, to deliver the same cardio benefits as a 45-minute jog in under 5 minutes—just 2 short sprints. Studies show Carol can improve your VO2 max by 12% in just 8 weeks, making you up to 10 years fitter. It's truly a game changer. If you want to future-proof your health and longevity without spending hours in the gym, check out CarolBike.com/Claudia for a $300 discount just for you, dear audience. That's CarolBike.com/Claudia.

Welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, Dr. Shade. It's such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Thank you, Claudia. Happy to be here. So excited.

So I've heard so much about you from so many different people, including going way back from Tony Robbins telling about him all of a sudden being on stage, having mercury toxicity in his brain. Lack of cognition and them seeking you out. But I'd love to start with your journey and how you became so curious from growing up in a toxic environment, a steel town, to wanting to understand better how the environment impacts our health. So maybe we can start there today.

Yeah, you know, I always say you need credentials, you know, and I have a PhD and I did all this naturopath training and stuff, but you need street cred, you know, street credibility. And so, you know, I came from Bethlehem and that wasn't a holy town, it was a steel town. You know, grew up every day with these big clouds of these metal dust plumes in the sky and very generous dentist who gave me 17 mercury silver amalgams despite having maybe 1 or 2 cavities. And so that was my credibility, you know, and I grew up with that stuff and I always knew something was a little off and, you know, I got into college and then I sort of had this spiritual awakening, you know, psychedelics do that to you. And, you know, long before it was cool to do that, you know, it was tune in turn-on-drop-out days. And, and all of a sudden I was into natural health and environment. I became an organic farmer, actually. I was an organic biodynamic farmer before there was USDA organic. I was NOFA certified, Northeast Organic Farming Association. And I really got into this, you know, clean environment, clean health. I joke that I went out of business as an organic farmer the year Whole Foods was formed. It was a little early for that. And then I went to Rodale Institute, which was like a that were research around organic farming, and they would say healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people. And so I was into all that, and eventually I switched over into looking at environmental toxins. I did the PhD on mercury as a toxin in the environment, patented specialized testing to look at the difference between how much of your mercury is from dental amalgams versus the fish you eat, and started the company Quicksilver Scientific based on that. Quicksilver, you know, is a European— is the old word for, for mercury. It means liquid silver. And ironically, in German, it's quacksalber. And the original word for quack, it was, or the term quack was coined by Paracelsus for doctors who used mercury in medicine. And, you know, fast forward to 20 years ago, they had Quackwatch and it was about outing people who thought mercury was a toxin. But anyways, I started the company based around the testing and Then I saw, well, I gotta solve the problem too. And got into how do we naturally get mercury out of the body? Because I rushed headlong into it, got 17 amalgams out in one sitting, started taking all this DMSA, and I thought I would just measure all the mercury coming out in the urine, but nothing's really coming out. There's like a little more when you take the chelator, but not a lot. And so I just keep taking more and more and more until it just wasted out my whole body because my drainage pathways weren't open. Liver wasn't moving stuff out, the kidneys weren't moving stuff out. So I wasn't, I was taking chelators, but I wasn't really measuring it in the urine. It was just all stirring around and I just got so sick from doing that. And then I was watching all these functional medicine meetings in Boulder and I was seeing like Nigel Plummer, who was the original probiotics guy, and Bob Roundtree all talking about these, you know, GI health and liver GI connections and upregulating that. And I was like, wait a second, what am I doing? Why am I putting this all through the kidneys? Let me, pull it all through the liver and open up liver pathways. And I fixed myself in no time making this binder, a specific, you know, it was like one little 100-milligram spoon of this was equal to the binding of 90 chlorella. That was what people used to take then. And that just opened everything up and got me better really quick. And then I was like, I had to figure out why that worked. And at the same time, I got the attention of Hal Huggins and Dietrich Klinghardt. These are the old guard of mercury detox. And they started using that. I figured out that it was glutathione system processes. And then I had to get glutathione into the body. And people were doing injections and capsules wouldn't work because you'd break them down. And so I got onto these things, liposomes, and these delivery systems that make these nutrients absorb directly into the body and make them bioavailable. So they would go right in and, you know, we got them so they would go and peak in the blood in 20 to 30 minutes. And first it was glutathione and vitamin C, and then we started doing some neurological stuff like GABA and CBD. Then, we moved, broadened out detox into all things not just metals and then we got into immune, we got into cardiometabolic health, we got into longevity which is where we're talking about now. And, I always joke that when I started in going to A4M, the ultimate longevity conference that was in 2009 or '10, I thought, "Oh, the detox guy's just taking the trash out and all the sexy stuff up front, you know, stem cells and the hormones and stuff. But, you know, fast forward all the research that we know now, these mechanisms, all the toxins are aging you prematurely and the mechanisms for getting them out are anti-aging you. And so detoxification is a core central pillar of anti-aging medicine. And so now we apply those delivery systems to bring both cleanup stuff and bring up the mitochondria, turn up signaling for, for youth. And it's been a great ride and I love doing it because it keeps me young. Amazing.

Thank you so much for sharing that incredible story. And we're going to unpack lots of pieces in there, starting with looking at mercury in depth. I'd really love to dig into this. You're my, my first guest and the world's leading expert on this as well, obviously. And we know that the World Health Organization ranks mercury as one of the top 3 chemicals of public health concern and estimates that 19 million people globally, including children, are at risk from methylmercury exposure. So when you talk about toxins, millions at risk, mercury is WHO's top 3, yet most people don't feel an immediate danger, right? So it's not something that you notice straight away. From your research, what are some of the early signs or hidden biomarkers that someone's toxin load is starting to outpace their body's ability to cope? And what impact does it have on longevity? Maybe you can expand on that. Maybe you can share a, a story as well. Sure.

You know, and I laughed during that because they're like at risk of methylmercury exposure. And so different forms of mercury, you got methylmercury coming from fish and you have inorganic mercury coming from your dental amalgams. Your dental amalgams are metallic mercury. And one, they're rusting a little bit and you're swallowing that. It's going through your GI and it's blocking liver GI pathways and impeding detoxification. But the other form, the vapor is coming off of it and you're inhaling that right into the blood. And it circulates around. It can go wherever it wants, go into the brain, go into the joints, and then it rusts and sticks into this inorganic mercury form and sticks in. And at a cellular level, it's much more toxic than methylmercury. Methylmercury, just its problem is it's highly bioavailable and it gets across the blood-brain barrier. And you see with the Tony Robbins case, that was distinctly a methylmercury exposure. But if you look around the globe, the real risk is the elemental mercury in the in the dental amalgams becoming inorganic mercury. And, you know, that's through dentistry all across the world, and it's actually getting banned in all kinds of countries right now. There's a guy named Charlie Brown, ironically, like the, uh, great lawyer, and he's been spearheading getting, uh, uh, mercury removed from dentistry around the world. And so I just want to put that in there because I think it's a bigger risk to the world. But what are these?

Can I ask a quick question on that, Dr. Shade?

What proportion would you say is from dental amalgams versus mercury from fish or other environmental toxins? Would you say 60, 70%?

I mean, the problem is none of it means from dental amalgams. Well, some of it residually, but I don't have the dental amalgams anymore. I took them out. Depends if people have it or not. But around the whole globe, it's probably more than 60%. And because then you have some fish eaters, some not fish eaters in these different areas where they're using mercury. But fortunately, it's being banned. It's being pulled out. In fact, the US is like among the last countries to support this. Surprise, surprise. And there's all these weird stories around why it was even kept around so much, because you go into like artisanal gold mining in the, in the rainforest, and there they have areas where there's a lot of gold in the sediment and they run liquid mercury through and it pulls out of the Mercury, all the mercury out, and then they boil off the mercury and they have the gold. And oh my God, there's mercury all over the place there. But how do they get the mercury? It's because it was still being moved around for dentistry. And so it was like, so all these weird stories around it. But you know, how do you know that, you know, what are the first signs? And mercury's real characteristic, it goes to the brain and it goes to the glutamate receptors in the brain. And glutamate and GABA are 80% of the neurotransmission in your brain. We talk about serotonin and dopamine, but the, the on it, like hypervigilance, which is glutamate, and the turn it off and be chill is GABA. And those are in this balance. And the mercury cranks up that glutamate side. And when you're hypervigilant all the time, what does that look like? Anxiety. Yeah. It's, yeah, it goes from being on it to being anxious. And so anxiety, and then the, the mercury's getting into the mitochondria and blowing out the ability of the mitochondria to make ATP correctly. And so it's sucking up the antioxidant load inside the mitochondria, and then you have damage and the mitochondria make free radicals instead of making ATP, and it lowers the NAD levels. And as we know, NAD is the core thing to keeping the longevity cycle of the activating the sirtuins and all these good things. As the NAD goes down, that stuff goes down, energy goes down. So fatigue and anxiety. Now anxiety runs for a little while and you get neuroinflammation and that brings brain fog and cognitive issues. And so when Tony got sick, it was crushing fatigue and cognitive issues. You know, he's such a like, I'm on it that it wasn't really an anxiety thing so much as a like forgetfulness and that neuroinflammatory fog. And so that's real characteristic for mercury, but a lot of the toxins to do that. Toxins are, you know, one of the signs you've overloaded the system. They'll be similar. There'll be fatigue and malaise. Sometimes stuff is getting into your joints and your matrix, the extracellular matrix, and the lymph isn't moving well. There's a lot of effect on the cardiometabolic health, and that'll be this activation of sirtuins, and that's propagation of mitochondrial biogenesis and the density and the function of the mitochondria. So there's almost always for all classes of toxins, a mitochondrial effect, which is bringing down the energy in the system. It's switching the programs from very healthy programs to just survival programs. And so there is a lot of cardiometabolic issues that come with it, and it could be insulin resistance. Fatty liver is a big thing that comes with that. Hormone disruption is big when you get into plastics, they're called endocrine disruptors. So these youth that are, maybe their entrance into puberty is really weird. Cycling for women gets real weird. Sexual dimorphism where, you know, there's excess estrogen signaling in men or excess androgen signaling in women. And it's a shifting your masculine-feminine balance over to one side or the other, especially with the plastics. They're, they're xenoestrogens. They hit the estrogen switches. And at the same time, they're turning down the cardiometabolic wellness. That's why we called them obesogens, like these kids who were like microwaving all their plastic were getting fat. The boys were getting man boobs and they lost their drive. And so that's that blend of the hormone and the cardiometabolic unwellness. And of course the brain is always an issue. The ability to be resilient and take stress and react correctly, that all gets disrupted. And so there's this whole blend of malaise and lack of drive and lack of clarity that comes just this heaviness that comes from a, from a toxic load. And then certain toxins have specific things that they do. So Dr.

Shade, I mean, some of the things you listed, right? So the fatigue, brain fog, et cetera. Some people might say that sounds like perimenopause, like they're, you know, how do you know if it's from mercury or when should people test or should people test all the time to understand what is the cause and what's the root?

The problem is we have the whole soup of toxins and then we have specific toxins and, and those broad ones, you know, if it's really, so you know, your exposure, do you eat a lot of fish and what kind of fish are they? Top of the food chain or bottom of the food chain? You mean you could sit there and eat sardines all day long and you're never gonna be toxic, at least from the mercury. But if you're eating swordfish and tuna, and that's what Tony did, he went from being a vegan to being paleo. But you know, those guys, you, you don't go from the fin to the hoof. I'll just say that. You, I mean, you don't go from the plant to the hoof. You stop at the fin and you're like, well, fish are a little bit easier to just handle, you know, as a mental construct. And so, he just made the mistake of jumping into these higher-order fish thinking that the lower-order fish had more stuff. And so, you know your exposure from fish and you know if you have dental amalgams. If either of those are true and you're having these issues, you should do testing on that. Testing is tough because it's not like there's just a toxin machine and you can measure all your toxins, But now there's some pretty big panels, things like Vibrant America, Doctor's Data, Great Plains Lab have these broad toxin exposures that'll have volatile organic compounds like gasoline type things and toluene, xylene, these industrial chemicals. They'll have a variety of different pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate from Roundup. So you can do these broad toxin panels and there's usually something. And then you do a metals panel and do all that and something will stick out. Or are you just like, you know what? I'm just gonna go after it all. And some people choose to do that. There's, you only have so many dollars to spend on this. The detox is expensive, the, the testing is expensive. But I do, if you get a broad panel, I, I really like seeing those. But rest assured you are exposed. So exactly.

I think that's a point as well, that it's not if you're just eating the swordfish and the tuna fish every single day, like I think Tony was, right? Or if you have the amalgam fillings. But you are exposed nevertheless. So you would say for most people, this is important to, to be wary of.

And then you make your own biological toxins, metabolic waste that you have to get out. And, you know, if our kidneys are rolling, our liver's rolling, we have a lot of fiber in the diet, and we're not under constant stress because, you know, we talk about the autonomic nervous system, that is a big control on it. And I'll get to that in a second. But if everything's rolling out, you know, you're moving things, You're, if you're exercising, working out, some of those triggers that you hit when you work out stimulate detox. If everything's draining, you know, you're exposed and you're moving it out, you're exposed and you're moving it out. But there's certain things that lock everything in and you become a net accumulator. And then over long periods of time, you're accumulating. And so like one, here's how detox works. Let's just get that out there. And if we have that idea in our head, then when we talk about all these things that block it, we'll understand where it locks it up. Up. And so detox is like this relay race. You're like, you got the, you know, the hot potato. You got this junk in the tissue, you're gonna push it out. So you push it out of the cell and it goes into circulation, goes into the blood. Then the liver grabs it, pulls it into the liver. If it needs any more processing, it'll do that. Your cell can do some processing, the liver. And then the crucial part is it dumps from the liver through the bile into the upper GI, the upper small intestine, right below the stomach. And that bile flow— bile's that green liquid coming out of the liver and associated with the gallbladder. So every hepatocyte, every liver cell is sucking in things from the blood, doing whatever it has to do, and draining them out with the bile. And we think of that as draining into the gallbladder. And when we eat, we squeeze some bile in and it helps us digest the fats. You know, it's an essential part of digestion, but it's also the river of toxins and the bile transporters and the toxin transporters are the same thing. And so if the bile's not flowing, the toxins aren't flowing. So you need that movement to the bile. This is the one big places where it gets locked, the transition between the liver and the bile tree. And then when it gets down to the GI, you have another problem where you might reabsorb it. A lot of toxins just go back into circulation and just do this. Things. So you need to throw out into the blood, you need to pull into the liver, you need to dump into the bile, and you need to bind it and get everything going out. So where does this get blocked? The biggest block is that liver to gallbladder bile tree transition, and things like stress block that. And when we talk about the autonomic nervous system, talk about glutamate and GABA, and on the glutamate side, when that's hyperactive, then You go into sympathetic dominant autonomic tone. Sympathetic, we associate with fight or flight. And then the opposite of that, which is GABA related, is all zen. That's parasympathetic. People say rest and digest, but it's rest, digest, repair, regenerate, detoxify. So all that's on the calm side. If, so if you're always locked up, you're blocking actually the bioflow and, you know, like with Bile's essential for digestion. If you're in fight or flight, you don't do— you don't digest, you don't repair. You're like, I got to deal with something right now. So stress, chronic stress is locking that up. Estrogen dominance is locking that up. And estrogen dominance also gives you glutamate excess. So that works there. Inflammation, especially driven by leaky gut, periodontal infections, UTIs. This is endotoxemia. These are little parts of bacteria that get into circulation and drive inflammation because you think there's a systemic infection. So all of those block that. And then at the cellular level, glycotoxicity blocks that. So glycotoxicity is too much carbs. And so, you know, if we're always stressed, we always have carbs on board, we're always eating, we don't have that time to go, all right, let's release and get everything out. We go into, when we take the carbs away, we go into autophagy, we go into our cells, we break down old broken cell parts, we get the fats and amino acids back out of it. It's a recycling system. And we move toxins out at the same time. So if we're not doing any, you know, if we're always feeding the system or we're always stressed, you lock all these things and they build up and they cause all this. Even if you're not acutely exposed, then it's the super toxins always getting filled in there.

With so many accumulating factors that can come into that, what are some of the protocols that you love to recommend for let's say your average person, let's say your average American, typically sedentary, probably not exercising enough, probably not eating the best, carb-focused, etc. So what are some, maybe say, top 5 things you would say, start with this, focus on this to detoxify your body so that your system can actually work properly? Yeah.

So drainage is a big thing and drainage is a, you know, it's been used as a term in European naturopathy and in And then as that came to the West, it's been used forever. In fact, in France, they call it lavage, the washing. It's like doing your laundry and it's getting, and it's lymphatic movement, it's urinary flow out. That's the drainage out there. It's the bile flow out. It's getting things moving. In fact, bile flow, like the top thing to just add into your lifestyle is bitters as just a single lifestyle opener. And, you know, we know like, oh, bitters in your old-fashioned, Angostura bitters, you know, the cocktail bitters. That was a medicinal. In fact, that was developed by a surgeon who was a general and he was in charge of a platoon in the Caribbean. And he wanted one thing to give all of his soldiers every day that would keep them the most healthy. And, you know, the new one, you know, it has some red dye in it and and flavorings, but it still has that core of gentian, the bitter root that stimulates bile flow. So he could keep the most amount of people healthy by keeping bile flow going, which is gonna increase digestion, clear the upper GI and detoxify. And so it's really, you can get these medical grade bitters like we sell Bitters Number 9 and Bitters X. You know, like all the women who work here, cuz women have more gallbladder problems than men. They all have that in their purse when they're out. You know, you have some with food, or you have some in the morning or whenever you just feel a little stuck and that gets drainage going. Something for the kidneys, diuretics, you know, drinking a lot of water is moving stuff through. And then these herbs, you know, we have a product called Kidney Care that's got some classic diuretic herbs like dandelion leaf is in there and some Chinese mushrooms that are diuretics and a couple of nutraceuticals. So getting, you know, even getting a little dandelion extract and some bitters is gonna start opening everything up and flowing everything and then getting movement for lymphatic drainage, and then some sort of binder, the simplest of which is charcoal. Now we have a sophisticated one, UltraBinder, that has the charcoal or activated carbon. It's got some bentonite, it's got zeolite, it's got chitosan, it's got some specific metal binders. And you know, that's the real fancy stuff. But at the base, drain and bind, and, and you're getting things up and moving, and then you can get into higher order things that squeeze stuff from the tissue. So you've got the reservoirs in the tissue, you've got the circulating load, and you've got the drainage paths. And so, and then of course also keeping the stool moving. So keeping your GI moving. And if you're prone to constipation, you have to take things that will act as laxatives to get everything moving out. So, you know, a simple level is just move everything out and then carb restrict while you're doing that. Get a lot of fiber in, which is a binder for you too, and you can really get the system up up and moving. Now, probably better if you use a targeted system like our Push Catch Lever Detox or our Advanced Push Catch, which will override and, and really hit these triggers real well. But at the basis, it's drain, move, and bind.

Is there certain movements that you recommend? I have a trampoline, for example, mini one at home that I do between, but obviously it's just for a few minutes. I'm not there for an hour, let's say. I did, I would be, but What would you recommend?

Those are good, but here, I'll even show you. You know, in Tai Chi and Qigong, we would do this. You'd like, you'd bounce on your heels and you're just letting your, you feel your flesh just kind of drop up and down and you're getting a lot in there. You need to move that stuff. There's a really fancy Qigong exercise, really hard to do. It's called the long life exercise. I was joking about really hard to do.

But, you know, these are all those arms. Okay.

Yeah. It's just swinging the arms and then the rotation and then rocking of it.

Yeah.

And, you know, things like that really move. So obviously I'm a fan of Tai Chi and I think that slow movement is one of the best things out there, but just walking is really good. So walking and bouncing, you know, it's just gets everything moving.

So for people listening and watching, it can be so easy, right?

Swinging the arms. That's what you're doing on your mini tramp.

Of course, you don't even need any accessories. So there's no excuses, everyone.

I'll just wait till I get this thing. Everybody's waiting. You know, waiting is the ultimate, you know, cop-out. And then they get like one of our detox and they're like, well, I got to wait till I have like, maybe on the weekend or when I have a vacation, like I'm going to sit at home because I'm going to be next to the toilet and go to the toilet all the time. But that's not the way it works. And all these negative aspects of detox, detox used to be a real hard thing to open the gates and then flood into your blood and you're not draining and you feel like crap and you're getting rashes as it comes out to the skin. It really, if you line up all these things, the movement, the liver flow, the drainage, and the, and the binding, you don't feel bad. You just feel better and better as you offload all these toxins. And you're hitting these same triggers that generate more mitochondria and, you know, bringing up your NAD. And it's like you just feel better all the time. Beautiful.

So I'd love to look at glutathione, often called the master antioxidant, which you touched on before. And science is obviously really backing it up. We even had Dr. Nayan Patel also on the show as well, which we dug deep into glutathione. And as we know, when glutathione levels drop, it almost always linked to higher toxin exposures. You were, you were saying earlier, especially heavy metals like cadmium or mercury as well, which obviously then leads to worse health outcomes, chronic disease, immune health, etc. So given its central role in detox and longevity, what are the most overlooked levers people can pull to raise glutathione effectively? And if you could maybe recommend 3 interventions in order of impact, what would they be and why?

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In general, you, you want to be hitting these. If you hit these, there's this big trigger called Nrf2, and that turns up cellular detox and you, you get toxins conjugated onto glutathione and you push 'em outta the body and stuff. But that's also turning up synthesis of glutathione. So you want to be taking things that, that help trigger that. And those will be sulfur compounds like lipoic acid, some of the sulfur compounds in alliums, garlic, onion, leeks, in crucifers, broccoli, especially broccoli sprouts have sulforaphane. Wasabi and hot mustard have allyl isothiocyanate. You know, there's, but even cabbages and stuff have a lot of these triggers, molecules that help you turn up that glutathione synthesis. Then you need the raw materials and those are amino acids. It's glycine, glutamate, and cysteine. Cysteine is usually the limiting one, and that's the sulfhydryl-rich antioxidant amino acid. And so making sure you have enough protein in whey powders, there's some real high-grade whey powders that have a lot of gamma glutamyl cysteine, which is two of the amino acids just waiting for the glycine to be put on. So those are good precursors to it. In fact, some guys are trying to sell that as a supplement. It was a great one. It was just a little too expensive and it hasn't really gotten out there as much, but You know, the proteins and the signaling really get that going. And in general, unless I'm under a load, I want that to be happening. But then if I want to detox, I'm going to be going through a lot of glutathione because like when glutathione goes down, that helps mercury and cadmium and other toxins accumulate. But mercury, cadmium, and other toxins also bring your glutathione down by binding to it. And then you're always flushing it out of the system and losing it. It. When you use glutathione as an antioxidant, you're recycling it. So when you detox, I like to give extra glutathione. And the way we do that is in these intraoral nano liposomes. Liposomes are little bubbles of fat. Now they're actually technically bubbles of phosphatidylcholine. This is what your cell membranes are made out of. And so you make these little membrane bubbles and the glutathione's inside it. When you take these into the oral cavity, they passively diffuse into the vasculature and they go into circulation. And it's a great way to take in glutathione. I know Patel has a spray, his S-acetyl glutathione, which goes transdermally and then deacetylates and you get the glutathione that way. And so both of these, I mean, you know, we've shown you, you go to the top of the glutathione scale in a couple of days and, you know, really build up very nicely with with the liposomal forms of glutathione. And then glutathione also, you know, you act like it's just an antioxidant detox, but it totally controls immune function. And when glutathione levels are low, you go into a more reactive allergic-based immune reactions or inflammatory reactions called Th2 dominance versus Th1 wants to just go in and kill things. And so having low glutathione makes you very susceptible to viral infections and accumulation of viral load. And having glutathione up gets the immune system to dump all that stuff. And so low glutathione is going to give more food allergies, more inflammatory reactions, which are holding more toxins in and allowing more chronic infections to build, which is building inflammation and holding toxins in. And one thing to remember is inflammation and detoxification are fundamental opposites. And when inflammation goes up, detoxification goes down. And that's because inflammation is pro-oxidant. And so you turn down your antioxidants. Systems in your antioxidant production. And so these are the sides of it. And in longevity, it's that pro-inflammatory side, which ages us so much. And getting over to the anti-inflammatory side, that includes Nrf2, AMPK, sirtuin activation, all these things that keep us down that longevity path. So we're always trying to stay on that side. And glutathione's one of those tools. Yeah.

Would you say glutathione is something that people should just be taking every day? Daily? Because as we age and environmental toxins from what we are ingesting to purely in our environment, it impacts our health.

You know, every day it should be a low dose if you can use it every day, a lower dose, and then a higher dose when you're feeling ill or you're, you've been exposed a lot, or when you're detoxifying, when you're doing immune protocols and you wanna take much higher doses. Always replacing the inside stuff is not always the best. And you know, except when you get to menopause and your hormones have just gone down. So sometimes, you know, knowing a little bit about your glutathione levels can help you dial in, you know, how much, how much to supplement. So I just want to say it's not just the one single miracle thing, you know, because if you overload it, you kind of turn down your, your own production and it finds a steady state. But going through these periods where you really load it in and clear everything out is really good. And then day to day, lower amounts. So maybe you'd be doing 100 milligrams a day, long-term. And then when you're going through a detox, you might do 400, 600, even 800 milligrams in a day.

Should people do that with medical oversight, or is that something that people can just do roughly? No, we're—

we have such a heterogeneous medical population, like patient population. We have those really into it, you know, and these biohackers and these health obsessors, you know, like yourself, and they can do that. Themselves. I mean, this is not— they're not taking rocket science, like, for a drug. Yeah. You know, and I really encourage people to work with their health and take supplements and be really aware of where things are going. So many people are taking like 50 pills a day. I heard that's good for you. That's good for you. That's good for you. That's good for you. What are they doing? What triggers are you trying to hit? I mean, if you're talking about multivitamin and multimineral, sure, those are every day. If you're doing hormone replacement, sure, that's every day. But it's not just every single supplement, every single single day. And so I, it's good to really know what's doing what and take that time to, you know, get to know yourself.

And yeah, they say like cycling as well, even with supplements and things like that too.

I'm a big cycler. All the detox stuff that we do, if you're doing a longer one, you pulse 5 days on, 2 days off. You know, you might just do a 30-day thing and go straight through, or 20 and go straight through, but generally we pulse 5 on, 2 off, or 10 on, 4 off is than the best. But you know, there's like old— I found old mouse studies where they were supplementing something that increases NRF2, which brings up these enzymes involved in detoxification. And they watched those go up as these mice were taking these large amounts of these compounds. Over 10 days, it rose to a maximum and they kept them going for 30 days. And by 30 days, it had come back down to baseline. And so you want to stimulate induction of these genes. You're turning up gene expression. Of different things. So you stimulate that, clear things out, and then let that rest. Go back and then let that rest. If you do everything all the time, your body habituates to it and it doesn't signal like it used to.

I'm curious, Dr. Shade, what's some of your favorite protocols that you do over a quarter or half a year or even over a full year? Like, what are some non-negotiables?

Our basic system of detox we call push-catch detox, and that's stuff that stimulates the movement from the toxin, of the toxins out into the blood, stimulates the liver to do its job and stimulates the bile flow. So we're coupling movement of toxins to movement of bile, and then we come in with some binders a little after that. And you can do our, you know, 1-month advanced push-catch system. You can do that for 3 months, what I call a formal detox, and then you wanna work that into your lifestyle. And so, 3 feet from my bed is my infrared sauna with red light in it and stuff. And so, I'll, a couple times a week, I'll do push, sauna, catch. So, push, catch, you're going to take all your liquids. That'll be your glutathione, your liver sauce. Liver sauce has the triggers for Nrf2 to push out of the cell. It has things to modulate the immune system so that you don't inflame while you're doing it and, and mast cell stabilizers. And it has the, the bile flow activators, the bitters to get the bile flow going. So you got liver flush, you got kidney care, you got glutathione or the ergothione, which brings ergothionine and, and selenium and glutathione. Take all those liquids, they peak in your blood in 20 to 30 minutes. All those toxins start moving. 30 minutes later, you put in your binders that go in and catch them. So what are you gonna do in that 30-minute window? You can bounce, you can do tai chi, you could do yoga, you could sit in your sauna, you could do a foot bath, you can take a walk, you could do breathing exercises. So I do push, sauna, catch, and I'll do that a couple of times a week. And that, I mean, you come out of there and you're just like, God, I feel so much clearer. And the sauna brings two things. It's helping detox through your skin, but it's also hitting something called heat shock protein. And heat shock proteins make you resistant to the stressors. They normalize immune function so you're not like inflaming and reacting to things, and they act on mitochondria. In fact, adaptogens like ashwagandha and ginseng and similar astragalus, similar, similar compounds also activate heat shock proteins. And so the sauna does, you know, a bunch of things that complement the detox. So that's what I mean about making it a lifestyle thing. And then bitters, you know, I'll hit bitters, you know, once or twice through the day, just regularly at certain times I need more. And then taking some binders, maybe I'll do that at night if I'm not doing that push, sauna, catch. So there's a lot of ways to integrate it in there. You know, and then all your other supplementation and how, you know, what are you doing with all that?

Which bitters do you use or do you actually have your own brand or is it, what would you recommend for people?

Our two Quicksilver bitters, bitters number 9 and bitters X. Bitters No. 9 was developed by two guys, me and a pharmacist. And we were herbalists. We were into tasting all these herb extracts and putting them all together. We wanted the bitter signaling to get the bile flow. We wanted some warming things for digestion and stomach health. And we're like, yeah, that's just perfect. And we'd take it and be like, yeah, I feel that. It's great. And then I hired all these 20-something girls who can barely have their period going and are like, like PMSing like mad. And, and that's this lockup that's going on in the liver and it's hard to let everything down and it's hard to let the blood down. And then I had to make a bigger, badder, bet, you know, bitter. And that was Bitter X. And I even have a Triple X I never released, like super bitter. And so that one focused on using myrrh as your bitter. I mean, the gentian's in there, but we added the myrrh, which came out of used extensively as a bitter detoxifier in Ayurvedic medicine. And in all the gynecological formulas because it moves stagnant chi or blood out of the uterus. But stagnant chi in the liver is bile that's stagnant. So it's really good at getting bile flow going. So I joke that Bitters 9 for the guys and Bitters X for the girls. Well, that's not what I joke. I just kind of say that the joke is Bitters 9 for your brown alcohols, like your whiskey and your Old Fashioneds, and Bitter X, which has a more juniper-like flavor for your gins. And, and your tequila. So, you know, you just, you know, pick one, which one you're gonna go with. The 9 is a little bit more warming on the stomach, a little bit less strong on the, the bioflow, but it's there. The X is a little stronger on the bioflow. So the X is in the liver sauce that, in fact, that whole formula's just dumped into the vat there. So we're making sure that we're doing bitter signaling at the same time we're Nrf2 upregulating.

And you take it like half an hour, an hour before you eat.

Is that the optimal or, yeah, but yeah, with bitters, even after you eat, you know, the bile flow is there to, you know, if you've eaten a lot of fat and you just aren't getting that drop down, you take it after the meal. It's like, that feels good. And you could do bitters and soda, the non-alcoholic cocktail that, you know, tastes so good. So there's a lot of ways to use the bitters.

So one area I'm very passionate about, as my audience will know, is around brain health and looking at, for example, here, the gut-brain-immune connection and how detoxification impacts neurological and immune health. In part as my mother had Alzheimer's and sadly passed a few weeks ago. So this is a real, real passion area of mine. What can be done to optimize brain health with all the detoxification pathways, what we've been talking about? What do you want people to know?

Toxins are just horrible on the brain. They affect it in so many different ways. Toxins, now we classify them as gerontogens. They're accelerating the rate of aging. And so in that gut-brain-immune connection, once the toxic load gets high and the inflammation's building and the toxins are in the GI, the GI has inflammation and the GI is opening up, you're getting leaky gut, and that endotoxemia is going with the toxins up to the brain, stimulating the neuroinflammation of the brain. So the endotoxin is turning down detoxification on a systemic basis by blocking bioflow, blocking the kidney toxin movement, but it works on a cellular level, turning down those cellular protection mechanisms. So you're lowering the defenses and then popping these toxins in, and they go to the brain and they're stimulating inflammation in there, which is stimulating free radical damage and creating a lot of the fog that is generating the cognitive issues. Now, at the same time, if you're suppressing these signals that that do autophagy and detoxification. Remember, autophagy is the self-eating. One part of autophagy is breaking up the toxic protein accumulations in the brain, beta amyloid plaques, tau protein plaques, neurofibrillary tangles. And these are a big part of Alzheimer's. That's like autism and Alzheimer's. I often say that autism is like early Alzheimer's because of the inflammation in the brain. So for instance, like a story with my mother, my grandmother had Alzheimer's and then my mom's coming, you know, getting older and she started to get forgetful and she was like maybe in her early mid-60s and my dad and my mom both had amalgams. My dad's brain was pretty sharp and my mom was losing it. My mom got her amalgams out, didn't even do the detox I gave her. Of course, it's always like that. With your parents. 9 months after she gets them out, I go in, I give her 3 months of detox stuff, and she's like, I take it every day, Christopher. And I'm like, you haven't touched it. And it's 9 months.

There's dust on the top of it.

Yeah, dust on it. You know, but even then, you know, you're naturally detoxifying. And over 10 years, her brain got sharper. And, and, and 10 years later, my dad's brain was mush and my mom's was sharper. Network. And so there's a lot we can do to get the toxins out so they're not perpetuating the damage into the brain. And so they're creating again mitochondrial damage, they're suppressing autophagy, they're suppressing detox. So when we hit the triggers for detox, we're clearing the brain very nicely and we're giving it a new lease on life. And a lot of these triggers for detox are also triggers for, like I said, mitochondrial biogenesis. So, so we're taking the junk out, we're stimulating the energy flow in the brain, and you get a lot more clarity and you've got a lot more longevity to your cognition.

Would you say there's a point of no return? So if you're trying to look after your brain, it's so important to get ahead of the curve. I mean, I'm sure it is in general, right? But does there get to a point where even detoxification cannot help anymore?

Oh, everything gets to a point of no return. But it's always worth going in there and doing it because the overlap between the cardiometabolic triggers and the detox triggers and in the brain, one of the forms of Alzheimer's is called type 3 diabetes. And that's insulin resistance in the brain. So the brain can only use ketones and glucose or dextrose, and it can't, can't break down fatty acids by beta oxidation. It can't break down proteins and gluconeogenesis and turn 'em into sugar. It only can use those two things. So when you get insulin resistance, your brain just runs outta energy. And so when you're doing detox, you're also making more cardio metabolic wellness. You're also increasing vascularity. So you're always gonna help to some degree. Sometimes this could be a really big change. In fact, you know, the guy's most associated with early cognitive decline and addressing it is Dale Bredesen. Yes.

I've had him on the show a few times. Yeah.

Yeah. So Dale Bredesen, years ago, I'm gonna say like, you know, before 2015, he was, his protocols were all put more stuff in, you know, here's your fish oil and here's your CoQ10 and, you know, here's some vinpocetine and here's some phospholipids and acetylcholine and we're just gonna build all that stuff up. And then he had, you know, a lot of people that just didn't respond to that. One of them Didn't respond. And one of his friends said, check your mercury. And they did our testing, found it was super high because he was eating swordfish and tuna all the time. Real high. This was right before the Tony Robbins case. Dale brought him to me and I didn't even know who Dale was at the time. And I'm like, yeah, totally toxic. And he's like, here, he's yours. And I detoxed him for 5 months and all the early cognitive stuff went away. Now, what else did he have? He had metabolic disease. He had insulin resistance, fatty liver. So all this stuff goes together. So we did the detox, but that's also addressing cardiometabolic. And at the end of it, the brain was fine and all the metabolic disease was gone. Now he had amalgams too, so he got those taken out, cleaned everything up, and he was good to go. And so now Dale in the Recode, detoxification and infections are huge parts of that. And then there's powering up the system with hormones, vitamins, and all those things that the system might be missing. So it's always good. Is there a part where a point of no return? There's a point of very diminishing returns. That's, that's for sure. But if you get ahead of this, there's so much you can do. And if you're addressing the inflammatory reactions that are going on as well as the toxins and bringing some peace back to the system, you can get a lot done. Dr.

Shikh, can you share about your mercury tri-test if people are curious to understand a little bit more about about the diagnostic component. Yeah.

And this is, you know, if you've got multiple inputs like amalgam and fish or just one input, but you might be shifting in between different forms. The way to get a total map of the mercury in the body is the mercury tri test. And we do blood, hair, and urine. So tri is the three matrices, blood, hair, and urine. Blood has both methyl and inorganic mercury. And you need to separate those two to look at them independently, and that's called mercury speciation. We're the only clinical lab in the world, to my knowledge, doing that right now. Might be a German lab doing it, but I think we're the only ones. And then you wanna look at like, how well are you processing those two forms? So you have methyl and inorganic mercury. So here, well, let's look at urine first. Inorganic mercury goes out through the urine and through the bile. And so we can look at the blood to urine ratio to see how well the kidneys are moving that out of the system. And what you'll see is the kidneys stop being able to do their job. Job of moving the mercury through the proximal tubules of the nephron into the urinary flow, and the urine will be low in mercury, but the blood will be high. We call that retention toxicity. In fact, Huggins identified that in the '70s but didn't really know how to test for it, didn't have the technology at the time. So now we can look at that. The mercury is going only through the bile, and we're not going to do a bile, uh, sample or a stool sample for that. We look at the hair and the blood-to-hair ratio as a surrogate for how your glutathione system is mobilizing methylmercury and getting it out of the system. And so when that's off, that's more of a liver marker that glutathione processes aren't right in the livers. You'll see these urine markers low in the beginning of a detox and hair-to-blood markers, and then at the end, they've normalized. In fact, at the end of a detox, often your urinary mercury is higher than at the beginning, but your blood's way, way lower. So you're looking at the two forms and their excretion indices.

Looking forward now, if you look 5 to 10 years ahead, where do you see the biggest breakthroughs in detox and longevity? Is it nanotech or microbiome-based detox, genetics, or something that no one is really talking about yet?

I think one of the biggest moves that we have now is in really sophisticated signaling control with peptides. You know, so in the longevity space, we've had hormones for a long time. We've had stem cells, but now we're getting, you know, like what's really in the stem cell. We're starting to get the growth factors out. Then we have that high-level signaling with the peptides. And I think bringing that all together is a big thing we're going to be doing in the future. And then maybe knowing specific peptides or specific signalers for specific toxin detox reactions. Right now we know, well, if we hit all this, we know it's going to work. So we might get a little bit more specific with the detox. I think, you know, one of the big things is we have really good cleaning machines for the blood now and for the plasma now. We have accumulation of old proteins in the blood. And so things like plasmapheresis and plasma exchange and plasma replacement, the— and we're starting to put things through blood through ion exchange columns to pull toxins out. I think that's a big addition into the system and probably a lot better testing to know how much things, how much different toxins are affecting you. So, you know, seeing the pattern better, being able to clean better, being able to signal better is sort of where we're going.

And what are you most excited about right now?

It's peptides and putting together complete longevity systems that integrate detoxification, cardiometabolic wellness and signaling for longevity. And so I am getting the opportunities now to work with some really big clinic groups that are focusing on this cash-paid longevity medicine. People really being interested in not waiting till things are broken to fix it. And that's, you know, I was doing a hormone podcast yesterday and it was like, don't wait till it's broke to, you know, don't wait until you're a menopausal mess before you start start supplementing the hormones, start before all that happens. So you have a smooth transition. And just like longevity, start early, get everything rolling and clean so that we can really enjoy things. And so I love putting together these programs for long-term longevity. Beautiful.

Thank you so much, Dr. Shade, for coming on. It's been an absolutely insightful conversation. Where can people find out more about you and Quicksilver Scientific? And we can link everything in the show notes.

Quicksilver Scientific on Facebook and Instagram. Dr. Christopher Shade, like Dr. Christopher Shade on Instagram is more of my personal stuff. You'll see me like hanging out in monasteries in Nepal and, you know, maybe a Burning Man, who knows, you know, all these different places that a little bit more of the things I do. Quicksilver Scientific, obviously the website practitioners, you want to get a practitioner account, a login, more of our educational resources are there. But there's a lot of information just on the website that you can learn from. Beautiful.

So if you could leave listeners with a parting thought or message or ask of my audience today, what would it be?

We do all these things and all these supplements and we're moving all these needles, but if you can't get your mind straight and your nervous system straight, there's very little you can do to override that. And if you do get all that stable, you don't have to do as much. And so the practices of meditation and mindfulness, allowing the brain to let go of these perceived dangers. As long as you perceive danger all the time, you're not going to be in a healing mode. You're going to be in fight or flight. So getting yourself to a calm acceptance of things and understanding what the ego is, that it's just supposed to get you through your day and do things.. And your calm mind is supposed to be on top of that. You get there, you get time outside, you get peace in your life. That's the strongest thing that you can do for your long-term.

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Dr. Shade, for coming on today. It's been a true pleasure. Hi everyone.

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