BenGreenfield-HeavyMetals.mp3

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And with me today on the call is a voice with which you'll be familiar if you've listened to many of the health podcasts that we've had here@BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's Dr. Minkoff who is on the call with me today. And we're going to be talking all about metals and metal detoxing and what you need to know about when it comes to metals, because it actually is a pretty serious issue. It's more serious than what I was aware of prior to finding out some more information from David and from his LifeWorks Wellness center down in Florida. That wellness center is one of the largest alternative medical clinics in the US so Dr. Minkoff sees a ton of patients. I know that he sees a lot of this stuff. He himself is kind of on the pointy edge of performance. Having done 38 Ironman triathlons. I know he's on the brink of his 39th coming up here pretty soon. And Dr. Minkoff has a ton of postgraduate training. In addition to his traditional MD certificate, he's an expert in functional medicine and chelation and allergy elimination, neural therapy, longevity and anti aging medicine. Just tons of different therapies and alternative medical treatments. So really honored to have him here on the show. So, Dr. Minkoff, thanks for coming on.

Thank you, Ben. It's good to be here and talk again.

So real quick, before we jump into metals, what is going to be your 39th Ironman Triathlon?

I'm doing vine man in July and I'm doing Ironman Florida in November. So that'll be 39 and 40.

Awesome. Wow. 40. That's huge. That's a lot of miles. So I think that you've probably got a pretty interesting story in terms of how you got interested in how metals affect our health and why it's something we need to be aware of. How did you get into this in finding out about metals?

Well, I got into it by accident because my wife got sick. I was an emergency room doctor and was interested in health, but didn't know anything about, about heavy metals or toxicity or anything like that. And my wife decided one day that she didn't like the way her fillings looked and she went to a dentist who supposedly knew how to take out mercury fillings. And after he took them out a few weeks later, she, she's also a triathlete, really quite a good one. She's almost always in local races here. She's a podium finisher. Her age group and she woke up one day, and she couldn't lift her arm, and she couldn't move. Her glute on one side was pretty much gone, move it at all. And I took her to the best neurologist I knew, and they said, looks like she's got Ms. She. She had some problems with her thyroid, with autoimmune thyroiditis, and they thought maybe this was what was going on. And I just was, like, flabbergasted at it, and I didn't really know what to do. She's a nurse, and she owned a home health care nursing agency. And I went to pick her up one night, and there was a new dentist that moved in the same building, and the sign on his door said Natural Dentistry. So I was waiting for her parking lot to come out to drive her home, and he was walking out of his office, and I said, hey, let me introduce myself. And do you think that my wife having this mercury drilled out of her teeth has anything to do with. Now she's being diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis? And he said, absolutely, and you better get trained, because this is 1996ish, and nobody around here knows anything about this. And there's a guy in Seattle who's real smart, and he teaches doctors, and you should go up there and learn about it. And so the next weekend, I was in Seattle, and I spent a week with him, and he taught me about heavy metal poisoning and mercury. And when I came back and did the diagnostic test on her, she was very positive. And it just kind of opened my world to, like, holy smokes. And so I began to learn, and I went around the country and studied with a lot of very smart people who kind of mentored me in it, and a very good doctor from Switzerland who came over here and spent about 200 hours with him. And what happened is that she got better. Her mercury toxicity went away, her Ms. Disappeared, her thyroid symptoms disappeared. And within about six months after doing the treatments on her that we did, she. She was normal again. Her arm recovered, and she's never had anything since. But a lot of our friends noticed. You know, someone came and said, well, I've got chronic headaches. Could that be mercury? And then someone else said, well, I've got chronic arthritis. And so I got interested. And so in the back of her nursing office, I set up a little office, and a couple afternoons a week, I started to see people. And I learned from this doctor a kind of kinesiology. It's a kind of neuro biofeedback. Muscle testing, where you can diagnose a lot of things or get ideas on what's wrong with the body, using the body's autonomic nervous system as the, as a tester. And I began to see these people and get results using nutrition and detoxification and curation, and it just blew up. And in the practice just blew up. All of a sudden it was. I needed a nurse practitioner and we needed three more rooms. And so it just grew. And it was so fascinating that I actually left to move to medicine and went into this full time because it's a lot of fun, because you can really find out what's wrong with people and you can really help them. And heavy metals are a major problem in our society. And a lot of people have them, and when they get rid of them, they can get better. And so that's a clarity.

Well, I definitely want to ask you a little bit more about testing for heavy metals, but before we even get into that, you know, your wife obviously got this from dental work. And I know that that's becoming less and less common these days, even though it's still an issue, especially in people of a certain age. But, you know, in addition to that, what are some common sources of metal exposure? And if you, if you want, I mean, I know like mercury kind of is the one that flies on the radar, but are there other heavy metals as well? And where are we finding these? How are we getting exposed to them?

Well, the environment has a lot of this stuff in it. Mercury is released when you burn coal. So if you live near a coal burning plant, the mercury levels in the atmosphere are high. What happens is that the mercury particles then fall into the water and it gets into plants. If you do mercury vapor studies on nice, healthy foods that have a lot of sulfur in them, like onions and broccoli and cauliflower, you'll find that the mercury levels, if the atmosphere is high, there'll be mercury in them. If you live in Hawaii and you're near the big volcano, that thing spits out tons of mercury. I have some patients that live that are coffee farmers that are on the Big Island. They spend half the time in Kona and half the time in Florida. When they're six months in Kona, their mercury levels skyrocket because they're on the mountain, the volcano is active, a lot of mercury comes out of there. They breathe it in, it gets on their skin, their body absorbs it, and then they come here for six months. We give them detoxification products, and then mercury goes down fish are high in mercury. The bigger the fish, the more the mercury. If you like tuna and you eat a lot of tuna, you're getting a lot of mercury. There's been surveys done in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles where they went to sushi bars, got portions of fish and especially predator fish. It's swordfish and mahi and grouper and tuna and shark and these, they accumulate mercury and they're high. So if you eat a lot of it, you get it in your body. I measured quite a few sushi lovers or big fish eaters and their mercury levels are usually high. Their blood mercury levels are high. I had a patient who had chronic fatigue for many years. When he came, we measured his mercury levels and they were really high. So we started to do a program with him where we were doing both intravenous and oral, what's called chelation. Chelation is a way of binding the mercury in the body so that either it comes out in your stool or it comes out in your urine. After about six months of doing the chelation on him, he wasn't getting any better. And so I sat him down, I said, I don't know what's wrong, this isn't working. Give me a seven day diet history on you and maybe something's coming in I don't know about. And he said, well, I eat a lot of fish but I catch the fish myself. And where I get the fish is I go to a pristine lake in Tennessee where there is just nothing around it, the water is pure and I catch the fish there and I prepare it myself and I feed it and I probably eat two or three pounds of fish a week of my self caught fish. So I said, bring me a sample of fish. We're going to send the fish to, it's called Doctor's Data Laboratory in Chicago and let's have them do a mercury test on it. And they did a mercury test on it and it was off the roof. So in areas where there's mining or where there's runoff, you can get water that has a lot of mercury. And if the water has a lot of mercury, it gets in the fish. I was concerned one year in Coeur d' Alene when I did Ironman Coeur d', Alene. I got out of the water a couple days before and I swum and I thought, gee, I don't feel very good. I went to the Fish and Wildlife guys in Coeur d' Alene and I said, is there any problem with. Because there's a lot of mining around there. Is there any problem with it? And he said, well, we have a fish advisory. You can't eat the fish in lake Coeur d'. Alene. This is some years ago and I don't know if this is still true because the metal levels are too high.

Yeah, I mean, Coeur d' Alene is. I mean, that's obvious where Ironman Coeur d' Alene is. And also the river that comes off of Coeur d' Alene goes right behind my house. And it's the same issue. I can't go fish like I can go fishing behind my house, but I can't eat those fish. And when I go swimming in that river, I do feel a lot different. It's one of the most, you know, it's a pristine looking lake and a very clear river and you wouldn't think it's polluted. But yeah, there's a ton of metals.

And what happens is that those metals are absorbed through the skin and they get in your body. And if you spend much time there, you can get just like the fish do. You can get, you know, it could get in your body and, and it can poison you. Now, a lot of pesticides don't have mercury, but they have arsenic. If you're working with jewelry or fabricating or soldering or grinding, then whether it's cadmium or chromium or arsenic or beryllium, these are all metals that the body will absorb and they act like poisons. And one of the ones that we're seeing here now a lot of is uranium.

From the nuclear fallout.

It's from nuclear fallout. Now I originally thought in Iraq, starting in 1992 with the first Iraq war, the armor piercing missiles have a depleted uranium covering on the warhead. And so when those missiles hit a tank, the temperature heats up to like 2,500 or 3,000 degrees. And it aerosolizes the uranium and it goes up into the atmosphere and it blows around and then when it rains, it comes down. I've been seeing hot uranium levels around here for a while and now they're even more. A lot of native people, even children, if I do a hair analysis on them or a challenge test where I'm looking at uranium, it's very common to see very high uranium levels. Uranium is just like mercury. It's a heavy metal and it's a poison because it blocks the body from making energy. And it may block hormone receptors or cell surface receptors where things have to plug in and tell cells what to do. And when you have These heavy metals sitting on there, the hormones don't work or the neurotransmitters don't work and the body can't make energy. So people get fatigue or they get problems with sleep, or they get depressed or they get cancer.

That's what I wanted to ask you. Like, you know, in terms of the exposure to a lot of these metals that you're talking, that you're talking about, that you're talking about basically what is going on? Can you get into that on a hormone or cellular level? What happens?

Yeah, like if the body's going to make energy through what's called the Krebs cycle, what happens is it takes a molecule of oxygen and a molecule of sugar and it makes an energy particle called ATP. In order to do that, there's an eight or ten step process where the original sugar molecule gets changed and a hydrogen gets pulled off of it. And in the process, some energy gets pulled off of it and it gets stored in another particle called ATP. And then the body, when it needs something, when it needs some energy, it can use the ATP as the energy. This process called the Krebs cycle, has enzymes which do this work. And those enzymes are blocked by most the heavy metals. If you have a molecule of sugar coming into a cell, if the cell can't use the Krebs cycle, it can only make two ATPs with a molecule of oxygen and a molecule of sugar. If the Krebs cycle is not blocked, it can make 38 ATPs doing it the way it's supposed to. If you have a cell that needs energy, whether it's a liver cell that's going to detoxify or it's a muscle cell that's going to contract, or it's a brain cell that's going to, that's going to be a relay for some neural hormone or something like that, it's only getting two energy particles out of each time the sugar comes in versus 38, that cell isn't going to have a lot of energy and it's not going to be able to do its job. Now, if it's in your brain, you might be depressed or you might not be able to sleep, or you might feel that cloudy thinking or you can't concentrate. If it's in your liver, it might mean that you can't detoxify. So the body can get rid of its toxins. It builds up, it's in your muscle. It might be that you have what's what people call fibromyalgia. You have muscles that hurt and you have little nodules in those muscles and they're tender. When the body can't make ATP, using oxygen and glucose to get 38 of them, when it's only getting two of them, it builds up lactic acid. The body gets acidic. And you get these areas in the body which are very tender. And if you go to a massage person and they rub them, or you wake up in the morning and you feel you're aching all over and you have these tender nodules, especially in the back of your neck, in the muscles of your back, and it can be in your legs too. Those are areas where the circulation has gone down. There's lactic acid buildup those muscle cells. Those cells aren't able to produce enough energy to do their job. They get local toxicity. Heavy metals are very prominent in causing that in some people. The other thing is, just one other thing on this is that we do a lot of alternative cancer treatments in our clinic. And virtually everybody with cancer has high levels of mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, really high levels. And these things are carcinogens. So they are part of the process, when a cell gets damaged, of causing cancer. So that's another issue with it. There's no good thing about them. It's always a bad thing. Wow.

What about hormones? Can they directly deplete hormones? Or are we talking about the cellular processes that you just described basically being disrupted to the point where you can't make hormones?

Well, on one hand you can't make hormones, but on the other hand they can block the receptor where the hormone is supposed to plug in. You get mercury sitting on a hormone receptor. Then when the hormone comes by and the receptor's already got something sitting on there so that the hormone can't interact or can't bind, then you can get either what looks like an over amount of hormones or an under amount of hormones. One of the problems today, some of these heavy metals act like estrogens. They bind estrogen receptors. You'll see people where they have an over expression of estrogen. A lot of the perimenopausal, menopausal symptoms that women get may be related to this too, is that they look like they've got an excess of estrogen from the premature puberty. Some of this is chemicals, some of it's food additives, but some of it's heavy metals where kids are going into puberty at 7 years old and 8 years old. It's because those estrogen receptors are being plugged as if it was estrogen. But it's not it's what's called estrogen. It's a foreign estrogen or estrogen like compound which actually comes from the environment. And some of that is caused by heavy metals.

Does this kind of depend on where you live too? I mean, do you see more heavy metal toxicity in people who are living in certain areas, environments?

You do. You do. Like I said here, I'm seeing a lot of uranium, but we also see a lot of mercury. You know, the whole vaccine thing. There is a mercury used as a preservative. It's called thimerosal and it's ethylmercury. It was put in vaccines starting in the long time ago 50s as a preservative. And basically what was occurring is that children. When I was a little kid, we got only a few vaccines a year. Now the average kid gets about 24 or 26 vaccines. And those vaccines may contain thimerosal. So you're giving a kid an injection of a dose of mercury, which is a toxic dose. Some children more than others are sensitive to this. And if they can't detoxify properly, then they can get problems with development, with autism, with learning, with allergies, with recurrent sinus infections, with problems with malabsorption, because these metal particles can poison any body system. Sometimes it's adrenals, sometimes it's in the intestinal wall, sometimes it's in the brain. And like you said, we're not seeing as much mercury in the anymore, though there's still plenty of it. But we do see it from vaccines, from the environment, cosmetics, Chinese toys. And I had a kid that got metal toxic with sucking on his mother's keys.

Wow, toys and keys. So this goes beyond just like mining runoff and predatorial fish. It sounds like there's lots of kind of hidden sources, right?

So I usually tell people, if you eat fish, don't eat it too often and eat little fish, eat sardines, eat tilapia, always eat wild fish, don't eat fish that have been farmed. There's some tuna around, that's okay. There's a guy in Oregon called Oregon's Choice where he's pole catching the tuna. And they're young tuna, so they're less than I think 2 years old. They're like only 16, 18 inches. They don't bioaccumulate as much. And he sent his fish to the University of Oregon. They've done levels of mercury on it, and it's way lower than whatever the regular brand is. So we eat some of that. But you gotta Watch it with fish. And if you're a fish lover. Now, some people are good excreters. Their liver is good. They're not deficient in minerals and they can kind of keep up with it, but a lot of people can't. And they get levels that go up and then they can feel the.

I remember you talking about that a little bit when you did that interview with us a few months ago about exercise induced asthma in kids and how it addition to tig, gluten and food intolerances and stuff like that, that metal accumulation could be an issue. Now.

Can I just. Let me just throw one more point in there. As I'm thinking of it. The other population that we see is in very young children, newborns. Because if the pregnant mom has a high level of heavy metals or other environmental toxins and she gets pregnant, the toxins actually get put into the fetus. So the mother will dump her metal load or her chemical load or pesticide load into the baby. So I recommend that mothers who want to get pregnant and fathers take six months and do a program where they're eating really clean food and they're making sure that their liver and their gut is healthy and that if they need to detoxify heavy metals or chemicals or pesticides, that they do it so that when they get pregnant, the mother is not going to poison the baby. Because we see a fair number of children now who are newborns or infants or young children who have chronic colic, chronic rashes, chronic sections. And they're poison, they're heavy metal, toxic, and they got it in utero. And so you can, you know, when you detoxify them, they come out, you know, the rashes go away, the colic gets better and they, and they can then thrive. That's just another sort of point that's that for parents or expecting parents, it's worth doing.

Wow, that's super scary. I want to ask you here in a little bit about this whole detox thing and chelation and all this stuff. But first I want to return back to testing for heavy metals because you talked about muscle testing and I want to find out more about how you're doing that. And then also if there's some other tests that you could get for heavy metals, like blood tests or hair tests or nail tests. I mean, it seems like there's a bunch of stuff out there, but can you kind of two part question explain this muscle activation testing that you're doing, but then also talk about some of the diagnostic panels that are out there that you could get for heavy metal toxicity.

Yeah. One of the problems with this is that metal toxicity can be in only one organ or two organs in the body or it can be in the whole body. There is not a test where you can say I'm doing X test and I can tell you if you have that tells you one way or the other whether you have a buildup of heavy metals in your body that doesn't exist. The way we diagnose this is always kind of a secondary way. Now what happens is that most of the time if you get heavy metal ingestion either from something you ate or something you put on your skin or when you breathed it, that the heavy metals don't stick around in the blood very long. They end up inside tissues. They will stick in your liver or your brain or your kidney or your pancreas. If you measure regular blood levels for these things, unless you just got an acute exposure like a high exposure, the blood levels usually look pretty normal. So that's a problem. And when doctors who aren't very familiar with toxicology, someone comes in and they think, oh, I must have Mercury, I've got 12 fillings and I'm fatigued and somebody told me I might have heavy metal poisoning. And the regular doctor does a blood level for mercury, most likely it's going to be normal. It's not the fault of the test, it's just that the mercury doesn't stay there. Now if you do a specific blood test where you look at the red blood cell level instead of the serum level, if you draw blood and you spit it, what you'll find is various cells and then there's liquid. The liquid is called the serum. When normal mercury tests are done or lead tests are done, they're looking at the serum. Usually it doesn't stay there very long, but it will stay in the red blood cells. One of the tests that we use is called red blood cell RBC mineral levels or toxic mineral levels.

That's the same contest. You can get to test just basic minerals too, like your magnesium levels, right?

Yep, yep. If you go to Metametric laboratory or that's the one we usually use, but other laboratory Genola uses it and probably doctors data does it. And you do red blood cell regular minerals and red blood cell toxic minerals. We get a panel back and it's got mercury, arsenic, cadmium. And lead. If the red blood cell levels are high, it'll show they're high. Those are people who are eating a lot of fish or they have an ongoing exposure. Aluminum is the Other one, it's aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury. I catch these on everybody that comes through the door, because if their levels are high, I know one of two things. They have active, ongoing exposure. Their aluminum level is high. They're cooking in aluminum pot. They're using an aluminum deodorant. They've got some exposure where they're getting high levels of aluminum or if it's mercury or if it's cadmium. Some people have exposures and they don't know about it, or they don't think of it. They're on, well, water and it's not filtered, or they're. We try to figure out where it is. That can be good. If the exposure is within the last three or four months. A red blood cell has a lifespan of about 120 days. So four months. For the last four months, that red blood cell got exposed to mercury through the blood. Its level will be high, and it will show you that it's high. That's helpful. The other way you can do it is you can get a hair sample and the heavy metals can be excreted in the hair. You get a hair sample and it shows uranium and tin and arsenic are real high. That person probably has had a lot of exposure and the body's trying to get rid of it, and it's coming out the hair. Now, if the person is a good detoxifier, it'll show up in the hair. If a person is a bad detoxifier, it won't show up in the hair. You do a hair analysis and it will look normal. But you got a person with chronic fatigue and they look terrible. And then you know that they're not even able to get rid of it. But as a screening test, hair can be helpful. And sometimes we just follow hair because it's not expensive. So you do a hair analysis on someone and their levels are very high. And they're talk about the muscle test in a minute. But the muscle test agrees with the hair and will detoxify them. What you'll see is if you do a hair, three months hair, at first the manganese might have been real high and it went down. And then the leg goes up, and then three months later, the mercury goes up. And then three months later, everything's normal and they feel good. So it can be a way to follow someone to see is your detoxification working? Is their body cleaning it out? And it's easy and it's not expensive. And as long as they don't put stuff on their hair, that will colorants and things. It's an easy way to do it.

Gotcha.

The other way that's often done is to give somebody a chelator, what's called a chelator. And that is either oral something, a pill you can take, or it's something you can give somebody intravenously. You challenge the body. You give them kind of a chemical or amino acid that binds heavy metals really well. And usually these things have a lot of sulfur because sulfur and mercury like each other and they bind. Same with lead and arsenic and cadmium, they stick to it. So you put this stuff in their blood or you give it to them orally and this stuff soaks up these things. And then you collect the urine and you measure how much came out. If you do it unchallenged, which means if you just collect the urine and send it for heavy metals, you won't get anything. But if you give the person this challenged dose, you'll see that their metal levels will just skyrocket. I just got one back today where this is a person that actually works for me, where she got an IV dose of what's called edta. It's a chelator. It's an amino acid that binds mercury. Then we collected urine for her for six hours. Her aluminum level should have been less than 35, it was 380. And her cadmium level should have been less than 1, and it was 6. And her lead level should have been less than 2, and it was 27. So these are really high. This is stuff that's in her body and it's a poison. There's no safe dose, so to speak. So then we treat it until we get this thing. We might give her 10 or 20 treatments. Then some oral supplements to help the detoxification process, measure another six hour urine in a couple of months. And what you see is they go down. They go down, down, down, down until you're not getting any more out. And when you're out, you've gotten what you can get and you reduce the load on that person. And usually people feel a lot better. And so those are the three sort of main ways. And the other way we do it is through kind of a. It's called applied kinesiology or neurobiofeedback. There is the system that runs and coordinates everything in the body, kind of like the operating system on a computer. It's called the autonomic nervous system, and it runs below a conscious level. And there are literally billions of reactions that are occurring every second that have to all be Coordinated in the body for the body to work. Right. So when you eat or when you walk outside and it's really cold or really hot, all the things that have to change, like what's salt concentration in your little toe and how fast should your heart be beating and should your stomach be putting acid in or not? And how thick should the tear film be on your eye? I mean, it's just impossible to think about all the things that coordinate it there. Part of your nervous system coordinates all this stuff, and you can use that as a way to. The system works on a reflex. So just like if you take a reflex hammer and bop somebody's knee and their leg jumps, that you can challenge the body with something that it's poisoned with and it will produce. If you have a muscle that's strong, it will make that muscle temporarily weak. You could put an electrode on the muscle and you can measure it. It's a little bit hard to explain it, but it's very sensitive. And if someone who is proficient at it, you can often tell where the mercury or air ladder, arsenic is in their body and what the relative concentration of it is. Then since it's very easy to do, once I get this on the muscle test, I will do the objective test. I'll get the hair analysis, or I'll do the IV challenge or oral challenge, or I'll get the red blood cell minerals so that I can make sure that what I'm testing on the muscle testing is right and I'll find it. And then I can, as I detoxify them, I can follow it with the muscle test to make sure it's going down, down, down and down. And this saves the patient money because the lab tests for heavy metals aren't all that cheap. And we can get it to where we, you know, where we can detoxify them and we can get these things out of their body. Wow.

You know, there's so many ways to test for this stuff. And I know that, you know, people who live down in Florida, Florida can probably look into LifeWorks Wellness center where you're at, But, I mean, is this the kind of stuff that people can just go to their local doctor to test for or should you kind of. I mean, is there any kind of resource or place that you could point listeners to if they wanted to get these kind of tests done?

The best. There's a couple good resources. If you go to. There's two websites. One is acam.org ACAM stands for American College for Advanced Human Medicine. That is a group of Doctors which are specifically trained to do heavy metal detoxification through this process. And so these guys are usually certified, they've been trained, they do it in their offices, they're knowledgeable about it. And there's probably 800 or 1,000 guys in the US and they're scattered around. And that would be the first place to go where you could at least talk to someone about it. Because most likely your regular normal family practice doctor, internist, Dr. OBGYN, they don't know anything about this stuff. Literally, they know nothing about it. And doctors who don't know something are always negative on it. So you got to find somebody who's educated. The other organization is called the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. It's AAEM, I think it's.com but it could be.org, these guys are also, they're specialty trained in environmental medicine. And part of that is environmental toxicity. And that group is also a good group. And the guys will be trained and they'll be knowledgeable and they'll talk to you about it.

Okay, cool. I'll put a link to both of those in the show notes. Now, obviously, I don't just want to scare people and tell them about all this stuff without talking about, like ways you can chelate or detox. I know you've kind of mentioned some of those words already, but there's lots of different things out there, I think, that are used for chelation or for heavy metal detoxification. Lots of formulas and supplements and stuff out there. What's kind of the basis behind these? I mean, how do they work and do they vary from formulation to formulation in terms of the best way to heavy metal detox?

I think the best fundamental way is eat as clean a diet as you can. If you can get this organic, you're going to have a lot less exposure because there's heavy metals and pesticides. And eat clean. That's like the really important. The second thing is most people are mineral deficient. If your body is magnesium or potassium or iodine or selenium deficient, and we test these every day, virtually everybody I see define these things where they are mineral deficient, that a broad spectrum mineral supplement and a lot of green food I have people avoid grains that you can get, you can make sure that your mineral levels are good. I supplement virtually everybody with a little bit of iodine and a lot of magnesium because it's so prevalent that they don't have enough.

You mean like an oral form of iodine?

Yeah, like Lugol's iodine you can buy it. It's an over the counter. A lot of supplement companies make it. Your average person, the dose of iodine, that's the sort of minimum daily requirement is. Is, I think, 400 micrograms. It's very low. I grew up in the Midwest, and they gave us iodine tablets when we were kids because the Midwest soil was low in iodine and there were epidemics of goiters. But there's no iodine in Florida. And we tested 600 people for iodine levels, and all but two were low. So I don't even test iodine levels anymore. I put everybody on about 6 milligrams of iodine per day. Now, if you talk to a regular nutritionist, that's a bit a lot. But your average Japanese person that's eating a lot of seaweed and sea vegetables is taking in about 12 to 13 milligrams of iodine per day. And there's no toxicity level at that basis. I usually supplement people with a little bit of iodine, like one drop a day. I supplement everybody with magnesium to bowel tolerance. The easiest product is called Calm. It's a powdered magnesium, and you can just put hot water in it, and then you just add it. You just keep taking it till you get a loose tool and then back off. And then usually that will bring magnesium levels up to normal.

That's what I use. Well, I use that and I use a topical magnesium, like a transdermal magnesium. And then my kids take. It's called a kid's Calm Natural vitamin that I think is made by the same company that makes that Natural calm magnesium. Oh, go ahead.

Well, I think everybody should be on a green spot. Nano greens or doctor's greens or there's a lot of them out there. It's 10 servings of fruits and vegetables in a scoop. It's organic, it's full of minerals, it's full of chlorophyll. It's full of flavonoids, which are antioxidants. This is another study we did in our office. 2000 patients measured their levels of what are called carotenoids. Those are what give fruits and vegetables color. They're the main source of antioxidants for the human body. We did 2,000 patients measured their level of carotenoids, and a healthy level is above 50. And to get above 50, you have to eat between eight and 12 servings a day of fruits and vegetables. Well, very few people eat that many. When we did the study in our office, the average level was 18 and the average kid level, children under 12 were, was below 15. These people are all depleted. They don't have any antioxidants and their bodies don't work well. We gave them one scoop of what's called nano greens and retested their levels in six weeks and everybody was above 50. So that's easy. You throw it in a smoothie, it tastes good and it makes a big difference. Those are protections, these things are protections against. Because these heavy metals are free radicals, they generate injury because they cause what's called oxidative stress. They're unstable and they damage membranes because they steal electrons and that damages the membranes. And if you have a lot of these antioxidants around, they protect you. So that's sort of a no brainer that everybody can do. The other thing is I put people on, I put together a product. When we first started doing the heavy metal detoxification in the office, we had people taking 14 different supplements and it just got unwieldy, it got too expensive, it got to where you can't. People just wouldn't, they just wouldn't take that much stuff. I put together a multivitamin multimineral product that had whole foods in it, 16 whole food organic concentrates that had extra stuff to help the liver detoxify. And then it had a lot of extra stuff in it which were very strong in antioxidants. That product's called Body Health Complete plus Detox. You can take two tablets twice a day. It's the best multivitamin, multimineral. We just did a new comparison where people are taking eight and 12 tablets a day of other stuff. Have the amount that's in here. This is real easy to take. You can give it to children, you just snatch them up. Adults can take it. Usual doses, twice a day. It's a great product. When you look at the ingredients list, it's terrific. It has basic support for minerals and vitamins and antioxidants and to support your liver to detoxify. Because you're getting poisoned every day. I mean every day you drink something out of a styrofoam cup, you walk on your grass and there's a pesticide. You eat a non organic food, you take a Tylenol or an aspirin, you breathe air that's got. You get in a new car and you breathe all the fumes into it. It's literally 24 hours a day you're getting toxins into your body and you sort of have to mobilize your body so that it can deal with it. So the greens, the magnesium, the iodine, this body health plate plus detox, you'd have to spend a couple hundred bucks a month to equal what's in that product. And I think it's $57 a month or something for it. It's really good, it really works, and people take it because it's a neat product to take.

Is that basically what a chelator is?

Well, there's a lot of natural chelators. Vitamin C is a chelator. Lipoic acid is a chelator. These are things which will bind metals and help them move out of your body. There are specific, both pharmaceutical and natural chelators. But the common thing, the origin of the word chelator is, or chelate is a Greek word which means claw. It's the idea of this thing grabs the heavy metal and it sticks to it. Then once it's stuck to it, it won't stay in your body. You either pee it out or sweat it out or poop it out. Natural chelators exist. A diet that's fiber is a natural chelator. Vitamin C, lipoic acid, these things are natural. Broccoli, the cruciferous vegetables that have a lot of sulfur. Sulfur is natural chelator. These things. If your diet is high in this stuff, you're accumulating all the time and you're naturally removing it all the time. The other thing that's important about this is if you're not having a bowel movement or two every day, no matter what, then you're holding this stuff in and it will poison you. One of the big things about doing any kind of chelation or just being healthy is that you have to make sure your waste leaves in a timely manner every day. Otherwise it builds up.

I know we're running kind of short on time, but I wanted to run by you really quickly. When you're doing detoxing and stuff, stuff like this, is there concern about you somehow getting rid of important minerals or like important metals in your body? Like, you know, if you have anemia, do you have to worry about somehow this stuff, removing iron or if you've, you know, magnesium, is it going to leach minerals from your body, that type of thing?

Well, it is if you do pharmaceutical curators, you know, if we're giving somebody ivta, What's a pharmaceutical chelator? Well, EDTA or dmts or dmsa, These are initials, but they're pharmaceutical chelators. For most of these things, you have a license to do it you can deplete someone of good minerals. I formulated products some years ago to help with this. The first one is called metal free, and it's what got my life better. And it's a spray. This is something that if you have a metal exposure, you take between one and eight sprays of metal free. It will detoxify the heavy metals out of your body.

It's a spray.

It's an oil spray. And you spray it under your tongue and it goes into your body and it binds heavy metals and it comes out in your stool. Another one, which is. Now, usually I don't use that unless the person's actually been diagnosed with having heavy metals. But it's very safe using children. It's easy to dose, and it's really good. It's been on the market for 14 years. We've had children drink a whole bottle of it and not get really sick. It's very safe. The other one that is maybe more pertinent to your audience is one that we call body detox. It has in it things that will detoxify chemicals and pesticides and heavy metals. You can use it as kind of like prophylaxis. Like you're doing pretty good and you don't need to have a whole program of severe detoxification. But you want something coming into your body every day in addition to your basic nutrition, where you're going to be able to. Where your body gets assistance to move this stuff out. This product, body detox, you take, take four sprays before you go to bed at night. Just put it underneath your tongue, and it will bind chemicals and pesticides and heavy metals, and it will move it out of your body on a daily basis. And it helps people to stay more clean of this stuff than they would be without it. Those are the two that can. You can put links to that Body Health website, and there's a lot more explanation about it.

Okay, so one is called detox and one is called metal.

One is called metal. Three is specifically for heavy metals, and the other one is called body detox.

Okay, all right, cool.

Now, the other one thing is just quick. A lot of people are deficient in essential amino acids. Essential amino acids are those eight amino acids that you need to eat in order for your body to make protein. Most people don't think of it, but proteins are required for detoxification. If you are low in your essential amino acids, your detoxification system will be slow. When the stuff comes in, it won't come out. And when it doesn't come out, it builds up, and that's when you get sick. I put everybody on Master amino acid path map because most people are low in essential amino acids. We found that people who take map detoxify about 3% quicker than people who don't. It revs up their liver enzymes so that they're able to detoxify the stuff. When you're deficient in it, you don't detoxify. So that's sort of the other thing, nutritionally, that someone can do to make sure that their body has. It has all this sort of armamentarium that it needs in order to be a really good detoxifying machine.

Got it. I actually take that stuff for more for sports performance, but that's good to know that it's useful for that as well. Okay, cool. Ton of information here. I'm gonna have fun putting together the show notes because I know we've got a lot of stuff that Dr. Minkoff talked about for the listeners. So if you're listening in, I'll make sure that I link to all these recommendations and some of the testing resources that Dr. Minkoff gave for Heavy Metal. And then also for those of you who like Dr. Minkoff's information, he's always a wealth of information. And he's done podcasts on Ben Greenfield Fitness about, like I mentioned, how to fix exercise induced asthma in kids and how to get rid of chronic pain. And he did one with us on prolotherapy. He even did one with us on just like his own personal life and kind of like how he squeezes in doing 39 Ironman triathlons and also being a doctor and running a medical clinic. So I'll put links to all those podcasts as well if you just want to geek out on Dr. Minkoff. Dr. Minkoff, thanks so much for coming on the call today.

Thank you, Ben. I hope it wasn't too much, but at least it gives people some ideas, hopefully.

Awesome. All right, this is Ben Greenfield and Dr. David Minkoff signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.