S2:E9 - Enterprise Fitness Podcast - Mark Ottobre Interviews Bruce Jones

Hey, hey folks, it's Mark Ottobre here, dusting off another episode from the old Maximus Mark podcast show. This one is with Bruce Jones from the National Institute of Integrative Medicine. Back in the day, I also had him at an Eat Your Way to WABBS seminar where he presented on this as well. Phenomenal guy, truly knowledgeable. Look, you're going to get a lot out of this podcast. I do a really good intro on this one. So I'll cut this intro short. And let's get straight into it. Speak to you all, speak to you on the other side. This podcast is proudly brought to you by MaximusMark.com and Enterprise Fitness Personal Training. For Melbourne's most professional and knowledgeable personal trainers, contact Enterprise Fitness on 1300 887 143 or email info@enterprisefitness.com.au. Enterprisefitness.com.au. Hey, hey, it's Maximus Mark, and welcome to the show that punches you right in the face with information, but in a good way. It's Maximus Mark, and today I have a truly enlightening show about heavy metals and detoxification. I mean, there are many opinions about just how to detoxify heavy metals. However, today we're gonna hear from a true expert and master in the field with Dr. Bruce Jones from the National Institute of Integrative Medicine right here in Melbourne. Dr. Jones graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1980. Following 3 years working in the public hospital system, he worked in general practice for many years where he specialized in counseling and chronic pain management. His particular interests lie in postgraduate medical education, the integrative approaches to prevention and chronic treatment of kidney disease, and best practice in management of heavy metals, chelation, and detoxification therapies. Bruce presently serves as a senior lecturer in integrative medicine at the National Institute of Integrative Medicine, or NIMH for short, in East Hawthorne, and is a member of the International Society of Nymphrology. We were lucky enough to have Dr. Jones at our last Eat Your Way to Abs seminar, where he blew the minds of all the participants when he dropped massive truth bombs about the effects of heavy metals and just how to detoxify. Toxify them. So it's my absolute pleasure to present to you today this absolutely awesome podcast. Welcome, Bruce. Absolute pleasure to have you on. So before we get rolling, I really want to just kind of get a bit of a background. So tell us, how did Dr. Bruce Jones become Dr. Bruce Jones? I mean, how did you become one of Australia's leading authorities on integrative medicine?

Well, about 2 years ago, I was invited to take up a position as a senior lecturer in integrative medicine with the newly formed National Institute of Integrative Medicine in Melbourne and to specifically develop educational programs both at an undergraduate and postgraduate level to teach people the importance of integrating the best of conventional medicine with the best of natural medicine and it's really just developed from there. The programs we have a course now available in— for the general public on complementary medicine and health and we're currently developing a postgraduate course specifically designed for general practitioners and naturopaths and any other healthcare practitioner and the first modules in that should be released sometime late next month.

Wow, that sounds really awesome. Now you're the one who's actually putting a lot of the course material together? Is that right?

Yes, yes, that's my principal role at the Institute.

Yeah, cool. So yeah, you definitely have access to all those, I guess, all the research and then basically putting that research into a practical format and telling the practitioner essentially this is what you do with all that research.

That's right, because there's a huge amount of, huge volume of research that's been published, particularly in the last 10 years or so, that that most practitioners don't have the time to be able to access or to make sense of. And this is one of my interests is to be able to crystallize the essence of a lot of this good published scientific research and bring it down to a level that practitioners can use day to day in their clinical practices.

So in other words, we can safely say you are the go-to guy on all things when it comes to the functional medicine. So we're in good hands today and getting some good info from you for sure.

So I still got my L plates on my friends.

I know, for some reason I don't believe that. For the people at home who have never considered heavy metal toxicity, can you tell us a little bit about what it is, why and how might heavy metals become a problem for an individual?

Sure. Heavy metal toxicity is basically where heavy metals build up in the body and the body's natural detoxification mechanisms struggle to get rid of them. It's purely a question of input versus output. For example, if you live in an area that you have a lot of environmental exposure, say for example you live near a coal-fired power station, or you live in an area where there's a lot of heavy industry, then you're much more likely to be exposed to heavy metals than someone who lives in an idyllic tropical island, for example. So where you live does make a big difference. Again, if you're living close to a major road or a major freeway, you're going to be much more exposed to some of the heavy metals that emit from diesel fumes— cadmium, for example. So, these are sorts of the things that you may never think about but may be affecting your life every day. But there's a couple of other ways in which heavy metals can become a problem for the individual. Through genetics— of course, we inherit half our genes from our mother and half our genes from our father, It's not always— sometimes it's the father's genes that are largely expressed, sometimes it's the mother's genes, and this applies to our detoxification pathways in that our genes very much influence our ability to detoxify heavy metals and other environmental chemicals. Diet is obviously a factor. If you eat a lot of fish, particularly large fish like shark or swordfish, that can be a problem with methylmercury. And the other main way that the majority of people get exposed to heavy metals is through dental amalgams, and we'll talk more about that as we go on.

Yes, we will. So I guess let's start with the basics, and the basics would be, I guess, testing and screening. So how would one test for heavy metal toxicity?

Well, the simply best test is a hair tissue mineral analysis. Now, this is a fairly simple test. It requires just a sampling of hair, preferably from the back of the head and close to the nape of the neck. Now, hair grows at the rate of about a centimetre a month, so If you get the 2 to 3 centimetres worth closest to the scalp, you're going to get the most recent results of what's happening both at a nutritional level and a heavy metal level. You can take samples from other parts of the body. You can use pubic hair. You can use axillary hair, but that has a few problems, mainly with underarm deodorants. Or you can use toenails and toenails are very good except that it tells you what's been going on 12 months ago because of course toenails take a long time to grow.

Right, okay. So the hair mineral analysis, what labs do you recommend for hair mineral analysis testing?

Well, the National Institute of Integrative Medicine only uses InterClinical Laboratories in Sydney. They are the Australian agents for Trace Elements Incorporated, which is a specialist heavy metal testing laboratory in Addison in Texas. It's a lab which has been in operation for 30 or 40 years and has tested well over a couple of million samples from people worldwide in that time. Their tests are very, very reliable. They're very accurate and the report is excellent.

Right, right. And so they're the only lab that the NIM recommend, is that correct?

We've looked at laboratories from right across Australia. There's a number of other service providers as well as other providers in Europe and the US. There we found that in terms of reporting standards in terms of the amount of usable information that we can get from any one report, they're not as good. They're also— a number of the labs wash their hair samples and rinse them, which whilst not affecting the heavy metals so much, certainly affects the nutritional element readings and can make them somewhat unreliable from specimen to specimen. So we use— there's only a couple of laboratories in the world that don't wash their hair samples prior to processing, and Trace Elements Incorporated in Texas is one of them. Right.

Excellent, excellent info. Gary Rutten from California asks, is there any tests you can run to ensure blood-brain barrier integrity before starting a heavy metal detox?

That's a very good question, and the simple answer is no. There is not one test on the planet that you what you can do to ensure that. Now, the adult blood-brain barrier is like a couple of sheets of cling wrap or Glad wrap. It's a very, very effective covering and it protects the brain from a lot of exogenous metals and chemicals. However, there's a couple of situations in which the blood-brain barrier can be breached. The first is if you have a major head injury. That can cause all manner of damage to the barrier. The second is if you have a major stroke. And the third is if you get a really high fever such as with a good dose of influenza or if you're unfortunate enough to get a good dose of malaria or Q fever or dengue fever or something like that. That alters the permeability of blood-brain barrier and you are exposed during that period of time with the body temperature above about 38, 38.5 degrees Celsius. But apart from that, no, the human blood-brain barrier is normally fairly intact.

Righty, righty. So it's not really something that you necessarily necessarily need, but just maybe be conscious of if the patient has a head injury or a stroke or a fever.

Correct. Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. So, sources of toxicity. So, the most common place, as we spoke before, to be exposed from heavy metals are dental amalgams, big fish, breast milk if the mother is toxic, and the environment. Can you offer the listener an example? I mean, before you offered the example of —when you say environment, you were talking about in the seminar we had you at, you talked about if you live close to a coal mining, was it, or the—

Yes, power stations. Power stations. Where you've got power stations that are burning coal. Now this is, of course, Australia depends for a lot of its base load energy on brown coal in Victoria and black coal in the other states. But countries such as China, for example, are putting in huge numbers of coal-fired power stations. And the problem with coal, of course, if you think about where coal comes from, now coal is formed from the deposition of plant material from millions and millions of years ago. So the plants have been growing They have absorbed mercury and cadmium and other heavy metals from the air. How did they get that? From volcanic activity. Volcanoes are one of our other major sources of environmental heavy metal contamination. People don't realise this, but Mount Etna in Sicily, for example, spews out huge amounts of heavy metals such as mercury, and I think it's actually been quantified, into the atmosphere around the Mediterranean, and then that spreads right over Europe and North Africa. And of course that's been going on, that volcanic activity's been going on for millions and millions of years. So the plants that were around, you know, 200, 400 million years ago, or more have absorbed all these heavy metals from the air, from the atmosphere. They've died, they become compressed into peat, and that further becomes compressed into brown coal and then black coal. And so we go and dig it up, we put it in the power stations to fire the boilers, guess what happens? All of that, those metals become released back into the atmosphere again. And so the cycle continues. Right, right.

So someone might think for a second, they might say, oh well, we live in suburbia, Melbourne, we're not gonna get that much exposure, but that's incorrect, isn't it?

Well, totally incorrect. They, you know, with the problems with Fukushima, Chernobyl nuclear reactor, within the space of a couple of weeks they were detecting, I think it was polonium, in the air over the US and then later on over Europe. And certainly with the Chernobyl disaster, the contamination from that nuclear accident ended up worldwide. So just because you live, you know, in the southern hemisphere, you're not immune from what's happening in the northern hemisphere and vice versa.

Yeah, so that's why everyone really needs to consider heavy metal toxicity.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Now, a little bit more of a specific question comes from Roldoff Torres. He asks, are there any jobs such as, say for example, mechanics that may have, you know, a consistent higher toxicity level of heavy metals and or that maybe can do a metal detox as a step standard practice?

Okay, so there's two questions there. The jobs that for sure can have toxic levels of heavy metals— well, the ones that we know for certain is anyone involved in dental practices, whether they be dentist, dental nurse, endodontist, orthodontist. Anyone who plays around with the mouth is going to be exposed to mercury. We know that for sure. There have been autopsies done on— a series of autopsies on dentists who have died from natural causes, and they found that there was a 6-fold increase in mercury in their kidneys, greater than 6-fold in the occipital cortex— that's the back of the brain— and an over 81-fold increase in the deposition of mercury in the pituitary gland, and the pituitary pituitary of course regulates all the hormones that we need to control bodily functions. So dentists are at high risk. Other groups who are at risk of course anyone involved in working with metals. That might be sheet metal workers. It might be welders. Pardon me. So anyone in metalworking industries at high risk. Anyone involved in home renovation. We've seen a couple of cases recently where people have been occupationally, for a living, renovating very old buildings, and their arsenic and lead and cadmium levels were sky high. And this is to do with particularly lead in old paint and the exposure to other metals in their environment. So they're the main groups. What can you do? The second one is maybe they can do a metal detox as a standard practice. It's not as silly as it sounds. It's probably not a bad idea to do that once or twice a year to do some sort of detox, but I would strongly recommend testing first so that— because certain types of detoxes work better for certain metals and not as well for others.

Right, so you really gotta know which heavy metal you're gonna pull out to use the right supplement.

Yeah, exactly, because one size does not fit all.

Yeah, for sure. Now let's delve in a little bit deeper into that amalgam issue we were speaking a little bit about before. Now there are many, many functional medicine practitioners and biological dentists going around basically telling everyone to get the mercury amalgams removed. You know, flat out get them removed today. Now, you gave some stats in the seminar saying that 70% of people do have an improvement, 20% of people have no effect, and 10% of people actually get worse after having them removed. You have a strict protocol when it comes to recommending if someone should actually get their amalgams removed. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I could talk to you for an hour about that, but we would run out of time very quickly. Yes, there's a number of things that you've got to do before you consider the elective surgical removal of a dental amalgam. And let's face it, it's just like any elective surgery, okay? There are potential risks with any elective surgery. Typical things: bleeding, infection, pain, and in this case breakage of a tooth, one of the problems with amalgams is that you're dealing with damaged tissue and because the dentist originally when they are placing an amalgam actually have to excavate a lot of healthy tissue around the area of decay in order to place enough amalgam to make it hold. Now, this amalgam of course is a mixture of metals. It's not a metal alloy. It's a conglomerate of mercury, of silver, of a bit of tin, a bit of zinc, a bit of copper, and occasionally a bit of indium. Now, as you have hot drinks or cold drinks, those metals just like rocks in the ground expand and contract, expand and contract, and that sets up micro fractures within the dental material. Now, over time, those micro fractures can become a major fracture, and particularly if you have a dentist drilling away trying to get rid of the last bit of that amalgam, it's very easy to have a breakage of a tooth, and that's a bit of a disaster. Because that's again going to— that whole procedure releases mercury into the bloodstream and can be one of the reasons why this 10% of people get worse as a result of that procedure. So the question is, what do you do to try and pick those people for whom it's going to be beneficial as opposed to those who it's going to harm? We can't reliably say for those who are going to— it's not going to make any difference. I can't pick them yet, but I have a pretty good idea as to who it's going to benefit and who it's not. And the way we do that is that we start off with what's called a functional liver detoxification profile. Now this comes as a test kit and it's quite simple. It's a challenge test for the liver's detoxification pathways from 3 substances. One is pure caffeine, the second is aspirin, and the third is paracetamol. And the idea is that you start off with some caffeine tablets and then you take saliva samples 2 hours and I think it's 6 hours later, and then later on you take the aspirin and paracetamol, collect urine overnight and you sample that into little test tubes and send the saliva samples and the test tubes off to the lab. And what they'll do is actually look at the metabolites of caffeine, aspirin and paracetamol and then that will tell us what's happening in Phase 1 pathways as well as 4 of the Phase 2 pathways. People who are deficient in glutathione or may be very low in glycine, which is an amino acid, or who may not be able to conjugate some of the toxins— and paracetamol is a classic toxin, can be positively fatal in overdose— you find that these people can't clear these substances out of the liver, and so they're the ones who are at high risk of having adverse reactions to a dental amalgam removal. You with me? Yeah, 100%. Now, we can do some confirmatory tests. So that's the functional liver detoxification profile. There's a couple of laboratories that do it in Australia. One is Healthscope Functional Pathology and the other is Nutripath Laboratories in Melbourne. They use the same protocol and the same testing procedures. The test from Nutripath is considerably less expensive than the Healthscope one, so we routinely use them. Yeah. And the result's just as reliable. Equally usable. The second test that we sometimes do is a red cell glutathione. Now, you've probably heard of glutathione. Glutathione is a very, very important antioxidant. Consists of 3 amino acids bonded together, and one of the ways in which— one of the main ways in which the body gets rid of mercury and other heavy metals is to bind it to this substance glutathione and get rid of it out of the body. So we can measure the level of glutathione in the bloodstream, which is red cell glutathione. The next test we do is called an Apolipoprotein E status. Now that's a big word and it measures a protein. There are a number of these apolipoproteins floating around in our bloodstream bloodstream. Some are good, some are not so good. This particular one, Apolipoprotein E, or ApoE for short, comes in 3 varieties. It is a variety called 2,2, 3,3, and 4,4, and you can have mixtures of those. You can have a 2,3, and you can have a 3,4, and you can have a 2,4. Basically one of the genes comes from your mother and one gene from your father. Now, 60% of the population have what's called 3-3, and that gives you an average detox ability. Okay? Yep. A 2-2 is excellent as far as detox is concerned because it means that you're very, very efficient at getting rid of heavy metals, and if you've got 4-4, you've got real problems. Because it's the Apolipoprotein E is one of the main ways in which we also get rid of heavy metals and if you've got a 4/4 your mechanisms are very, very inefficient and so these are the people who it tends to build up in and therefore predisposed to early onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Right. The Alzheimer's and I guess the accumulation of mercury in the brain is where that whole Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter came from.

Yes, mercury is highly what we call neurotoxic. It poisons off brain cells. And if you have this apolipoprotein E4/4, or even if you have the more common E4/3 variant, you can't get rid of mercury out of brain cells. Poisons the neurons and they basically die off. And you can see this in people in their late 50s going into early 60s. These tend to be the people who end up in nursing homes quite early on in life, in sort of late middle age, whereas people who have, say, got 3, 4, yes, they can still end up in the same nursing home, but it might be 10 years later. Yep.

'Cause they're slightly better, they've got a longer way to go, but they're still not immune. So absolutely critical, you need to run the functional liver test, you need to run the red blood cell glutathione test, and you need to run the— is it a genetic test that you're running?

Yes, it's called an APOE genotype. Yep. We get it done through St. Vincent's Hospital Pathology in Melbourne. You can also do it through Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Pathology in Sydney. I'm not sure in the other states, but I assume that most states will have one hospital that can run the test.

Unless you got referred from someone, I guess a practitioner from the National Institute of Integrative Medicine, if you went into your local GP and asked for this kind of test, they would look at you blankly, correct?

Most of them should know about APOE testing. They may not know about the other two tests.

Right, okay. And just on the functional liver test, if someone is supplementing with, say, let's say they already supplemented with glycine or some folic acid or something that essentially speeds up liver detoxification, when they do the functional liver test, they should get off all supplements including caffeine, and things like berries as well, I saw in the notes sheet that the functional liver test comes with.

Yeah, preferably no caffeine, aspirin, or paracetamol for about 48 hours beforehand. Yeah. And any amino acid supplements, and that includes whey protein, don't have that for 48 hours because your glycine, of course, is one of the things that should shows up in this test. Alright. Because glycine works two ways. Both it binds heavy metals of its own accord, that's called a process called glycination, and secondly, it's one of the three amino acids making up the glutathione molecule. And what you tend to see is that the body will try, if there's a limited supply of glycine, it'll tend to put it into glutathione manufacture rather than keeping the glycine just for the binding process of glycation by itself. Okay, glutathione is such an important molecule that that has— it's sort of like top dog, you know, that has a priority throughout the body.

And would you— just, I guess, an off question, but would you recommend supplementation with glycine just for everyday, I guess, health?

Only if we have someone who has got a low level of glycine or glycation on a functional liver detoxification profile or has a low level of glycine on a blood or urine amino acid analysis, yes, you would. But you usually have to supplement other things as well. Righty, okay. Cysteine is the most important because the availability of the amino acid cysteine is rate limiting for glutathione synthesis. Now what rate limiting means, if you ain't got enough of it, the whole process is slowed down. Right. Okay, so cysteine is actually the most critical thing, and whey protein doesn't have much in it. Right. P-protein isolates have far more cysteine than does whey protein or soy protein. Yeah, yeah. And so what I recommend to people is that instead of just using whey protein alone, use a blend. Yeah. You're much better off having a blend of, say, whey protein and pea protein than whey protein alone.

Yeah, definitely. The most common source of metals for many of the listeners would be fish. What, what fish? We spoke before about big fish, but can you— do you have a quick list of fishes that people should avoid?

Yeah, basically flake or shark is the number one culprit in Australia. Swordfish isn't as common, but it is certainly around. Big fish— tuna can be a problem if you're having a lot of it. You know, a can of tuna once or twice a week is not going to make that much difference unless you're one of these APOE4/4 individuals. Well, then it can be. The other one that's not well recognized is flounder. Now for heaven's sake, if you go to a restaurant, do not order flounder because it's a bottom dweller and it lives in fairly shallow waters and it gobbles up everything that's on the bottom of the ocean. And flounder is quite deadly. People don't realize that. The other two, which I don't know if you have any listeners in Japan, but for heaven's sake, do not eat whale meat or dolphin meat because they are absolutely loaded with mercury. They're big mammals and they cannot excrete excrete it that gets trapped in the tissues. And if you eat it, you're gonna get poisoned with mercury. No question about it.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And it's bad for the environment as well. So your thoughts on, I know this is a completely loaded question, so we might not go too in depth with it, but thoughts on vaccinations as a source of heavy metals?

Okay, not much, not as much a problem now as it used to be. Okay, now I had a look recently in what vaccines contain mercury and there's only 3 at the moment available in Australia. One is the Japanese encephalitis vaccine which is designed for people traveling to Asian countries during their summer. Japanese encephalitis can be positively can be fatal. It's not very common but can be positively fatal. I think it's mosquito-borne. The second one is Q fever, which is an endemic problem in Far North Queensland. And the third are some but not all of the hepatitis B vaccines. So you have to check with— if you're going to need any of those three, check with your doctor to assess whether there's thiomerosol in it as a preservative. Thiomerosol consists of about 49% ethyl mercury, which whilst not quite as toxic as methyl mercury from fish, it's still injected straight into muscle and therefore into the bloodstream. So the major problem is going to be with some of the hepatitis B vaccines. Having said that, 5 to 10 years ago, this thiomerosol was a preservative in tetanus toxoid or tetanus shots or adult ADT, which is the adult form of diphtheria and tetanus toxoid, and they were used extensively. And of course, prior to that, that was used in a lot of the vaccines for children. Children, but they have been all phased out. So that's what I'm saying, it's less of a problem now for people who have been vaccinated, but if you were vaccinated 10, 15, 20 years ago, then it still may well be a problem for you today. Righty, righty.

So coming back to getting those tests done. So Thomas Wurlin from Sweden has a good lead-in question before we start talking about supplements and protocols. He asks, how do we prevent exposure with lifestyle habits and is there anything we could do on a regular basis to clean out the body from pollutants?

Yeah, excellent question. The, obviously the most important thing is an organic lifestyle. With the avoidance wherever possible of polluted environments. Okay? So wherever possible, getting organic fruit and veggies, filtering your water, especially getting rid of fluoride, and something that a lot of health-conscious folks are not well aware of is that you think you're doing the right thing, jogging along by the road, filling your lungs with this wonderful polluted diesel fumes and so forth. You're— what you're doing is poisoning yourself. You can be getting all the exercise and inhaling all the fumes. It's a disaster. You're much better off jumping in the car and heading off somewhere out in the bush, going for a bushwalk or if you've got bike racks, throw a bike on the back of the car and then go off for a nice ride on a country road away from heavy traffic. It's something that is just not realised. I just look at people when I'm driving to work and they're jogging along the main roads and I thought, you guys are crazy. You're off your cotton-picking brains. What sort of health benefits do you think you're gonna get if you're loading yourself up with diesel fumes? It's insane, hey. You know, it's just crazy stuff.

Yeah, yeah, I might as well go out and— I've heard it's the equivalent of smoking a couple of cigarettes. And if you do it in some more polluted cities like say New York or LA, it's the equivalent of smoking cigarettes.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Or if you've got a smoggy day, and certainly with Melbourne and Sydney you can get days where you get temperature inversion and all the particulate matter in the air stays down lower in the atmosphere. So if you go out jogging on those days, you're in for strife. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

Now let's switch gears to talking about protocols and supplements, which I've got a lot of questions from different practitioners all around the world. Let's start with a myth, and it's a popular myth going around, at least some of the communities that I'm a part of. There is a myth cycling around that chlorella is needed, is indeed, it's a very good heavy metal detoxifier, however, it does move mercury, but it moves mercury from the body to the brain. Now, this is completely false. Is that true? Completely false.

And the simple reason is that the key binding molecule in chlorella is chlorophyll. Okay, now chlorophyll, as you realize, is the green stuff in green plants, and it's a fairly large molecule. In fact, it's the same size as our heme molecule which makes up the core of hemoglobin which we need for carrying oxygen around in our red blood cells. It's quite a large molecule. It's in fact almost the same. It has a magnesium core as opposed to an iron core in heme, but effectively they're the same size, same structure, and they're too big to cross the blood-brain barrier. So from a practical point of view is no, chlorella cannot under any circumstances apart from the rare situation where you've had a stroke or a head injury or a high fever. They're the only situations where it's even theoretically possible. Right, right.

So chlorella is perfectly safe to use? Absolutely. Awesome, excellent. I know, get me some chlorella. If people suspect heavy metals, is there anything they can do as a general defense against heavy metals bombardment that we face? Say if they don't have access to testing?

Yes, there is. And there's a couple of products which can be very, very useful in this regard. One is called algotine, A-L-G-O-T-E-N-E. Now this is a marine phytoplankton and it's a fascinating thing to look at under the microscope because these little critters come in two colour forms. One's green and one's orange. And the green ones are all filled up with this chlorophyll we've just mentioned and the orange ones are filled up with carotenoids such as we get in obviously carrots and apricots and peaches and bananas and so forth. Now, these carotenoids act as antioxidants, whereas the chlorophyll acts as a heavy metal binder. So, algatine is, etc., made in Australia. The little phytoplankton called Dunaliella salina has actually been used extensively throughout the Middle East in land reclamation trials where they're using bioremediation of poisoned swamps to try and get rid of the heavy metals. Basically, the Genelia multiplies in these swamps. They absorb the heavy metals that are in the bottom of these swamps, and then they get rid of the residue. And there's actually been quite a number of published papers. They've been doing this for 20 years or more. And now we have this— the availability of having the alginate as a daily supplement, just one twice a day, and that's very, very good. A couple of other things we could mention are zeolites. You may have heard of zeolites. They've been around for a long time. They're a special type of clay called a montmorillonite clay which has a very, very open weave structure and it's a very good absorbent, a bit like a sponge. The only thing is it not only absorbs heavy metals but it also tends to absorb some of the useful metals like zinc and magnesium as well. So it's the sort of thing that you can use as a short-term detox, say a couple of capsules twice a day for a period of for 3 months, but not something that you have on a long-term basis. One other product which I might mention at this point is something called micro silica. Now, micro silica is available from a website in the States, BioPure, bioPure.com, and it's a fascinating compound. It's basically a silica-based molecule and it binds heavy metals in the gut and basically exports them out the rear end. It doesn't get absorbed. It's very, very safe and very effective and that's something that again, as far as we know, can be used low dose in the long term. But again, I'd be more inclined to use it for sort of short periods, you know, say 3 to 6 months at a time and then reevaluate your hair just to see whether you need to continue to use it.

Excellent. Well, that's definitely some good stuff. Out of all of them, the alginate sounds the most, I guess, broad-based and the best to kind of use on a daily basis. Would that be fair?

Yeah, well, it's two products in one. As I say, if you look under the microscope, half these little critters are green and half of them are orange. Orange, and the orange ones are giving you lots of nutrition in the form of beta-carotene and a number of minerals, whereas the green ones do all the mopping up work. So it's a novel sort of product, and the clinical trials that have been run with it have been very, very impressive. Excellent. Excellent.

Now, once the metals are within healthy range, Do we still need to use supplements for protection against things like mercury and aluminium?

Well, how do you define what's a healthy range for a heavy metal? Healthy range is zero. In my book, they're poison. Yes, yes. There's no such thing as a healthy range for a heavy metal. There are for nutritional elements, absolutely. both your nutritional elements like calcium, magnesium, and zinc and so forth, and some of your trace minerals like strontium and vanadium and lithium are all needed in trace amounts for good biological purposes. But heavy metals— what you sometimes get confused is the difference between a healthy range and what's called a reference range in a population. Now let me explain. When researchers are looking at the quantity of any particular variable, say it's haemoglobin or blood sugar, say, in a given population, say you take 1,000 people, you test all these people for this particular ingredient and you get a population range, and that reference range has a mean which is the 50th percentile, and then you have what are called standard deviations either side, and you come down, and your 2 standard deviations either side cover roughly from about 3% at one end to 97% of the population at the other end, and this becomes what laboratories publish as their reference range. Reference ranges. It means that if you are outside of that range, you have 3% chance or less that this figure was occurring by chance. You with me? Yep. Okay, so you can safely say that if your level of mercury in your hair is twice the upper limit of the reference range, that it is highly, highly unlikely that that's happening by chance. It's likely that you're excreting a lot of mercury into your hair, and therefore it's reflective of your total body burden. But your reference range should really be zero. Your normal range for heavy metals is zero because even small amounts are going to poison off key enzymes throughout the body. And I have been absolutely astonished in my research of finding out how many different enzymes, key enzymes that catalyze biological processes can be stuffed up by even small amounts of mercury. And I could spend again, half an hour just talking about what that does. But of course we're going to run out of time if we do that.

Yeah, absolutely. So in other words, just to kind of summarize that point, it's very common to see a ref— uh, it's very common to see, uh, metals in someone's body. However, it's certainly not normal to see it because normal should be zero for these heavy metals.

And these are things not just mercury but lead, arsenic, cadmium, and then things like beryllium, antimony, uranium, uh, cesium, platinum, tungsten, things like this that you'd normally not even think about, aluminium. These things that you don't sort of routinely think about but can certainly contribute. There's a metal called gadolinium and that's used in a number of contrast studies with MRI scans and that that can be a potential poison if you have to need many of those. And there's a whole lot of other ones which again, some of them are tested for in your routine hair mineral analysis, but some of the others we can only test for in urine. And what we do is that we For people who have high levels of mercury or other heavy metals in their hair, we do what is called a DMPS challenge test. Now, a challenge test is basically where we give a certain quantity of a chelating agent called DMPS through an intravenous strip in normal saline. It takes about an hour. And we get the patient to collect their urine for 24 hours before the test and 24 hours after the test. Then we send it off to a laboratory in the US called Genova Labs and they analyse it for us and they send us back two reports. Then what I do is that I sit down and I compare the two reports and I compare that with what is the level of metals in the hair. And that way you get a really good overall picture of what's going on.

All right, I was just actually about to get onto that. Brooke Lustig from New Zealand asks two questions. The first is, what's your thoughts on an oral versus suppository DMSA?

Okay, in Australia, we only use oral DMSA. What you might be thinking about is the suppository form of EDTA. Now, EDTA is a different chemical. It's been around for a long time. It's primarily used for the treatment of lead and cadmium toxicity. It's available for use intravenously or in rectal suppositories. But DMSA is very close to the DNP which I mentioned. It can also be used as a challenge test in situations where a practitioner doesn't have access to intravenous facilities. It's not as accurate, but it's certainly a lot better than nothing. And again, you use the same 24 hours before and after protocols. DMSA is a drug. In Victoria, it can only be prescribed by licensed medical practitioners. And it's potentially quite toxic. In fact, you have— a lot of the problems have been that people have stuck to a standard dosage of this stuff and wondered why some people got really, really, really sick. It can be quite poisonous to the liver. In overdose, but in using the correct dose, it's a very, very useful chelating agent. Now, the question is, how do you work out what's the right dose? And the simple answer is you've got to look at your functional liver detoxification profile that I mentioned earlier. By looking at the relative Phase I and Phase pathways, you can actually— I have actually created a table whereby one can very quickly work out the correct dosage on a milligram per kilogram basis. And for those people who utilize that dosage, they don't run into problems.

Yep, yep. The next part of her question was she's heard from other practitioners that you should pull mercury out first before lead. Is this true or do you have any thoughts on this?

DMSA will chelate both at the same time. Okay. The same will happen with alginate, with microsilica, with zeolite. They will both take them out at at the same time. The one thing you must never, ever, ever do is to use EDTA alone where you have got any mercury in the system. It's deadly. I've seen too many disasters where EDTA recirculates. You were mentioning about chlorella. Chlorella doesn't do it, but EDTA will. It will take mercury out of the body and shove it in the brain and it cannot get it out of there. So it is much safer. It is something— ADTA is something I don't like using except in very, very, very defined specific circumstances. DMSA is a much better chelating agent and you have to use it in the correct dose.

Excellent. So on the home stretch now, only a couple more questions, but the next question is from Dane McDonald from Sydney. He asks, what's your thoughts on chlorella versus chelation for mercury? What do you prefer and why, or would you use an integrated approach, and if so, what's your rationale for that? Okay.

Different people accumulate different amounts of toxins. And people who have low amounts of toxins such as heavy metals or environmental chemicals don't need chelation therapy. They need some good detoxing agents. As I said, alginate and micro silica and the zeolites are very safe and very effective detox agents. Chlorella is just the same. It's also a very good detox agent. Spirulina is not so good. If you're going to— not for detox purposes anyway. Chlorella is much better. Now, how do you assess whether you need chelation or just detox or a combination? At the National Institute of Integrative Medicine in Melbourne, we have instituted a heavy metal detoxification program which addresses just this issue. By doing the appropriate tests including the functional liver detoxification profiles and the heavy metal hair analysis, we can actually ascertain which people need chelation and those who are going to be just fine on naturopathic detoxification processes alone. So the simple answer is it all depends on your level of toxicity and that has to be tested. You've got no way of guessing it otherwise. Some people who can feel really sick may not have a lot of heavy metals. They might have a lot of environmental toxins in which the approach needs to be somewhat different. And you can have other people who don't feel too bad and actually get on with their lives pretty well and yet amazingly they can be accumulating a lot of junk. So, you can't predict it. You've got to test for it, otherwise you've got no idea at all.

And mercury gets all the attention when it comes to heavy metals. What about cadmium, arsenic, and lead? Or are they just as important? Best forms of assessment for them, is it still the same as the standard testing procedures?

Absolutely, absolutely. They're all cumulative poisons. They affect different tissues. For example, lead largely affects bone and brain. In the bone, it poisons off the bone marrow, so one of the things that you see with kiddies, for example, with lead poisoning, is they become very, very anemic. Cadmium, it just— it distributes a bit more widely. Quite a bit in the kidneys, quite a bit in the liver, quite a bit in bones. So it sort of spreads itself around. One of the problems with cadmium is that it is carcinogenic, and if you don't get rid of cadmium, it increases your risks of cancer. Not any specific— one specific cancer, but the risk of cancer as a whole. Arsenic is a ubiquitous poison. Again, it behaves very much like mercury, and again, it gets into mitochondria in cells and poisons off the energy production in cells. So arsenic is not a good thing to have. And the other thing is that the more variety of metals that you collect in your lifetime, the cumulative effects that they have one with another, they have what's called a synergistic effect. That is that their effect is greater than that of the individual metal. You with me? Yeah. So a bit like— that's why herbalists use different herbs in combination to get a synergistic effect. The same happens in a detrimental sense with heavy metals.

Right, right. And what other toxic elements should we look for, be looking at apart from the big 4 when it comes to improving our clients' health and wellbeing?

Well, the other key one that we see cropping up all the time is copper. Now around 30% of Australians and This also applies, I believe, in America, and I'm not too sure about the figures in Europe and Britain, but certainly in Australia and the US, around 30% of the population have copper levels above that upper limit of the reference range. Okay? Now, copper does some nasty things in overdose. It's essential as a nutritional element and around 60% of the population have it within the normal range. About 10% are actually low, and the people who have low levels of copper actually need copper supplementation because it can increase their risks of cardiovascular disease quite significantly. Okay? But if you've got high copper levels, it alters the way the brain functions and it alters the gut function. It binds to what's called the proton pump in the stomach and acts like a proton pump inhibitor that you may have heard of that are dished out a bit like lollies these days. And it lowers the production of hydrochloric acid. Consequently, if you're having a nice big steak and you're copper toxic, you're not gonna be able to break it down and a lot of it's gonna go undigested. Which is a waste of darn good steak. You know, and a lot of these people who become copper toxic swap from red meat to white meat, and then they go from chicken and then they go to fish, and finally they find that even fish is too hard to digest and end up becoming vegetarians. Now, there's nothing wrong with the meat. The problem is that you've got too much copper, and that's readily tested again with 24-hour urine tests and some blood tests.

Righty, that's great. And just, I guess, to get some final thoughts on things, what are your final thoughts on, I guess, everything that we've spoken about today in summary or in closing?

In closing, it's a bit like, what the police and the judges say in courts of law. Not knowing is no excuse. Okay? So if you've committed an offence and you don't know you've committed that offence, that's too bad. The law's all written down there. You're meant to know the laws. Well, how anyone can possibly know all the laws these days is beyond my comprehension. They keep manufacturing. Thousands of jolly things every year. But in terms of heavy metals, not knowing is, is not good enough. You've got to know. It's a bit like knowing what your cholesterol levels are, what your blood sugar levels are, what your kidney function is doing. Very important. Most people have got no idea that their kidney function can be impaired. It might be down 20, 30, 40%. And you won't even know it and yet it's affecting your health. Your blood sugars might be high. Your homocysteine levels can be high. Lipoprotein A levels can be high. You can be a guy who's in his, you know, sort of late 30s or early 40s jogging along and have a heart attack and think, you know, your family thinks, why the heck is someone who's so healthy and so fit drop dead with a heart attack? the reason is they've got accumulation of this protein called lipoprotein A, which is a little bit different from the apolipoprotein A, B, and E that we were talking about earlier. These are things that you need to know what they are. And we're just hearing metals, it's just the same. Unless you test, unless you know, you're gonna face the consequences whether you like it or not. Definitely.

That's some pretty good closing thoughts, I have to say. So I guess, what are you working on at the moment?

Well, at the moment, we're continuing to get the fellowship program in integrative medicine up and running. First 3 modules we hope to have up towards the end of next month and closely followed by another couple of modules within a couple of months' time. So this is a 300-hour postgraduate master's level program which I've put together, which we're hoping to become the gold standard for training of integrative health practitioners throughout the country. And so my efforts concentrated on getting that up and running being released for the whole public. And of course the other thing that takes up most of my time is ensuring that we've launched the heavy metal detoxification program, making sure that people are aware of it, and thank you, Mark, for the opportunity of letting practitioners know that— and patients know that this is available. If I may, I'll just give you some phone numbers to tell listeners where they can get their heavy metals tested.

Absolutely.

Now, for the National Institute of Integrative Medicine, for anyone who is in metropolitan Melbourne or the Mornington Peninsula or in surrounding areas, the phone number for NIMH is 039 039 804 0646. I'll say that again. That's 039 804 0646. You'll find us at 759 Burwood Road in East Hawthorn and the website is www.nimfinelli.com.au. Now for people outside of Melbourne, I would suggest that you ring InterClinical Laboratories here in Sydney and ask them for a list of referring practitioners in your local area. They will have a list of people who send them in hair mineral analysis on a— tests on a regular basis, and their phone number is 02 9693 8888 and on the web www.interclinical.com.au. So that's for anyone else in Australia. Now what about if you are in the US or overseas? And I would suggest there that you contact Trace Elements Incorporated who are in Addison in Texas and I'll give you their phone number. It's 800-824-2314. That's 800-824-2314. Ask for customer service, and again, they'll be able to supply you with a list of practitioners who can refer you to their services.

Excellent, excellent. Now, I know that there are some people who have just listened to this podcast and just about jumped out of their seats leap when you said that you're putting together a 300-hour course because I know there are a lot of health practitioners who listen to this show. Are you able just to share a little bit more information? Is that available to, I guess, even personal trainers, nutritionists, dietitians, medical doctors? That's available to, I guess, anyone who wants to learn this?

Specifically being written for practicing healthcare practitioners. Okay. As I said before, it's taking stuff that the researchers are publishing in scientific journals, trying to translate that into something that GPs, naturopaths and osteopaths and dietitians and pharmacists can use in their day-to-day practice. If you're not a practicing healthcare practitioner, you would still benefit from a couple of the units, the one on clinical nutrition nutrition, the one on herbal medicine, that's units 2 and 3, and they're going to be released shortly. But some of the other later units you would really, really struggle with. Right, right. You're welcome to try them. Yeah. I think I've got a few— You're going to be climbing Mount Everest.

I think I've got a few people on the call who will jump right in. I know there are a lot of people out there I know people love learning and, you know, they'll be forever indebted once they get their teeth into the material. So, and to get into that course, they just contact the National Institute of Integrative Medicine.

Is that right? Yes, yes. And there are details on our website, but contact the Institute and they'll get me to send you an email or just send an email to clinic@nimh.gov.au. Clinic@nlim.com.au. That's clinic@nlim.com.au to say you're interested in the fellowship program or in the heavy metal program or preferably both. And then I'll get in contact with you and send you out all the details.

That is absolutely awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the line today, Bruce, and just sharing with us That's just absolute gold in terms of the information. I know there are gonna be, I'm gonna get a lot of great feedback about this podcast because what you've shared today is nothing short of absolutely world-class. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your contribution to the field of integrative health. It's absolute pleasure having you on and an absolute honor to have you speak at the seminar last month. So thank you so much and we wish you all the best.

Thank you, Mark, and all the best for you.

What'd you think of that, folks? The podcast with Bruce Jones back in the day, the interview I did with him, awesome stuff. So that's Bruce Jones from what I think now, I'm not sure if he is with the National Institute of Integrative Medicine or if he's not. So if you call them, you may or may not find him. It's been a long time's past since I did this interview with Bruce, but nonetheless, fantastic information. And I do need to put a disclaimer on it. If you're a personal trainer out there and you're listening to this for the first time, listening to this podcast does not make you an expert at detoxifying heavy metals. Detoxifying heavy metals is serious stuff. Now, I remember I did a course with Mark Schaus, who's also been on this podcast show, and he said he had a client who was very, well, basically just didn't listen to him, didn't take his advice in the dosages for the DMSA, and he woke up in the middle of the night and he was peeing out a ready silver liquid. Which was the metals that were scraping his basically, you know, pee hole essentially on the way out. And it caused, you know, a fair bit of damage on the way out. So I mean, you've got to detoxify people slowly and you've got to really understand how much and how serious it is and how long it's been in the body. So testing and not just testing because it's the biggest thing with functional health and functional medicine is that It's one thing to run some tests, but it's not about the tests that you run, it's about who interprets that test. How do you interpret that data? Because not every doctor, not every practitioner is gonna interpret that data the same. So if you are gonna do a heavy metal detox, make sure the person knows exactly what they're doing. At Enterprise, we've got Christine, who is a qualified naturopath. However, there's quite a bit of a waiting list to get on with Christine. Christine, so I mean you can contact us, but we might send you to our friends at Remed who are in Hawthorn. And you can go see Emma there and tell her Mark sent you from Enterprise. If you can't get in with Christine, that's okay, the people at Remed will be able to help you, no doubt. So hope you enjoyed this podcast. As always folks, train hard, supplement smart, and eat well. and stay listening to the Enterprise Podcast. And for more information, check us out, melbournepersonaltrainers.com. Shoot us a line on Facebook and now on Instagram. Speak soon.