The Crucial Do’s And Don’ts Of Heavy Metal Testing And Metal Detoxification.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Yeah, so from a standpoint of hair products, washes, scrubs, makeups, that's what they said. 518 chemicals and half of that for men. They put fillings in goats and they put silver fillings in monkeys. And what they did is they used a, I believe a radioactive isotope. And then they did body scans of these animals and they found that mercury liked things like the kidney, the large intestine, the jaw. From where it was at. It also liked the hypothalamus and pituitary. What the research shows if someone's ever lived in or currently lives in a house built prior to 1978, there is lead in the water supply joint of the plumbing of that home.

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Hey folks.

Ben.

It's Ben Greenfield. And my guest today is actually a guy who I met down in Kona at Ironman Hawaii one year. We actually roomed together at his place. I crashed on the couch, as a matter of fact, in a condo with him and his family. And this guy is not only an Ironman triathlete and I know he's done a ton of half Ironman and other triathlon events as well, but he's also the, the team doc for the pro cycling team@competitivecyclists.com works with a lot of athletes and of course he himself does quite a bit of training as well. Now I have sitting on my desk right in front of me a test that this guy, Dr. Greg Manjian sent over to me. And it is this like, it's a, it's a bottle with some kind of like a detoxificant in it or something along those lines. I'll let him explain a little bit better. It's heavy metal detoxification agent and it's this six hour provoked urine challenge test with these complex instructions in which I'm supposed to take a prescribed mega dose of these capsules and then like pee for the next six hours anytime I pee into this orange collection container. And honestly, it's kind of like been. It's one of those things where it's like sitting at my desk staring me in the face and I haven't yet started into it because honestly, I I wanted to get on this podcast first with Dr. Greg and talk about heavy metal testing and heavy metal detoxification, whether we really need to be doing these complex tests like this and what we get out of them and what's the right way and the wrong way to test whether you have heavy metals and also to chelate or get rid of those heavy metals. So, that being said, I'm going to shove this giant box of test stuff to the side so it doesn't tip over while we're talking here. Just wanted to have it on my desk to remind me to ask you about it, Dr. Greg. And let's jump in right there. There's a lot of different ways that people could test for heavy metals. Like, I even had a person recently on the podcast who does hair testing. Can you talk about heavy metals and why people would want to test for these things in the first place? And, you know, why you choose this specific test?

You know, hey, Ben, Alison, great to be on the show with you. It'd probably be more fun if we were both sitting in Kona right now at the coffee boat.

That'd be preferable. Yeah.

Diving for the goggles at the bottom. You know, heavy metal. It's one of these things where in my years of doing functional medicine, people have this concept. We're all told that we're toxic. And the question I always ask them is, well, what are you toxic in? How toxic are you in it? How are you going to detoxify? And when do you know you're done detoxifying? You know, it's kind of this catchphrase term. Heavy metal toxicity is something that it's nothing new. However, a lot of natural practitioners don't go there because the reality of it is it's a tiptoeing effect. And most people don't do it at the right timing. And some people are absolutely not appropriate to even step into this world. Why we use urine. You know, most people, when they get a test done by their doctor, they're expected that, like, even blood, for example, is the gold standard. Yet as we learn about blood biochemistry, what we're learning is that your body is so protective of its blood and how it works that if you actually have. If you go to your medical doctor and you get a heavy metal test done with blood and you have heavy metal in your blood, what we know is that you have an acute toxicity, and that's a significant issue, and that's something that has to be dealt with in more of an emergency situation.

How would somebody get an Acute toxicity to heavy metals. Like aside from, I don't know, sucking on a thermometer.

Yeah, you think back in the days of playing with those thermometers. You know, that's a great question. What we've seen is, for example, anything from a person getting significant dental work done, and they are already immunocompromised. I've worked with some people that work in manufacturing industries and that have been some quote unquote chemical spills, and they've had some toxicity from those standpoints. It's super uncommon though. And that's why we don't test the blood. What the blood does when it has heavy metal in it will disperse it into its body tissues. And that's why we use, I like to use the urine, and I've done hair before. There's also something called a urine porphyrin test. The reason that we check urine in this standpoint. You guys heard Ben talk about a challenge test. When I first got into doing heavy metal testing, I was what's called a defeat autism. Now, Dr. I went through all this special training to work with mostly children on the autistic spectrum. And what I would do initially with this testing is we would do both a provoked and also a non provoked test. And after about 500 of these, Ben, what I found out is if people had the ability, ability to detoxify these metals on their own, we would never probably have the need to do a provoke test. So what I saw several hundred times later was a non provoked test that showed that the person really didn't have a lot of heavy metals. And then we provoke them with some form of a detoxifying agent. And then that question asks this with a little bit of help, then what can the body get rid of? And it also gives us an idea as to what agent to use when the body's ready to actually get rid of some of these metals.

Okay, gotcha. What does that mean? Provoked versus unprovoked?

Yeah. So a provoked means we actually give a person, in this case dmsa. We give them a very specific dose of dmsa, and then for the next six hours.

What's dmsa?

Yeah, DMSA is a sulfur containing detoxifying agent that is known to go. The other word that you gave before was chelate. And chelate is the fancy term of physically going in the body and binding to certain components and in many cases certain minerals. And chelation will actually get rid of a lot of good things too. So the chelation agent of dmsa, and there's several of them that are used, but we use that one because it's probably the easiest to use and it's the most legally available. Even though right now it's under the scrutiny of some FDA work. There's a couple of supplement companies that are no longer carrying it because they don't want to play that game. So we give that to you and then for the next six hours we collect every drop of pee that you excrete and then we send that off to a lab in Illinois, Illinois called Doctors Data. And they're able to come in and give us some pretty good numbers, gives us a reference range because you should have something in your body. Welcome to this world. The average woman starts out with 518 chemicals every morning and men are half of that. So we still have exposures. So there's expected to be some levels, but they've done some pretty neat work to figure out what's acceptable and what's excessive.

From that standpoint, when you say the average woman starts out with 518 chemicals every morning, what do you mean?

Yeah. So from a standpoint of hair products, washes, scrubs, makeups, that's what they said. 518 chemicals. And half of that for men.

Wow.

Which I mean, that is. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And even going into this whole world of toxic environments, I mean even out of the Journal of Environmental Health and I can get you the resource for that ban toxic, that says that women between the ages of 65 to 87 with high lead levels were nearly 60% more likely to die during this 12 year old study. So there's some really interesting things when we look at. And there are certain metals that we see more commonly on these tests. And there's other ones like mercury, for example. This particular test that we talked about is actually not a good test to check for mercury levels because we are starting to understand better where mercury is stored in the body. And if just giving DMSA is not a great measure to actually pull it. And the other thing we know is that your body is pretty protective of things like mercury. So one bolus dose at one point in time, your body's not just going to be ready, willing and able to dump a huge load of mercury. So some people will do this test and they'll say, oh my mercury was within normal range. But then they might go into a chelation process and six months later they might come back and say, now why is my mercury high? It wasn't high before and what that is. And we'll talk about this when we get into chelation is you actually set up something called a concentration gradient in your body to start pulling some of these things out.

Interesting. So the basic way that this works then is you take the DMSA that's binding to the metals, allowing them to be passed out in the urine, and you're then measuring what winds up in the urine.

Exactly. Yep. That's as simple as we can make it. And one of the reasons why I like this is, I mean, when I work with even challenged populations or even young kids, it's a doable collection. It's something that's fairly easy to collect.

Now, is it dangerous to use something like dmsa? Like, if I'm taking something like this and it's somehow freeing up heavy metals to then get passed out in my urine, does that set me up for some kind of heavy metal toxicity or allow for these metals to, you know, cross into my brain or something like that as they're circulating around, getting freed up for passage into my urine?

That's a great question. And the answer, in my professional opinion after doing this for 15 years, is yes, a huge yes. And that's why I would never. Please, if you're listening to this podcast, please don't go out and buy a bottle of DMSA and do this test on yourself. Because we know that if you are immunocompromised, if your body is not super healthy, you could have a huge herx reaction. And in giving yourself dmsa, and the other thing is if you don't have a good detoxification pathway set up, this can really just stir the pot. And you can get a pretty pissed off hornet's nest by doing this. So that's one of the things that, in my opinion in doing functional medicine with people is there's a right and a wrong time to measure these things, and there's a right and a wrong time to even go after the chelation component. So, yeah, it's. And there's a reason why the FDA is going after it, dude, is because if used improperly, it can do some pretty nasty stuff.

Wow. Okay, cool. So you basically need to have a practitioner walk you through something like this. And what's the name of this actual test kit, for example, that I have here that I know that you've been nagging me. I need to do it at some point here in the next few weeks. But what's this one called? Just a urine.

What it is, it's a 24 hour urine kit from Doctors Data however, because I've done thousands of these heavy metal tests, that's where that crazy sheet that I gave you with how to take your bolus dose and how to take follow up doses. So we've taken their basic test kit, but then we have a proprietary way that we actually do the collection because I do this testing on a lot of sick people and honestly it's my license on the line to make sure that I'm doing it on the right people and supporting them through the process. So yeah, and actually average person can't just call Doctor's data and get their own test kit, though there are many practitioners that successfully know how to do this type of work.

Okay, gotcha. So one of the things that you sent over that I'm going to put in the show notes for, folks, and by the way, if you're listening, you can access the show notes where I will have a link to Dr. Greg's website along with some of the other resources we're about to delve into. The show notes are at BenGreenfieldFitness.com HeavyMetals that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com heavymetals and one of the things that you sent over to me, Dr. Gregg, is this sheet that's kind of like the results sheet that someone would see if they were to one of these urine heavy metal tests. Now on this sheet it's showing things that are within the reference range and things that are outside the reference range as far as metals go. If you look at a test like this and you see a bunch of stuff is outside the reference range, where do you start with? Like, what do you do?

Yeah, you know, first off, it's the timing of this test. Now people come to me clinically in two different fashions. One fashion is a person starts with me from ground zero and they have XYZ symptoms going on. And this is actually a test that I do fairly. Frankly, I never run right away because it's definitely an upstream type test. And in the second breath I have people that come to me that have done testing, that have this test done, and then they have it sitting in front of me saying, and they're like, what do I do about this? So the cool thing that Doctors Data does, so let's say that a person's high in lead. When we get the results back, Doctors Data has several sheets of paper that talk about possible sources where they might have got their lead, areas where they may continue to be exposed to lead, and also some pretty neat referenced articles about the backing of that. So when a person, when we start with really what a person's done, what their goals are, what their symptoms are, we have to be really careful because in my opinion, the chelation process is very stressful on your body. And you know, just like if I hired Ben Greenfield to do an ironman, but I haven't ran a block, you know, you're going to start me out at the appropriate place. So very much like when I work with people that have, even if I know that they have obvious heavy metal exposure, many times we can't start with chelation. We have to start with, you know, way upstream. Things like looking at balancing their stress, how are they sleeping, what is their diet, what's their adrenal health? A lot of them have pathogens in their gut. So we can never start here. Yet. This is, in many of my cases, especially my tough cases, this is definitely an area that we like to get to. Yet some people come with kind of a preconceived notion that we're going to start chelation right away. And then after a little bit of education of them, they completely understand that you can't do that right away. Like, we're not going on a hundred mile bike ride after you get your first bicycle.

Okay, gotcha. Now, if you were to chelate somebody I know that I've talked to, for example, I had a guy named Dr. David Minkoff on the podcast a couple of years ago and he talked about this spray that he recommends called metal free, because somehow that allows you to chelate the heavy metals without them winding up getting deposited in other areas of the body. And I know that in other cases, things like spirulina has been recommended as a natural way to chelate heavy metals. What do you like as far as the chelation process is concerned?

Yeah, that's a. You know, Dr. Minkoff is. Dude's freaking brilliant. And I currently do use some dmsa. However, the way that we use dmsa, we use it orally, and the reason why we use it so differently is that people have to understand the half life of it. One of the reasons why I do not do IV work, even though I'm not against IV work, is if we did IV dmsa, the half life is only four hours. So in my opinion, a person gets too big of a dose and they don't dose frequently enough. Now, the spray that Dr. Minkoff talks about is amazing. And actually I just sat through an awesome lecture with a Dr. Nicholas and he actually has started his own nutraceutical company called Metron Nutraceuticals. And they are actually isolating a zeolite that has the ability, much like that spray that you're talking about. Because what the issue with DMSA been, in my opinion, is that people use it, but they forget that it also is attractive to many minerals in your body. So if you're not doing specific, what we call on cycles and off cycles, one of the things that you notice on that sheet is we actually measure creatinine levels. So the question there is asking, yeah, it's like, hey man, can your kidneys help handle this? Is this going to be too much for your kidneys to do? And again, this is why when we go into the world of chelation, we gotta be so specific. But yeah, there's some brand new research right now on these zeolites and how they're used. And I would agree with you, I think that we are finding ways because this whole world of heavy metal toxicity is becoming more in the forefront. I mean, the World Health Organization just made a statement that says 82% of all chronic degenerative diseases are caused by, by environmental exposure to toxic metals. Now that's a bold statement.

Where did that statement appear from?

The World Health Organization, the who.

Really interesting.

So this is where there's actually something called, and this is in the process, the group of, one of the group of doctors that I work with, we have actually exclusive rights to this stuff called hydrolyzed clinophyllite fragments where they're actually taking a water solution of these zeolites and we're able to get. It's much easier on the body. You don't have to get up around the clock to take things yet. Dr. Minkoff is absolutely onto something that we need to find ways that. And we know that we're exposed to much more things than just mercury and lead and arsenic. I mean, I have a functional medicine patient that grew up on a farm in the Midwest and he grew up on the back of the spray coop without any protective garments on and he played Rambo shooting weeds. And just the exposure from that is astronomical. So I'm excited to see the research coming out on more effective ways to actually and safely. Right. I mean, if we have a five or six year old person that has the need to be tested and chelated, it's a lot easier to use a spray than it is to get them to choke down a horse pill of dmsa.

Now what about IV chelation? That's another thing that I've heard about Being used for getting rid of heavy metals. What's your opinion on I.V. chelation?

Yeah, you know, first and foremost, my medical license does not allow me to do IV chelation. I think it's amazingly effective when there's a definitive acute exposure. Again though, like what I talked about with the half life of DMSA or DMPs or EDTA, what happens is, number one, it's expensive in most cases. Number two, if a half life is eight hours on like DMPs, you're not going to go get an IV every eight hours to go through a long enough on cycle. So I think it can be used very effectively and many doctors do use it effectively. It's not my wheelhouse. I've never done IV chelation with people just because we've gotten such good results with oral chelation at this point.

Okay, gotcha. So we've got IV chelation, we have these like sprays. Is this oral chelation that you use one of these more like zeolite based chelations?

Well, the oral would be this, the zeolite is actually a dropper, but the DMSA would be like the oral.

Okay, so the same DMSA that you use for the test is the DMSA that you use to actually chelate the heavy metals from the body.

And it would make sense that if we use this particular product and this is what came out of you, that that would be the product that we then used to actually go in and bind versus having some random product that we use and then we have no idea what to go after them with.

One of the big warnings that you hear about with chelation is that if you have metals in your mouth that you could potentially just like get this overload of metals in your body as you chelate. Is it safe to chelate if you have fillings?

I have never told anybody to chelate with heavy metals in their mouth. It doesn't make sense to me. So that's why when people work with me, I work very closely with biological dentists all around the United States. And I think I wrote down the. There's a website, I believe it's iomt.org which is the International association of I think toxic medicine. We could put a link to it in there. But no, I specifically work with. No one does chelation until they have proper dental work done. It makes no sense to pull metals when they're sitting in your mouth. And dude, this is a whole nother podcast. And I mean I have, I have conversations with local dentists and I mean they get Spitting mad in my face. The ADA stance is still that mercury amalgam fillings are perfectly safe. However, man, it's just there's so much research that kind of. I just, I have strongly have to disagree because the stuff is so, so straightforward.

Yeah. The website by the way is IAOMT.org and I will put a link to that in the show notes at BenGreenfieldFitness./ heavy metals. But it looks like it allows you to find a dentist. Yeah. Who's a biological dentist or also known. They're known as holistic dentist but they do like mercury free dentistry and use a lot of fluoride free products. I have a dentist who I visit here in Spokane when I do go to the dentist, which is honestly pretty rarely who is a holistic dentist. And same thing, all biological compounds and they really take into consideration the metal component and the fluoride component. So I'll put a link to that IAOMT.org but you basically work with docs to make sure that the fillings are removed and replaced prior to doing any type of chelation.

You have to. And here's the thing. So even when a person goes in and gets dental work done, even if the biological dentist does all the appropriate things, there's still an exposure. So there are very specific protocols that I use with patients four weeks before the removal and then we do specific work with them the day of the removal and two days after the removal just to make darn sure that any exposure that they might have had during the procedure doesn't continue to adversely affect them. So it is, man, it is not to be taken lightly. And Ben, it's not just a silver filling, bro. I mean they could have, someone could have a silver filling underneath a crown. That could also affect them a bunch. And then we could get in the conversation of root canals and what they do. But I think that would be a whole other podcast in and of itself also.

Now I've got some questions for you about what happens after the testing and after the collation. One of the things that of course, you know, we're big on in this day and age is quantification. Like how can we actually see that what we're doing is producing some kind of a result? Do you do any kind testing like heart rate variability testing or performance evaluations or follow up health evaluations or ways that you can see that for example, going through a heavy metal detox has actually produced changes. I mean you can even look at like sleep tracking and testing and things of that Nature, like, what do you do afterwards to see if what you're doing is actually working?

Yeah, I love it, Ben. What I've kind of. My mantra that I've used for the last 15 years is don't guess test. Because someone comes in, they're like, I want to feel better. I'm like, well, you could go have a nice glass of wine and have an evening with your wife and you would feel better. So, yeah. So part of it is a. We rerun the test, the actual test itself, so we quantifiably prove to them that they have things like less metals in their system. But when we do the specific work with like the competitive cyclist, the pro race team, these are people that are crushing the work with heart rate variability. And what we're seeing, as you understand because you've got the app that rocks, and that's what they're all using right now is the Nature Beat app, is that their nervous system is just less stressed and their ability to recover is because they don't have this stressor in their system. The other thing that we're fine with this is so in my other population of people that are a lot of times taking things like synthetic hormones or medications, again, my degree does not allow me to change prescriptions or do any of that. What we find, though, is that when we decrease the body's load from a toxic standpoint, that their cells become more sensitive to anything that they're doing. So anything from decreasing medications to getting off medications with the supervision of their doctor. Yet then when I have my more quantifier in elite athletes, that's when we're seeing things, like even faster times, we're seeing quicker recovery, and then more quantifiable things like the hrv, which is just an amazing tool. And people love getting up every morning and putting their heart rate strap on and seeing what's going on.

How do you quantify or look at what you just described as far as the cells are concerned?

That's a good question. So what we're doing with that is a little bit higher end. And you had a podcast on a while back where someone was doing things like organic acid testing. So we're doing more advanced testing for those people that we need bigger answers on. So we can run like ion profiles. I know you're familiar with some of those. We can run some very extrinsic profiles and see where people are at. I also like to run hormone profiles, more advanced hormone profiles, whether it's a stress hormone profile or we can run profile hormone Profiles that are much more advanced. What that tells us is a how the body is figuring out the metabolites of the hormones. And it also lets us know how sensitive the cell is to extracellular hormones. And that allows us to really get an idea of how well the cell itself is doing from that standpoint.

Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. So have you yourself gone through this heavy metals test and found out things that are happening in your environment or in your body?

Absolutely. So when we did the work, I grew up in a small coal mining town in North Dakota, and mercury is a huge byproduct of the coal industry. And then I chose to live in northern Minnesot a period of time by iron ore mines. As we dug into the research on lead toxicity, we understand that lead is actually mostly stored in the bone structure. And when moms are pregnant, they give a pretty substantial amount of the matrix of their bone to their baby. And what we also know is that the firstborn male gets the biggest dose of mom's lead because of the hormonal component. So I'm actually the third born son of my mother and her fifth pregnancy. My mom had two miscarriages. And when I did my initial test, Ben, my lead was almost off the charts.

Wow.

Now, but I didn't have like all these, what would be called, like, lead toxicity issues. I had none of those, quite frankly. However, a fairly significant portion of my patients, people that, the clients that I coach, are people that just say, hey man, prove to me that I'm healthy or not, and let's quantify it and let's go after it. However, you kind of get used to who you are and what you live in. So as I've gone through over the last three or four years, chelation, by the way, is not a. It's not a 30, 60, 90 day program. I mean, you first start chelation by actually going after the tissues in your body that we call the body tissues. And what we mean by that is any tissue other than the brain. We try to do our best early on to not cross the blood brain barrier because we would never want to a huge dump of metals into, for example, a leaky gut, because you could have, you could raise. Holy terror. So. And even the concept of auto re intoxication, where if someone is not having really good bowel movements, their body will redistribute those metals. So we have to be really careful of that. So, yeah, long story short, I've been digging into it. I'm a couple years in, and my levels now are within the reference, however, I like you, don't live in a hermetically sealed envelope. So it's a case where probably once a year or once every six months, I will do what we call an on cycle where I will ramp up my body's concentration gradient and go ahead and do a short ramp of chelation just to make sure that my body is continuing to do what it's designed to do all by itself.

Okay, gotcha. Now, you mentioned something important there about the blood brain barrier and the concern there about heavy metals interacting with that. Can you go into a little bit more detail of what you mean there?

Yeah, we have to be careful about going after people's brains. We also know that they actually did some pretty interesting research in this world of like silver fillings, because what they're honestly saying right now, Ben, is the greatest impact that we have from a Mercury standpoint, roughly 52% of a quote unquote, silver filling is mercury. What they also know, they did studies and for those that love animals, I apologize, I didn't do the studies, I just read it it. But they put fillings in goats and they put silver fillings in monkeys. And what they did is they used a, I believe a radioactive isotope and then they did body scans of these animals and they found that mercury liked things like the kidney, it liked the large intestine, it liked the jaw from where it was at. It also liked the hypothalamus and pituitary. And when you understand, you look at a lot of, let's say middle aged people that have endocrine issues. If you're tweaking the ability of the hypothalamus and the pituitary to do what it's supposed to do, it changes everything. So we have to make darn sure that the body itself is clean, clear. And then crossing the blood brain barrier with something like alpha lipoic acid is done several months into the program. And then when you do that, you have to be really careful because some people will have pretty significant reactions and you have to alter doses quite a bit. But that, but the ability to tap into the brain and pull things from there is something you need to do, but you have to be really careful about when you do it.

What are some of the other areas that you've found people to be getting lots of heavy metal exposure.

So mercury from fillings is very well known. And the other thing that lead is probably the most common thing that I see with people have toxic levels of. And the best area that I'm seeing what the Research shows if someone's ever lived in or currently lives in a house built prior to 1978, there is lead in the water supply joints of the plumbing of that home. And that can also be a significant source of lead. And we're actually not too far removed from things like leaded gasoline and some of these other components. It's also fun because I get to treat people, actually all around the world is I see geographical distributions of certain things. Like, for example, I treat a handful of people from a little area in the middle of Nebraska. And oddly enough, they don't know each other, they were never related, yet they all have elevated arsenic in their body. So either someone was trying to poison this entire community with arsenic, or there is more than likely arsenic in their groundwater in small amounts.

Yeah, I talked about this when I had the person who did the hair minimal analysis on Wendy, and she had informed me that, for example, my hair showed high levels of manganese. And I went out and got my well water tested. And you would think this pristine well water flowing over the spring 700ft below the ground, that'd just be perfect water. Right. But there, there are high levels of manganese in the water. And I'm currently going through the process of having it tested for all radiological compounds and metals just because I've realized that, you know, I live on this north facing slope, there's a bunch of like farmland and, you know, personal residences with huge yards and things like that about a half mile up the slope. And it's certainly possible that a lot of what they're doing, chemicals they're using, products they have, are just basically flowing downhill and leaching into my well water.

You are so exactly right, Ben. I actually treat a guy that owns a septic company and he talked about the septic systems of what he called sick people or people that took a bunch of pharmaceutical medications. He said it's the most difficult septic system to regulate and manage because the, the biochemistry of it is so impossible to work with. So, yeah, the reality is that you have this ability to get so many things. The other thing that we see is when I worked, when I lived up in Duluth, Minnesota, we had people that would get parasites in their wells. I mean, we had a family that had giardia in their well.

Wow.

And I mean, so, yeah, it's. Yeah, you have this beautiful 700 foot deep well and you just assume that the magical filtration system that gets down to that takes everything out. But, but man, we're living in a different world. Wow.

Okay. So anything else that people should know here as far as warnings when it comes to heavy metal detoxes, warnings when it comes to chelation, things they should know about as far as the right way versus the wrong way to chelate. Anything else that people should know?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just don't go do it on yourself, please. After hearing this podcast, don't go run to your dentist and have them tear all your solar feelings out. Don't go in and Google chelation and just start on yourself. There's a right and wrong time to do it and I just, in my opinion, it's worth having a coach alongside you that's done it thousands of times and knows the ins and out of it. However, I think it needs to be on our radar. I honestly feel that with what we're exposed to these days, this needs to be something that a person says. Yeah, you know, I've read about that and I've heard about that. I'm just really trying to figure out when the right time for me to do that is.

Okay, got it, got it. Now, I know that in addition to the sample report that you sent over to me and some of the other resources that we Talked about, like IAOMT.org, metal Free, the Nature Bead app, some of the things that we talked about during the discussion, you also have your website@drmonjean.com that's D R M O N G E O-N.com and I'll put this in the show notes for folks. But if you go there and you want to do an evaluation with Dr. Manjian, he'll give you 100 bucks off the code you use over there on his site is Ben 100. And you get 100 bucks off doing your own metal detox. And do you walk people through the report like on the phone or on Skype or something afterwards?

Dr. Greg yeah, so what I do with people is when the first thing that initial evaluation, it's by far my most favorite part of being a doc. What I get to do there is just really have an authentic conversation of where a person's been. I mean, I'll ask you. You get a six sheet questionnaire where I will literally ask you questions that you've never been asked before because I need to have a true understanding of what you've been exposed to. So that includes, yeah, it includes about 30 to 50 ish minutes of our time going through that intake. And then what I do is I need to truly figure out what is the next best Step I have a really conservative doc. One of the things I think that sets me apart is when I actually do work with people clinically is every single one of my programs starts with a fast, some specific form of a fast. Because what we know, Ben, without a doubt, is that if we don't get a hold of the gut and how it works, nothing else holds wind to it. So we start off after that initial time together where I get an idea of family history, what you've been exposed to, what you've tried. People will fax me their labs is I'll figure out. My goal is to ask what is the one best test that we can do next that will give us the most information and give us the most usable clinical information to take this person to the next step. What it also does is it allows me to figure out what fast and what dietary approach we can use that person to support that work. So the idea, it's not just what I say is I'm not a supplement for a symptom. It's always. It's got to be a game plan. And people need to understand, too, that if they're going to work with someone like myself, it's a process. This is not a, I'm the doctor, you're the patient. Just do whatever I say. But it's a process where we walk through and truly help you get, you know, get the life that you were truly designed to have. But, yeah, we love that component. So the fee for the initially valid is normally $395. But with my work with you, Ben, really appreciate what you're doing, we're going to give people 100 bucks off that just to kind of take out any. Any chances that they may have of thinking it may not be for them, but to truly take that step for themselves.

Right, Cool. Well, like I said, I haven't done this test that you sent over to me. It's just one of those things that's on my radar. And now that I understand it a little bit better and the idea behind it, I'm gonna do it this week. And if you're listening into this podcast, usually when I do tests like this, I'll report the results on the comment section or sometimes over on Facebook or whatever. So stay tuned to find out what I discover from my heavy metal testing. But if you want to do this yourself, if you're concerned about things that you're exposed to, whether you live in a pristine area like I do, and you're concerned about your well water or perhaps what farms around you might be exposing you to. Or if you live in an urban environment and you want to know what it is that's in your body that you may need to actually do some kind of a collation therapy for and you want somebody to walk you through it. Dr. Greg knows this stuff really well, so check it out. Drmonjian.com is his website. We'll put links to everything@bengreenfieldfitness.com and Dr. Greg, thanks for coming on, man.

Dude. Ben, always good to hear you and hope to catch up with you in Hawaii soon.

All right, folks, this is Dr. Greg and Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

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Sam.