How Metal Toxicity Affects Health And Aging

Coming up on this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

If you're going to live to 180, you are going to be full of metals. Metals inhibit mitochondrial function. They lower your testosterone. They cause hair loss. They cause graying. And they cause cancer, as well as actually a whole bunch of other diseases.

So you've got to lower your exposure to them. And you have to get rid of them as you live. Hi, I'm Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Genetic variations make some people more prone to heavy metal toxicity. Some of us are very good at detoxifying while others are not. In this mini episode, Dr. Hyman shares his personal experience with mercury poisoning in conversation with founder and CEO of Bulletproof 360, Dave Asprey.

Let's listen in. There's compounds I write about called chelating agents that you can take with your food. When I eat sushi, you need the fat from fish. I take chlorella, which is a fraction of so well. Chlorella will bind to the mercury in the gut so you poop it out. But chlorella will not pull mercury out of your brain. So what you end up doing is over time, you lower the incidence of metal entering your body and you slowly remove what's in your body. And I talk about how to do that in the book. But if you don't know that metals matter and you're just going to go.

So can you measure how much metals you have in your system?

Yeah, there's two ways in Superhuman that I write about. The gold standard is you collect urine and see what your body's excreting, with or without an agent that may cause you to release more. and then a more common and cheaper way, but less telling, is a hair test. And there's usefulness for both of those, but you can go to a functional medicine doctor and say, I'd like to do a heavy metals test, and they'll usually order a urine test for you. And it's very common to find elevated mercury and lead.

In fact, if you're over 40, you're probably going to find it. So let me just share with you as a practicing physician who, one, suffered from mercury poisoning. Had it too. and two, have treated literally tens of thousands of people with metal poisoning and have done tens of thousands of tests. And I would say it's probably one of the most ignored and underappreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don't know how to think about or measure. And personally for me, I lived in China and it got Huge exposure to mercury. I don't have great genes, they're detoxifying. And it destroyed every system in my body. It destroyed my gut. I had diarrhea for years and bloating and pain. It destroyed my mitochondria. I developed chronic fatigue syndrome and it was such an extreme version that my muscle enzymes were high. My CPKs were like 600. My liver was affected. My immune system was affected. I started developing rashes and sores all over. I was completely cognitively impaired. I couldn't focus, think, concentrate, remember where I was in train of thought. This was like 25 years ago and I was so bad and I literally had to become an expert in mercury and heavy metals and detoxification and I've written a lot about it, but I think I would say that for many of my patients who suffer from weird or strange ailments, it's right at the top of my list of things to look at. And the only way to really know what your body burden is, you can look at your blood, but that only checks 90 days. Better. I mean, if you're eating a lot of sushi, you'll see it's high, but 90 days you stop, it'll go away. You can look at your urine, but your urine also isn't gonna be high unless there's an current exposure. So, if you're in a lead foundry or you're eating tons of sushi, you might see a little bit of mercury. The only way to really look at your body burden is to do a challenge test where you take a pill, it's a chelator, and you collect your urine for six hours. Hair tests also check for fish methylmercury, which is where we mostly get our mercury from it. That also will go away if you haven't eaten fish for a while. And then, there's another test that looks at the blood work that measures the inorganic mercury which comes from pollution or from fillings. And, that's called the Quicksilver Test. And, that is surprisingly high in people who have a mouthful of fillings and you can see the difference between fish or a dental mercury. And, the treatments are depending on the person, can be very aggressive depending on what they need. I have a patient who's got this terrible autoimmune disease and we're giving her intravenous support. Other people can do oral support. There's medications, but it's a whole process that has to be done safely. I think your point is really well taken. I think it's an under-served, an under-appreciated component of medicine and hopefully one day we'll get on board with this because it's just, I mean it was interesting. There was a, an article in the New York Times that I was quoted in. It was based on these special forces.

Oh, yeah, those guys get led, right?

Yeah. So, this guy came to see me whose job was, he was a special forces guy who was a blast expert. So, they would go blow up stuff, blow up doors, blow up this and they had to train and practice and they had indoor practice training. And, these guys were getting all sick. you know the Special Forces guys aren't malingerers, they're not whiners, they're not like, oh, I don't feel good, I don't wanna work. Those aren't those guys. These are the guys who, you know, like stay in freezing ice water for an hour and swim, you know, and do 4,000 pushups and like, you know, don't sleep for three days. These guys are not whiners. They're superhumans, right? Yeah, and so the guy came in, I'm like, okay, well, tell me about your job. I'm like, oh, we blow stuff up, we shoot things. I'm like, oh, okay. And so I said, let's check your heavy metals. And they were sky high. We put him through a whole program. He was, you know, metabolically his system wasn't working. He was overweight. He had pre-diabetes. He had cognitive dysfunction. He had all these immune issues, gut issues. All got better. And then he started sending all these special forces guys to us and we started treating them and they just all got better. And one of them was written about in the New York Times. Wow. Because his, you know, medical crew and everybody dismissed him and he completely turned around. And the guy who was the lead expert at Mount Sinai, who measures bone lead, which is the most accurate way to measure lead in the body. It's not an easy available commercial test, but it's a very powerful research tool. He said, these guys had really high levels of lead. And he said, on the follow-up test, he saw the levels come way down. And he says he's never seen that in his entire experience. And this is a guy who's an expert in lead.

How can you be an expert in lead and not know how to be a body? It drives me nuts.

It's not because it's not seen as a problem. Acute poisoning, yes. chronic poisoning, no. And there's nothing you can, quote, do about it. It's just nonsense. And there's, in fact, an FDA approved drug called the MSA. It's designed for lead removal and actually removes mercury. So I think, you know, for people listening, if you have any strange or weird ailments, if you have anxiety, depression, insomnia, autoimmune disease, gut issues, fatigue, cognitive issues, it may well be heavy metals. And and you need to find a good functional medicine doctor to help you diagnose that.

You go to functionalmedicine.org or ifm.org and.

You can find a practitioner who may know how to do this.

I'm gonna go a little bit broader than that.

Go.

If you are over 50 and you have not gone through a course of chelation, you are not doing aging right. You have to do this if you are alive in the modern world and you wanna live to a highly functional old age. And the reason I say this is that the safe EPA limits for lead used to be 20 parts per million, And they kind of- It was 40. It was 40 to 20. To 10.

To five. To five, and now they're finding even down to one, they're seeing cognitive impairment in kids.

Cognitive impairment and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. And now the people who are the experts in lead are saying, quote, There is no safe limit of lead. And if you are 40 or 50, you cannot be alive and not have a lead burden in your body. You must remove it. And it's not that hard, especially if.

You'Re not really sick. It's not gonna be a big deal. And it's so strange, Dave, 'cause medicine just ignores this. But in the journal Circulation, which is one of the- top cardiology journals, there was a paper a number of years ago that showed that if your lead level was over two, which is within the normal limits, which by the way affects almost 40% of the population, has this lead level, that your risk of stroke goes up 89%, the risk of a heart attack goes up 150%, the risk of death goes up from a heart attack 55%, and this is more than smoking or cholesterol, and it's like, well, why doesn't your cardiologist talk to you about this? So what are the basic tips if you're not gonna get chelated? What are the basic tips for detoxifying?

For detoxifying, not just metals or you mean metals?

Metals, it all works for everything, but.

How do you- One of my favorite compounds is glutathione, and you can increase glutathione levels by increasing vitamin C, by taking N-acetyl cysteine, I manufacture a glutathione pill. You can get intravenous glutathione, which- L-cysteine. And you do IV glutathione at your clinics, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, and we do it at Upgrade Labs in LA for people to recover better. Alpha lipoic acid is another thing. Selenium can help.

Zinc.

Zinc can help. The natural chelator. Cilantro, but surprisingly, you want to take cilantro only after you've removed most of the metal from your body because Cilantro can actually move heavy metals into the brain because it's one of the things that can also penetrate the blood barrier. So you go through and you say, I'm just gonna build some of these.

In on a regular basis. And then you need fiber.

You need to poop and pee and sweat.

Shocking how those work. Yeah, metals are a real deal. And learning how to detoxify, learning how to upregulate mitochondria and fix them, learning.

How to cool off inflammation, these are the central strategies around healthy aging. When our bodies become toxic, every one of our systems can become affected. This is just one of the reasons why it's so important to eat clean, organic, plant-based foods and grass-fed meat. Eat plenty of cruciferous veggies like broccoli, bok choy, kale, and Brussels sprouts to maximize your dietary phytonutrients and increase your body's ability to detoxify. Avoiding plastics and using natural, simple cleaning products in your home and on your skin are also ways you can help to reduce your toxic burden. If you suspect lead or other poisons in paints or floors, consult an expert to remove these safely. You can't eliminate toxins entirely, but you can definitely reduce exposure to these endocrine disruptors. And once you get the hang of it, you can live clean and green without much effort. Thanks for tuning in to this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider.

Sharing it with friends and family. Until next time.

Hey everybody, I just wanted to remind you all that the information in this episode is not intended to be used as medical advice. Always work with your doctor and if you can, find a functional medicine doctor. My staff, including physicians and nutritionists at the Ultra Wellness Center in Massachusetts, is trained in functional medicine to find the root cause of of disease and create health for you every step of the way. For more information about the Ultra Wellness Center, visit ultrawellnesscenter.com Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.