Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Functional Medicine Deep Dive: Environmental Toxins And Heavy Metals

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman here. My team and I have been working hard on something that I'm so excited to share a little bit about today. It's a revolutionary new platform called Dr. Hyman Plus, which is a premium membership exclusive for my community. With Dr. Hyman Plus, you get a ton of private content and special access that no one else gets. This yearly membership gives you exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes, access to all of my docu-series including the Longevity Roadmap and Broken Brain 1 and 2, plus all the bonus content. You get monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dives where one of our doctors goes deep into a health topic to tell you everything you need to know to heal. You'll also get access to a monthly Ask Mark Anything Q&A where I answer the Dr. Hyman Plus Community's biggest health and wellness questions. This Q&A is only accessible with a membership. Because I'm so excited to share this premium membership content with you, I'm releasing a teaser of the brand new Functional Medicine Deep Dive episode diving into one of the most important topics in health. I hope you enjoy it and head over to drhyman.com/plush. That's drhyman.com/plus for more information. Okay, here we go.

Hi, my name is Dr. Judy Nohosa. I'm a naturopathic physician in Arizona and I'm really excited to join your Community today. Thank you, Dr. Hyman, for inviting me. Thank you for letting me share the platform with you to discuss with your community, a very important topic that I find that is not often talked about, which are heavy metals. So heavy metal toxicity, heavy metal poisoning is something that I would like to talk to you about today. A very important topic in environmental medicine. And I find that after practicing medicine for the last 13 years, many of my patients that are chronically ill, patients that are difficult to heal and have autoimmune disease, chronic conditions such as chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, often at the root cause of their problem or an adding factor to not helping them get better are heavy metals, heavy metal poisoning. Today, I would like to discuss with you all the ins and outs on heavy metal. We're going to dive deeply on heavy metal toxicity. Before we do that, I want to go over a presentation overview so we know how we're going to navigate through the presentation today. My first slide to pull up, here we go, presentation overview. We're going to be discussing today on the topic of heavy metals. We'll dive in to discuss what are heavy metals. I would like to share with you eight of the most important heavy metals that are found in the earth's crust. I find them in clinical practice to be some of the most toxic and poisonous to your body. We'll dive in deeply these eight metals. We're going to discuss also what are the sources of metals? Where are they coming from? I want to teach you how to identify them in your living environment so you can stop the introduction of metals into your body. In environmental medicine, we often say detoxification is important, but if you're not removing the source of exposure, it doesn't matter how good you are at detoxing it, you're automatically putting them back into your body. So it's essential to discuss the source. I find that to be one of the foundations for getting someone better. We're also going to discuss the negative impact they have on your health as well. as well as the environment. We're going to teach you how to test for heavy metals. How do you know if you have chronic heavy metal poisoning? How to understand that, how to better test it and analyze it. We're also going to discuss how to detox them from your body safely. In environmental medicine, we have something called chelation, which is a treatment that helps you safely remove the metals from the body without causing further disease. Always important to have a physician that can guide you through that process, but we're going to discuss today also how you can gently and safely detox them on your own. We're going to discuss two cases I want to present to you on thallium and mercury. Just give you an example of what I see in my clinical practice so you can understand how I go from identifying the source to treatment to detoxification and also seeing how the patient can get better. Many of you might be struggling with heavy metal poisoning and really not know it. So I want to give you some tools to understand it better. And the last we'll discuss some cleaning, living, healthy living resources I want to share with you so you are empowered. By the time you finish this presentation, you can really feel a good sense of knowing how to navigate through such a complex topic. All right, so let's get started. So what are heavy metals? So heavy metals are naturally occurring elements that are found in the Earth's crust and they have a density higher than water. Most of us are exposed and have toxicity of heavy metals in our body as a result of the extracting process that we've been doing for centuries in humanity that comes from mining or smelting. We're really going into the deep crust of the earth and drawing these metals out for the use of our evolution and our development throughout society. We've had heavy metals in our environment for centuries. It's not just new to our current living environments. Of course, they're mined and extracted a lot more aggressively that ever. So we find them often in industrial applications, domestic use in your home living space for agricultural production, in the medical industry and technological applications. So you're constantly being exposed to metals from the really they're polluting the air, the water that we drink, the soils, where we plant our foods. Your food is a huge source of exposure. Many patients can have the healthiest of diets and still be quite exposed to metals, which is something I see commonly in my practice.

Today.

So they're hard to avoid. Everything we're breathing, drinking, touching can often be contaminated with metals depending on where you live and what your exposure is. And metals carry a lot of toxicity with them. They can cause a lot of harm to the human body. They can cause harm to your health even at very low levels. So it's important to understand that a micro exposure It's toxic and chronically the more you're exposed to it, the more it can lead to chronic disease. So we're going to talk about chronic exposure, chronic disease versus just acute poisoning, which most acute poisoning is normally dealt with at a hospital setting. And that's not what we're going to be discussing today. We're talking about the chronic low dose exposure that we all have and how it is impacting and leading to all the diseases we're seeing today. They're also quite difficult to eliminate from your body and from the environment Metals have such a high density that they tend to store in our tissues, in our bones, in our cells, in the brain, in the nervous system, in the organs, in the liver, in the kidneys. They like to store there and just get so deep-seated that the metals often don't come out of the body until one is going through menopause, until when it gets older, once we start to have bone breakdown, tissue breakdown. That's when we see a lot of that exposure from past exposure being into our current body and also very hard to get it out of the environment. This is why a lot of the water and the food is polluted and often we're cleaning the soils by planting the food. So we end up eating the toxic foods. Metals also tend to deplete other essential minerals because they compete with them. So heavy metals, think of it as heavy metals where there are 21 of them. They're the ones that are going to have a stronger density to cause disease. But we also have minerals, healthy minerals or healthy metals in the earth. that are also extracted from the earth and are essential for us to have in our bodies. So magnesium, chromium, molybdenum, zinc, selenium, iron, manganese, and copper are also considered the lighter, healthier metals that we're exposed to. So we call them minerals traditionally. But whenever we're planting food in the soils, we get all the minerals from the earth. So they're naturally occurring in the earth. But when we have a high exposure and pollution of the heavier metals, they tend to dislocate those good minerals. We often see in clinical practice often that our patients are very mineral depleted. Your magnesium levels can be chronically low, zinc depleted, selenium depleted as a result of exposure to heavy metals. Supplementing with minerals might be a good practice for medicine, but if you're not removing the true source of what's taking it out, you're never really moving forward. Another issue to discuss for us today. Let's dive in into the heavy metals that we're going to talk about.

Today.

As I said, we're going to discuss the most common ones. And here is a list. Sorry, I'm moving my slides. If you can cut the last part. Okay, so let's discuss the most common metals that we see in the environment. And of course, we don't have all the time to go over everything today, but I want to discuss with you and present on the most important, most common eight metals that I see in my patients, and I would like to present those to you. So here is a list of the eight metals. I've highlighted the most common ones that we're going to discuss. We're going to discuss an aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, cesium, gallium, lead, mercury, thallium. I find that most of my patients, when they're dealing with environmental toxicity, particularly metals, these are often a combination of this. Some of them, sometimes all of them, I'll see in my patients. But I've listed all the 21 metals that we see. So just to touch again on why do heavy metals matter? We are all exposed to it into our daily living environments. It's very hard to avoid them. And a lot of us are exposing uteral pregnancies a way that we detox our bodies because everything gets mobilized from your body into your baby. So if you're planning a pregnancy, detox your metals before you do that so you don't pass the heavy metals into the baby. Many of us actually had heavy metal exposure from our mother without knowing that we were getting that or without our mothers knowing. So many babies are being born today with a high load of heavy metals. And when you measure this in babies' bloods, babies' urine, you can see that there's babies are born with already lead mercury poisoning when they have never really been exposed to it. So starting in utero, is the place where our toxicity starts with our mothers. Cleansing, detoxing, if you're planning to have a child, is the best thing you can do for your child is to detox the metals before you get pregnant. As I said earlier, they have an incredible negative impact on our health and they can lead to a lot of acute and long-term diseases. Heavy metals have a huge affinity for the neurological system, the nervous system. Many patients that have diagnosis of dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, they tend to have high metal counts in their body. often when they do biopsies of patients that died of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, they find that their levels of lead and mercury are quite high in their brains. They also lead to autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's, lupus, many of my Hashimoto's patients have toxic metals in their body. They can lead to mood disorders and learning disorders. A lot of children that struggle with ADD, ADHD, they have been exposed to metals in utero, they have been exposed to metals through their vaccines, and it really impacts their learning. It can also lead to some problems of autism, and metals are considered also to have a negative impact on fertility. They can alter our hormone function, their endocrine disruptors, and can also lead to cancer. Acute exposure, chronic exposure of certain metals has shown to expedite the manifestation of cancer in the body or make a cancer worse. They also tend to disrupt your immune system. Many of my patients that I see in my practice have Lyme disease, have chronic mold exposure, parasites viruses and they're very hard to heal if you don't remove the metals. Often the metals and the parasites, the viruses are bound together. So it's very hard to treat someone for chronic infections, chronic disease, if you have not treated your heavy metals. You just won't see enough changes. But if heavy metals are part of the problem, they have to be addressed for the immune system to get better. They're constantly challenging the system and draining your body from those essential nutrients. as you can see, there's many reasons why we need to talk about metals. Most of you might be dealing with some chronic disease or just endocrine dysfunction. It could be as simple as some low thyroid that starts. And again, metals, because we have an accumulation throughout our lives, don't show up with an acute disease process. It's a slow moving process. So we're going to talk today about the symptoms, but testing is really important because many of you could be walking around with heavy metal poisoning and really not know it until you get a test done. So we'll address that. All right, so what are our sources? As I said, if we don't address the sources of metals, it doesn't matter if I give you the best detox treatments or the best chelation, you have to remove the source of the toxin, otherwise your body will never get better from it. So let's talk about how do we get metal exposure in our bodies? So endogenous exposure versus exogenous exposure. So our sources, most of us get the exposure of metals through the food that we're eating, the air that we breathe, the water that we're drinking, also through pharmaceutical medication use, as I said, vaccines, beauty products, cosmetics. Beauty care products is a huge way that women get exposed to metals without knowing. Also in your household, you're going to have a lot of sources of metals that you might not be aware of from cleaning products to your carpet, to your mattress, We'll dive into those. Also imaging studies, often done with contrast or barium swallows. So CTs, MRI with contrast can potentially give you some heavy metal exposure as well. We'll talk about Gadolinium. Also endogenous, so having breast implants, having mercury amalgams, the metal fillings or even prosthetics, having something inserted inside your body that has metals on it. gives you a constant source of exposure to it. And that could be just poisoning your body slowly.

Well, I hope you enjoy that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, plus all the content from my docu-series and of course any future ones we're going to release, plus monthly Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus monthly Functional Medicine some deep dive episodes, I guess, right? That's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus. Head over to drhyman.com/plus, that's drhyman.com/plus to learn more. I'll see you there.

Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.