Mercury Toxicity: How It Hides In Your Food & Poisons Your Health | Dr. Mark Hyman

Mercury is one of those compounds that screws up every system in your body. Mercury really is probably the biggest source of environmental toxicity that I see in my practice every day. And I've tested tens of thousands of people, probably done a hundred thousand heavy metal tests in my career. I've seen more of this than maybe most physicians on the planet. And I can tell you that it's real, that it has real impacts on our health, and that treating it creates real measurable results for people who are sick from it. Now, I I've had this and I don't wish it on my worst enemy because mercury is one of those compounds that screws up every system in your body. We're going to talk about what the science is about it, what we know about it, and actually how to deal with it. Now, I actually got mercury from many sources. I grew up eating tuna fish sandwiches. I had a lot of dental fillings. I love sushi. And I also lived in China, in Beijing, during the winter, which heats its 10 million people living there in their homes with raw coal. And that raw coal is a source of mercury, lead, and other contaminants. So I was breathing that in every day. I had an air filter, which I cleaned out stupidly, and knocked it out the window and breathed in the concentrated soot, which was full of mercury. And when I developed the symptoms, it just hit me all of a sudden. I was basically fine. And then something tipped the scale. I think it was an intestinal infection. And because of my own personal genetics, which make it hard for me to detoxify, because of, you know, this. This high load of mercury I had in my body, I all of a sudden went into severe collapse. I couldn't think. I was fatigued. I couldn't sleep. I had muscle. pain, twitches, muscle damage. I had severe digestive issues because mercury interrupts all the digestive enzymes and you had diarrhea for years. I developed food sensitivities, depression, anxiety. I mean, I really didn't know what the hell was going on with me for a number of years until I actually did some testing and I found I had huge levels of mercury. I've done again, I said probably a hundred thousand of these tests and about 10, 000 or more people. And, I can tell you that I had probably maybe in the top 10 or 20 of all the highest tests I've ever seen. Now, I've seen this in so many of my patients who suffer from all sorts of things from chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia to depression, anxiety, obesity, dementia, Parkinson's disease, cancer, heart failure, heart disease, so many different issues, many gut issues. If we don't understand how to diagnose this, if we don't understand how to treat it, we're gonna be leaving so many people in the lurch suffering needlessly. Now, traditional medicine completely ignores this. It's like a black hole. They don't test for it, they don't look at it, they don't care about it for some reason. Occasionally they will do a blood test for mercury levels and you'll see a whole blood mercury and it may be high from fish and they go, oh, stop eating so much tuna fish. But that's about the extent of it. They don't know how to actually diagnose your body burden. They don't know how to help you detoxify or any of the important things you need to do to actually resolve this problem. So I'm going to give you kind of a rundown on the state of mercury that we know now and a plan to actually help reduce your exposure and also heal and get rid of mercury from your body. Now, years ago, I went to a conference. It was called the impact of mercury on human health and the environment. And it was held at Thalane University School of Public Health in tropical medicine in New Orleans. This was a conventional medical conference. Okay. I want to sort of break down what was there, but it was an amazing group of scientists, policy makers, environmental scientists, toxicologists, biochemists, journalists, academic doctors, practicing doctors, dentists. everybody was there. And we tried to make sense of the environmental impact, toxicology, the basic science, the public policy implications, the health implications of one of the least studied and probably the greatest potential threats to our long-term health, which is mercury. Now, mercury levels were not high in our environment until the Industrial Revolution, until we were able to dig coal out of the ground, until we were able to actually burn it, until we developed the fossil fuel industry. All that led to the rise in mercury in the atmosphere, which actually polluted our oceans and led fish being contaminated with mercury and the rest of the story is pretty clear. Now, there were episodes of volcanic eruptions and things like that in the past, and you can actually see in different snowmelt when they'll do ice cores on glaciers and they can say, oh, there was a volcano in the Philippines in 1805 and we can see that mark in the snow. But it's really been a 30-fold increase over the last 100 years in mercury in the environment. 70% of it's from human sources and particularly in the last 40 years doing during the last period of great industrialization. And it comes from coal burning and coal-fired industrial plants, cement plants, chlor-alkali plants. They actually use this in the making of plastics, pesticides, PVCs, pipelines and more. So basically, there was a reduction in industrial mercury emissions over the last 10 years, but I think it's a small amount compared to what we're really dealing with in our environment. Now, what is sort of the deal when it comes to the risk of these problems? Well, it's kind of an increasing risk with increasing dose. Now, there is an exception for that. If you actually are dealing with immune effects, and we call this immunotoxicity. In other words, the role of environmental toxins in causing autoimmune disease. These are in fact called autogens. It's a well-described phenomenon in medicine now. And, mercury doesn't have to be hugely high to actually cause an autoimmune response. So, it's important. But, there really is no safe level. What's the normal blood level of mercury? Well, on your lab test, it may say 0 to 15. But, what's the normal biological requirement for mercury? Zero. There is no normal level of mercury in the blood. It should be zero. Okay? There's no need for mercury in the body. There is a lot of data about the risks. Some of that comes from, for example, research in the Seychelles Islands where they looked at kids and how they basically were affected. And they had a lot of fish in their diet and they had very mostly reef fish which have low levels of mercury. On the other hand, the Faroe Islands where people were eating whale blubber, which is hugely high in mercury, over three parts per million. There they found extremely high levels in the umbilical core blood, and it correlated with reduced performance in neurologic testing in over 900 mother-infant pairs. So they looked at mothers and infants. They checked the level of mercury in the core blood. They looked at neurological testing, and there was significant, in fact. And the dose sort of relates to the impact, right? So the severest symptoms, you know, occurred with higher doses. And you want to make sure that, you know, you have really a look at what your, what your levels are when you see the effects. You know, there were developmental effects in walking, talking, decreased on neurologic tests. So it's really important. Now, the problem is testing. When we look at testing, doctors will look at blood levels, but doctors typically check. But unless you've been eating fish with mercury in it over the last 90 days, it may not show your true body level. For example, most mercury is cleared from the blood within 90 days. And some of it's excreted in the urine, processed by your liver, But most of it is actually sequestered or stored in your organs, in your muscle, in your brain, in your liver, in your kidneys. That's where it goes. And when you eat, for example, tuna, what are you eating? You're eating the muscle of the fish, and that's where it's stored. So unless you actually do a challenge test where you take a chelator, which binds to the mercury in your body, pulls it out and collects your urine for six hours, you're really not getting a valid look at what your body burden is. And unfortunately, this is not tested by conventional doctors. They might do a 24 for our urine mercury test. That's helpful if you had acute exposure in a, for example, industrial plant or something, but it's not going to tell you what your long-term body accumulation is. So, mercury basically accumulates in muscle and accumulates in fat. And so basically blood levels aren't the best test for your body burden. There's another form of mercury called the inorganic mercury. Now, methylmercury is the most predominant form that comes from fish, but inorganic mercury is primarily from fillings. We call these silver fillings. They're not silver, they're mostly mercury. and it's cleared from your blood and it's stored in your tissues and it can be converted to methylmercury in the body and it can actually end up leading to all kinds of neurologic issues, everything from dementia to ADD to autism. And so you really need a proper diagnostic test to look at it. So the question is how do we get mercury in our bodies? Well, it's a lot of different sources. It can be from mercury vapor in the air if you live near a cement plant or a cold burning plant. It can be from water, from contaminated water, from fish, as I mentioned, from your dental fillings. There's ethyl mercury in vaccines, thimerosal, most of it's been taken out, but there's still a few vaccines like the flu vaccine that has it. It can be occupational exposures, it can be from home exposure. You break up fluorescent light bulb, you have a thermostat, batteries, red tattoo dye, if you got tattoos, splint lightning creams can cause it. There used to be more in over-the-counter products, less so now, but it used to be in contact lens fluid and neosinephrine, which she used for cold sinuses. So, you know, 80 of it is, is basically, you know, coming from the source of fish is primarily what's going on. It's, it's basically coming through your gut. You do inhale it if you're exposed, but it's, it's not as much of a big issue. Now, the once, once it's, it gets to your body, it goes to the kidney, it goes to your brain, it can be, it can be transferred to the baby, through the placenta. So a lot of kids are born pre-polluted the only the way out of your body is through urine, your feces, your breath, and breast milk. So the problem that mercury causes in your body is it binds to enzymes and binds to what we call the sulfur groups of enzymes. And this is kind of on most enzymes and it's in the mitochondria and other chemical binding sites. And it basically jams up your biochemical machinery, which is why it causes widespread effects. Now, we know, you know, with big exposures, we've documented these, the consequences, like the Minimata Bay exposure, where there was, you know, effluent from factories going into this Bay. And then the people in the town ate the fish, and the kids ate the fish, and they had terrible birth defects. They had, you know, pink disease or acridinia. Also, teething powder back in the day in the 30s, 40s had mercury in it. It was called Calomel was, was something used in medicine way back in the 1800s. I think it's what the Lewis and Clark expedition used to treat everything from syphilis to chronic infections. We've heard of a Matt Hatter syndrome, the Matt Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, the hat hatters use felt to actually make the hats and the felt was made stiff with mercury. And so, you know, it's also in fungicides and has been, you know, from grain exposures to contaminated grains. So it's really a problem. Now, It mimics so many different problems. So you think, you have depression, you're obese, you have diabetes, you have dementia, you have autism, you have ADD, you have whatever, an autoimmune disease, and you think, oh, that's all what they are. But actually they may be caused by mercury. We know that the symptoms of mercury poisoning in babies is very, very similar to the symptoms of autism. This is very well described. It's called erythromycin, and it's an issue and it leads to shyness, mood swings, insomnia, memory issues. A lot of neurologic symptoms are caused by mercury, including Parkinson's been linked to it, tremor, loss of balance, loss of hearing, tunnel vision, slurred speech, headaches, sexual dysfunction, really, really important. It can affect the gut like it did for me, causing diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, it can cause skin issues. So it's really quite a problem. we want to make sure we get rid of the mercury. So one of the controversies is about mercury fillings. I think it's less so. I think Canada's mostly banned it. I think that finally the FDA said it shouldn't be used for pregnant women and children. I wonder why it's okay for the rest of us. I don't really think it is. But basically it's clear that the fillings will go through chewing and through the pH of your mouth, depending on the microbiome of your mouth, can vaporize and release large amounts of mercury over time from brushing, grinding. And so, that can be a factor. Now, there was a large study where they looked at from, that was published in JAMA, found really no correlation between mercury fillings and behavioral issues in kids. However, there were a lot of problems with that study. First, it was a short study, and two, they didn't look at the genetic differences in these kids, and there was really differences in the kids who had impaired detoxification pathways. So if you redid the analysis of the study and you said, okay, who are the kids who are poor detoxifiers versus good detoxifiers? The good detoxifiers seem okay. The ones who were bad detoxifiers had a seven-year developmental delay. So if they were like 18, it was like they were 11. So that's a real, real problem. Now, it can take a long time to get rid of mercury from your body, up to 18 years to clear half the dose of mercury, and it comes out very, very slowly once it gets in. So you've got to learn how to actually reduce the exposures. And I think when you look at people with fillings, the data is really clear. They have higher blood mercury, they have three to five times more mercury in their urine, they have two to 12 times more mercury in their tissues than those people without amalgam fillings. There was one study I saw on sheep and monkeys where they basically put in fillings and then they actually didn't see terribly high levels in their blood because it's inorganic mercury, but their tissue levels were high. And when they did brain biopsies, they found a lot of this in the brain. They've even done corpse studies, autopsy studies on people with Alzheimer's, and the ones who had the most filling surface area had the higher risk of Alzheimer's. So it's really quite an important thing. Now, urine levels is how often doctors check, but again, it just looks at what's really your current exposure. So you really gotta kind of, you know, do the proper testing. There are now tests, Quicksilver Scientific is a test called the QS Tri Test, where it looks at mercury from inorganic sources or methyl mercury from fish so you can get a sense of where it's coming from. But I've seen, for example, patients who have fillings for decades who have high levels. So you know, I've had it. I've had it for 30 years. I've had the fillings. It's probably not a problem. not true. They still vaporize. Now, I see more and more changes in many countries like Germany and Canada and Europe, where they basically have banned these fillings. They can't get them anymore. You still can do in the United States, but most dentists actually don't do them anymore. They just kind of quietly have switched over. I don't know why, by the way, you should ask your dentist this. According to the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, if you take fillings out of somebody's mouth, you can't throw it in the garbage. You have to dispose of it in a specific way as if it were a toxic waste. So ask your dentist if he says they're fine, say, why is it okay to put my mouth, but it's not okay to throw in the garbage? I think you shouldn't think about that. So I think the data on this is pretty clear. Again, many, many scientists are on board with this, and many governments are now finally, you know, are very clear that this is a problem. So, I think we need to really get serious about getting these feelings out of people's mouth safely. And, there's a whole another conversation about how to safely remove them. Because you can't just go in there and drill. You've got to put a nitrile dam in. You've got a high speed suction. You've got to make sure you don't swallow it. You don't breathe in the vapor. The dentist should be wearing a mask, a gas mask basically. So, you have to find a special dentist. And, there's a website, IAOMT.org. we'll put all this in the show notes where you can get a dentist who's been trained how to safely remove mercury. So I think this is important. Now, let's talk about genetics here because I think not everybody is affected. I've seen people with a mouthful of fillings. Some guy was seven years old. I'm like, this guy's gonna be in trouble. But it turned out he was okay because he was able to really detoxify. Unlike me, I'm not great at detoxifying. So, I tend to have I have increased absorption of mercury, decreased ability to eliminate mercury. I have glutathione genes that are problematic. Glutathione is the body's main way of getting rid of mercury. It's a sulfur-based molecule in the body. It's from three amino acids, cysteine, glutamine, and glycine. And, it's ubiquitous. It's critical for longevity, for health, and for detoxification. It's an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory. And, you needed to get rid of mercury. Now, people have high mercury, tend to have depleted glutathione because their body's working overtime to get rid of it. So you need to do things to boost glutathione. But I have genes that make it hard for me to make glutathione, and I end up having, you know, more, more load of mercury given there's a problem. There's also interesting data on ApoE genes. These are genes that are, are Alzheimer's risk genes or cardiovascular risk genes. And if you have ApoE4, you tend to not be able to eliminate mercury because it doesn't have a cysteine or sulfur bearing amino acid on the Apo lipoprotein 4 genotype. And so that basically means that if you have this, you're at high risk for not only Alzheimer's but many other cardiovascular risk diseases and you end up being unable to excrete it. In one study, I think it was in Australia, they gave people a chelator, DMPS, who had ApoE4 and compared to non-ApoE4 patients, they had much higher body burdens of mercury. so this all sounds pretty depressing, but the good news is that we can reduce one, our exposures, and two, increase our ability to eliminate it. And so when I see someone coming into my office, you know, I check their blood pressure, I check their heart rate, I get their weight, I get all these important things, got their cholesterol, right? I check mercury on and heavy metals on every single patient who comes in with any health problem because it, it can be a great mimicker of all sorts of diseases. And I want to make sure that if they have it, that I treat it, and if they don't, that I have eliminated from my diagnostic possibilities of what's causing the problem. Now, the main ways we expose again is contaminated fish in our fillings. So you want to make sure that you get rid of the large fish in your diet, like tuna, swordfish, shark, tilefish, halibut, orange roughy. I mean, the list goes on and on. There's some great resources. The nrDC has a wallet card, which low medium and high mercury fish environmental working group has a has a great resource for how to reduce your contamination from fish that's ewg.org there's the Monterey Bay health watch which so there's a lot of great sources and there's actually great companies that now doing regenerative aquaculture which are raising great fish with low toxin levels the company I like is called seatopia.fish we'll put that in the show notes that's c e a t o p i a.fish and they have great delicious tasting fish so really important now you can check your blood level. But again, remember, that'll only detect your recent exposures. You can check your hair. Again, that gives you a partial picture because it doesn't check any mercury from fillings, just from fish. And again, as I've said, once your hair grows out, if you haven't been exposed, let's say you ate tuna fish for 10 years, then you stopped for two years, it would probably be none in your hair or none in your blood, but you could have a ton in your body. so the only way to really detect it is using a chelating drug called DMSA or DMPS, which is not so available in the US, and it binds to the mercury like fly paper. It's got sulfur in it. It should only be done by doctor. It involves taking one dose of medication followed by a six hour urine collection, and then you see how much comes out. And it's the most reliable way to see what your body burden is. Again, this is not a conventional test that most doctors do. It's not really well recognized. People say it's problematic, but they go, oh, well, yeah, of course you're taking a chelator. but no, if there's no mercury, and I had patients with no fillings who are vegan, who I do the test on, who never ate fish, who don't have fillings, who don't live near a cement or coal plant, and they have zero heavy metals in their body for mercury. It's quite amazing. So it's something I've seen over and over again. I think there needs to be more research. But again, there's nobody funding this data. Now, if you are sick and you have a high level of methyl mercury or ethyl mercury from the blood test, you can see it's probably a good idea to see a dentist and get your feelings out. safely. There's a lot of ways through food you can actually improve your body's detoxification capacity. You can take cruciferous vegetables, the broccoli family, and that boosts glutathione. Garlic and onions also do the same thing. They have sulfur in them. You can use various things like cilantro, which I've seen people juice cilantro can help their bodies eliminate them. You want to make sure you're taking plenty of fiber and having regular bowel movements to bind and excrete the metals. You want to make sure you're drinking plenty of water. You want to do saunas, which help to eliminate the heavy metals and toxins through your sweat. But, you also may need to take a chelating drug or do other things as well. There's some great supplements that can help that boost glutathione like inositol cysteine, lipoic acid, things like selenium and zinc are also important for activating your body's metal detox pathways. You need the right methylating vitamins B6, B12, folate. So, I've written a lot about this. We're gonna link to articles that I've written about how to identify source of mercury, how to optimize your body's own detoxification systems. But it's really, really important if you have any type of chronic illness and you have any type of exposure that you get this properly checked, that you work with a functional medicine doctor to get this properly treated, and you will see profound benefits. I went from basically being barely able to function to being severely ill and having all sorts of immune issues, cognitive issues, digestive issues. I had severe muscle damage. with elevated muscle enzymes. I was a mess. And it took many years for me to learn about this, to detoxify myself. But now I've learned how to do it a lot faster. And I would say it's one of the most satisfying things I do is treat people with these problems. And I've seen people reverse obesity, depression, autism, ADD, Alzheimer's, even poor metabolic health, autoimmune diseases, Crohn's disease. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. I remember one guy had ulcerative colitis. I tried everything I knew how do. Finally, I did his heavy metal test. He had super high levels. We chelated him and supported him with IVs and other things like glutathione. And, and he completely reversed his, his, his ulcer colitis. So I, I see these stories every day in my practice, and I encourage you to not give up. You need to go find somebody who can work with you. I would check ifm.org for a doctor in your area. But, but recognize that this is a big problem. It leads to many conditions that are often misdiagnosed as something else. And in order to, to properly deal with this, to work with a trained functional medicine doctor to help you identify the source, identify your body burden, and create a roadmap for applying the right therapies in the right way at the right time to help your body detoxify. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. Nearly 75% of the non-organic fresh produce sold in the United States contains residues of pesticides.