472 FBF: Toxic Aluminum: Trouble of an Abundant Element

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It's my pleasure to welcome Professor Christopher Exley to the show. He is a world renowned expert on aluminum from Keele University in the uk. He was featured in Natural News this week for his revelations of studying levels of aluminum in baby formula. And this is an important and pressing issue and we're going to learn more about it today. Chris, welcome. How are you?

Yeah, thank you very much. Yes, thanks for the invitation to talk to you.

Well, my pleasure. And you're coming to us from beautiful England, right?

Of course. It's always beautiful in England.

Between rains. The days are drawing in and it's a little bit dreary out there at the moment, but it's always beautiful. Of course.

But I remember on one of my last trips to England, I really got to experience the English countryside and I just. It was just stunning. It was beautiful.

Yeah. We're blessed with many, many beautiful areas here. Yes, you certainly are in such a small island.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it used to be in the old days that the sun never set on the empire.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Things are changing.

Tell us about aluminum and the dangers.

Yeah, well, my, I mean, the research area that I've worked in for nearly 30 years now is actually I want to understand everything that I can about how aluminium impacts upon living things. We really began asking the question, is aluminum useful for life in any way? And we don't mean, obviously it's useful for making cars and this type of thing, but is it useful as an element of life, for bringing life and being essential for living things? And we were never able to actually identify anything. And in fact, it's still true today that no living organism uses aluminum for any beneficial purpose whatsoever. And this is very interesting because aluminium is actually the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust. And it creates a sort of paradox because all of the other abundant metals in the Earth's crust and indeed all of the other abundant elements are essential to life. So trying to understand why the most abundant element, metal and third most abundant element, aluminium, is not essential for life has really been my life's work, trying to understand that.

When you really begin on that pathway, you then of course start to come across a number of different areas where aluminium does, or aluminum, as you call it, does impact upon living things.

I like the way you say it better.

I stick to mine because I remember to do it that way. And for example, one way which perhaps many people might have come across.

And certainly in North America you had a problem with something called acid rain. And we've had a problem in northern Europe with acid rain. And certainly back in the mid-70s and early 80s, this was quite a significant problem. And what we've learned at that time, and this is really when my research started in the early 80s, we learned that the acidification that was produced by acid rain, and this is of course of man made origin, this ring, we call it anthropogenic origin, wasn't actually the problem. It wasn't the acidity that was killing fish in lakes or trees in forests. It was actually aluminium being released into those lakes or into the soil waters that the trees were taking of aluminium. The fish were being killed by aluminium. And this immediately told us that when aluminum was biologically available, it is actually quite toxic. And actually this then started to fit with a number of other observations, including observations in humans where under certain circumstances where humans have been inadvertently exposed to aluminium, we found out aluminium is neurotoxic, it can produce quite a serious encephalopathy, a death of neurons in the brain. We found that it affects bone and bone conditions. We found that it produced an anemia within individuals. But these conditions are mainly what we would describe as an acute condition. And we are much more interested in what I now call living in the Aluminium age, because when I went to school, we did things, we learned about things like the Iron Age, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age. Well, actually, what I've described, the last hundred years or so since we were able to take aluminum out of its inert ores from the earth and turn it into metal, I've called this the Aluminium Age. And it's the Aluminium Age because you can't even begin to imagine the number of different ways that we actually use aluminium to begin with in our everyday lives. So getting an understanding now of not only how it is used, but the consequences of its use is part of a program that we have running here at Kiel called our Human Exposure to Aluminium Program. And part of that is looking at the way in which we know we're using aluminium. And another part of it is perhaps where we might not be aware that aluminium is a contaminant of a number of systems and therefore, as a contaminant may also we are being exposed to it and maybe getting inside our body.

Talk to us, if you would, before you go on. This is very interesting about some of the exposure points. Where are we getting it? You know, your recent study talks about baby formula. I believe deodorant and antiperspirant is a problem as one of the culprits as well.

Right. There are so many, but if you want to highlight a few, you've picked up one there, which is antiperspirants. Now, be careful, because aluminium acts as antiperspirant. It is not a deodorant. So you can get some antipers. Well, you can get some deodorants which are only deodorants, they don't have aluminium in them. But anything which uses the word antiperspirant contains aluminum. And yes, these are incredibly effective at preventing sweating. So, yes, you may be applying about one gram of aluminium salt into each arm every morning if you're a regular user of an aluminium antiperspirant. Other examples are, for example, vaccination. We use aluminium in adjuvants. Adjuvants are used to make sure that a vaccine goes a long way, produces a strong immune response to a very small amount of the antigen. And we use aluminium adjuvants. They're nearly the only adjuvant we've used for almost 100 years.

Is that in every type of vaccine.

Or just select nearly every type. So, in other words, you could probably make an approximation of 80% or more of all vaccinations ever given included in aluminium management and still do today because it's very effective and of course it's very cheap. So it really does allow you to use a very expensive antigen in very, very small amounts because it promotes the antigenic effect, it amplifies it, in other words. Yeah, exactly. It's very effective and that's why we use it.

So would it be, I'm just curious about the vaccines. Would it be possible to make that vaccine if you could have access to it and pay more for it, for it to have more of the antigen and less of the aluminum or none of the aluminum, or would it not work that way at all?

Well, some. For those vaccines where aluminium adjuvants are used, I am not even sure that you would get the same type of immune response if you left out the aluminium adjuvant part and even if you used more of the antigen. And I'm not really sure that those types of experiments have really been done because in some instances you may hardly get any antigenic response at all. It is that important. Now, there are other adjuvant materials that have been used in the past and some that are still used today. Mainly aluminium has been chosen, yes, because it's cheap and because many people think it's completely safe. Now, it probably is quite safe. But there are a number of people who, it would appear, do suffer a bad reaction to aluminium in adjuvants in the same way, they may be people who suffer from similar exposures to aluminium in other ways. You know, we're using it in our medications, we put it in all sorts of food.

It's in so many different things and so many different ways that the result is that every cell in my body and your body does include some aluminum atoms. Some more than others, some individuals more than others. And those aluminium atoms, they're not benign, they are biologically reactive, they are biochemically involved in processes going on, but none of those processes are necessary or required or indeed beneficial. So each and every one of us I always talk about, we're coping with our body burden of aluminium. We have a burden, each and every one of us, of aluminum associated with us, which has come from what we do in our everyday lives, where we live, what we do, everything that we do. And our body has to expend energy dealing with that. Now, we do not know what the long term consequences of that are. So some of your listeners or readers, they may have heard of connections with, for example, neurological diseases, Like Alzheimer's. There's been a connection between aluminium and Alzheimer's. Indeed, there are other connections with things like Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, these conditions. We are not sure what the exact connection with aluminium is and we're not sure whether it's dependent upon, for example, aluminium being accumulated over a lifetime or an approaching lifetime before any effect could be noticed. But there are definitely strong links here and they may come from the fact that we also know that with age we accumulate aluminium in our body. So while we are continually excreting aluminium that we take in, some of it is accumulating. And so we know that when we die there will be more aluminum in our body than when we were born. All of these factors, to me, even though I cannot be sure whether.

My intuition tells me that something which has no biological function, it's not required for any purpose, has never been shown to be beneficial in any way, it's probably something we don't want.

I would agree completely.

And therefore we should, until we know more, until we really understand what the long term consequences of a lifetime exposure to aluminium, what those consequences are, we should look, we should adopt a precautionary approach and we should reduce our exposure to aluminium as much as possible. Now, this is why, probably bringing you back to the reason why you called me. This is why the recent research showing very significant levels of aluminium in baby formulas, infant formulas, breast milk substitutes, is really quite alarming because these are the newest and most vulnerable members of our, and we're offering them an aluminium boost in the first few months of their lives. And this to me is wrong.

So what about the vaccine debate? I mean, we've done some shows on that before and people believe there's an autism connection, etc. And then I want to ask you, other than staying away from aluminum, is there any flush, is there any cleanse, anything that can reduce the amount of it in our bodies?

Yeah. What we've got to be careful of and always be careful of is we need to go by the science. And that's something that my group has always done. And for example, we have a research program looking right now at the biological availability of aluminium in vaccines. We're interested in that because clearly something which is so immunogenic has significant biological activity and therefore has the potential to, in some individuals to produce harm. And we need to understand that. Now, of course that doesn't mean that it is associated with any of these vaccine related disorders until we've done the research to say otherwise. At the moment, we don't know, but there are the links and you suggested some of those yourself. Now, our philosophy about aluminum is, first of all, sometimes the people from the aluminium industry think that we hate aluminium. We're the opposite, of course. We love aluminium. This is what we do for our research. It's our life, it's my life, it's what I do more than anything else. And we under no circumstances are saying that, listen, we've got to ban aluminium. We realize that's ridiculous. Aluminium has done a huge amount of good for mankind, particularly in the 20th, now 21st century in manufacturing, though, in many different ways. That's correct. In many different ways it's been incredibly beneficial. However, what has never been asked of the aluminium industry, they have never been asked to demonstrate its safety in any application, any application at all. And therefore it's down to people like ourselves just actually to start to look at this, to start to try to understand at what level we might consider aluminium to be safe and at what levels we think perhaps we need to do something about it. In other words, we need to be. If we're going to live successfully and healthily in the Aluminum age, we need to understand these so that we can reduce our exposure where it's appropriate. Now, what you asked me about, well, are there ways and means of cleansing yourself? Well, actually, this is a major research program in my group, as you probably could guess, because we're obsessed with aluminum, aren't we?

Right. Right. It doesn't seem like we're going to be able to avoid it.

Exactly. And you hit the point there, it's going to be almost impossible to avoid it. So what we need to do, if we can, I mean, apart from, as I think aluminium should not be included anything in the future until it's demonstrated to be safe to do so, or if it is included or if it is there as a contaminant, it should be measured and written on the packet or wherever it is to tell the user, whoever that is, they will be exposing themselves to aluminium when they use this product. In the meantime, we found an interesting relationship which goes right back to my original work, which was on aluminium toxicity in fish. We were able to show that aluminium has a natural antagonist, something which protects against aluminium toxicity. And that's actually the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust, silicon. Silicon protects against the toxicity of aluminium. Now, this very interesting relationship, the chemistry of it, is one of the major programs in my team, but also we're trying to apply that chemistry to both reduce the amount of aluminium that we absorb across our gut from our food, etc. And also to actually remove the aluminium that's already present in the body. And the way that you can do that, and this is going to sound rather simple, but it works. There are on the market and for example in the US an example would be Fiji Water. And by the way, we do not get any funding from these organizations. There are mineral waters that are rich in the element silicon. And in these mineral waters the silicon is in a form called soluble silicon. We call that silicic acid. What we know is that when you drink silicon rich mineral water, the silicon or silic acid in there goes into your blood and helps to remove aluminum from your body via your kidney. So you pee, you produce aluminum in your urine. So we now have a number of programs, both with healthy volunteers, but also been working with people with Alzheimer's disease, people with Parkinson's disease. We're just about to start a study with people with multiple sclerosis, essentially showing that by drinking about a liter or so of silicon rich mineral water every day, you are reducing your body burden of aluminum. Now if you were able to sustain that, now a liter of mineral water a day is actually quite a bit for most people. But if you were able to sustain that and keep it as part of your everyday routine in your diet. We've done studies so far over about 15 weeks where we have shown that what we call the body burden of aluminum of individuals is definitely reducing. If you could sustain that over months and years. We actually do believe that individuals could gain some particular protection from the possible toxicity of aluminium by doing this very simple thing. A non invasive.

Right. And now is this only Fiji Water or is there.

No.

I'm not supporting Fiji Water.

I understand this show is sponsored by Fiji Water. I'm just kidding.

Exactly. We don't have any sponsorship at all from them. What I can tell you though is that there's a sort of cut off. Now on a bottle of mineral water you often do see silicon labeled and the amount that's in the mineral water on the label it's often written actually not as silicon, but as silica. And if it says 30 milligrams per liter or 30 ppm or greater, that product should help you to remove aluminium from your body and indeed reduce the absorption of aluminium into your body.

Okay, and so there are many, many types of waters that do this, right?

No, no, there are not many.

Not many.

There are many in terms of around the world, but in each individual. For example, in the UK there are probably only three or four that we can buy easily off the shelf at your local supermarket. And actually, my friends in the US find it relatively difficult to find silicon rich mineral waters there too. In parts of Europe, it's much easier. In France and Italy they have many, many more mineral water companies. And many of those mineral waters are coming from areas. And it's all to do with the geology and geography of the area where the mineral water is naturally rich in silicon. We actually use in our studies. The one mineral water company that does sponsor some of our work by providing us with the mineral water free of charge is a company called Spritzer from Malaysia, which isn't available in the US or in Europe. But again, they have a range of mineral waters with a high silicon content. And for us to do our studies in Alzheimer's and coming up, multiple sclerosis, we actually, you can imagine we need thousands and thousands of liters of this stuff. So we get loads of it free of charge from this particular company to do the research.

So can't we just take a silicon supplement of some sort rather than worrying about the hard to find water?

You know, everybody asks this question and it's the obvious thing to do because you can go to your health food shop and you'll see loads of these silicon supplements. Unfortunately, silicon supplements are generally something called silica. Silica is of course, what happens to silicic acid when it aggregates, it comes out of solution. Silica is sand, essentially. Now, unfortunately, that you can't put. If you took up some sand and you dropped in some water, theoretically it will dissolve to give you soluble silicon, but you need to wait about several hundred thousand years or something of that. In other words, it's a very slow process going one way and not the other. These silicon supplements, many people take them and some people actually tell me that they get some positive results from them. That's quite possible because silica is a surface upon which, for example, metals, including aluminum, can absorb. And it might help the metals to be excreted in that way. It doesn't give you silicic acid, it doesn't give you soluble silicon, or if it does, it gives you a relatively small amount in comparison to what you can get simply from a mineral water and sometimes from your own tap water. But it's very rare that tap water is so high in silicon as these specific waters are. So the silicon supplements do not supply you with soluble silicon. But it's unfortunate and we have for many years been involved with trying to develop something which does. And there are companies out there that claim to have developed things that do. And we've tested them all and none of them live up to the claims. So one has to be very careful about that. I don't want to put people off using silicon supplements. If people find them to be helpful, go ahead and use them. But they are not working in the way in which we understand this particular chemistry to work.

And so it sounds like then the water advice that you mentioned and just. I mean, can we make an attempt to avoid aluminum or is it almost futile?

No, no, you. I mean I met. I make attempts to avoid. Avoid it in a number of ways, but I balance those up against my own personal feelings. So for example, I eat very little processed food because I know that aluminium is used in the processing of food and I know that certain types of processed food contain considerably more aluminium than for example, fresh food where you've cooked something yourself. So we now live, I'm sure the US is exactly the same as the UK in a ready meal world. Everybody goes out and buys ready meals this and fast food that. These are the types of products which will contain more aluminium. So there are opportunities there to cut down. For example, on your aluminum intake, it includes all of our favorite drinks, all these soft drinks with colas and similar types of things.

These will have aluminium in them, much more so than some fresh milk or a fresh juice. That isn't Long life. The other thing we have to worry about is packaging. So one of the problems with the infant formula study that we found was it's quite likely that the high levels of aluminium in the infant formulas, that some of it is coming from the packaging because there's so much aluminium based packaging used these days. It really is everywhere. And there is good evidence, I mean, for example, Long life products, if you drink Long life orange juice, you know the type you get in the sort of carton that you can keep for a year as long as you keep it somewhere out of the heat and things. Well, these cartons are usually made of a laminate, trilaminate. They often have a cardboard on the outside, a polythene on the inside, but in the middle is aluminium and that aluminum is brilliant at keeping oxygen out of the product. So that's why it works so well and why aluminium is so good. But there is always some aluminum from that foil getting into your product and the longer you keep it for, the higher that content would be. So I mean I would never drink any of these long life type products. I would always buy fresh orange or something which is in a plastic or perhaps a glass, but generally, I guess plastic container or paper, just pure paper container or something of that sort. You can also avoid doing things in your kitchen. You can avoid simple things like wherever you've got acidic foods of any sort, not putting them in direct contact with either aluminium in cookware or indeed aluminium foil or tin foil, as you might call it, you can reduce things in that manner and it perhaps becomes a way of life to do that. I mean, one of the things that I do do is I do apply an antiperspirant because I cannot live without it. I cycle a long way into work every day and it just would not be very pleasant for my colleagues if I was sweating all the time. So I make that sacrifice. But I do quite like to drink quite a lot of silicon rich mineral water to try and compensate for that purpose. So you have. You have to choose things yourself as the way in which you can do something about it.

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. And one of the things that I've heard about breast cancer is that particularly women, but men get breast cancer too. But women, of course, shaving one's underarms and then applying that antiperspirant is so much worse. It should never be applied on freshly shaved skin because that's when the skin is more open.

Right, you've raised an interesting subject. Next week, I'm off to a conference in Austria on the very subject of breast cancer. And right now there is a burgeoning but small amount of evidence that is implicating aluminium and possibly antiperspirants in breast cancer. That's the only place we're at at the moment. A few years ago, we did our first study on this, I think published in 2007, where we're able to show that when biopsies or samples were taken from.

Women who had breast cancer across the breast, from the area closest to the underarm to the area furthest away in every individual, we always found more aluminium in the breast tissue in the area closest to the underarm. So that sort of alerted us to the possibility that aluminum might have a role to play in this disease. Since then, there's been quite a lot of interesting research which is beginning to give us a possible mechanism also of how aluminium might have a role to play in this disease. And in fact, I'm going to present some brand new research at this meeting, some of which I can tell you about now, which is, I mentioned already that one of the ways in which we get rid of aluminium from the body is through our urine by peeing it. Actually, what we've found and just publishing at the moment is that it looks like the, our perspiration, our sweat may be a much more efficient way that we are removing aluminium from our body. So we may actually be sweating more aluminium than we are peeing aluminium on a day to day basis. Now that's a good thing because we're removing aluminium. But then it raises this interesting question. Yes, but in the underarm area, we were applying an aluminium salt to stop us removing the aluminum by sweating. In other words, it's like a double hit there in that area. Not only are you applying an aluminum salt to prevent the sweat gland from working, but in preventing the sweat gland from working in that area of the tissue, you're not removing the aluminium by sweating because you stop sweating because you stop it there. Right, yeah. So that's an area now that I think we need to focus on as the possible reason why there may be elevated amounts of aluminium in those areas. Not simply because it's being applied to the surface of the skin as the antiperspirant, but also the action of the antiperspirant in preventing aluminium being removed from those tissues by sweating. So that's some new research for you that we're going to review.

Well, maybe just in general, peeing and sweating more is good for us.

Absolutely, you're absolutely right. Drinking, just flushing water and doing exercise. And you know what, there is very good evidence that, for example, take the well known neurological condition of Alzheimer's disease. Very good evidence that you get protection from physical exercise. Now, we don't know why, no one has worked out why that is. Perhaps it's simply because people who are regularly doing exercises are more efficient in removing aluminum from their body.

Right.

It's a possibility. We don't know.

Another good reason to exercise. You know, you're just speeding up the system a bit and flushing it more. That's got to be good.

That's absolutely right. I'm sure that's right.

Yeah, exactly. Well, good. Well give out your website and tell people where they can find out more about your research.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm at Keele University. I can give you the website address if you relatively straightforward. So we're at www.keel, which is spelled k double e.ac.uk and then just forward slash and then you need to use the English spelling aluminium. So it's www.keel.ac.uk.

Aluminium. That'll take you to my website. And listen, if anybody really wants to drop me an email, I'M more than happy to try and answer the questions as as well as I can.

Good. Well, very good. Well, Professor Christopher Exley, thank you so much for joining us today and telling us about this very, very interesting research. And I wish you well in doing more research and finding more ways that we can keep this metal at bay because it's not doing us any good. So thanks for joining us.

No, it's my pleasure. Thank you very much.

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