Dr. A. reviews a 2021 study showing lead and cadmium are cardiovascular risk factors even at low levels. Heavy metals substitute for essential minerals like zinc and calcium, reduce nitric oxide, and damage the enzymes that protect your heart. Cadmium is especially toxic to mitochondria.
In this paper, when they say lead and cadmium, we've now got proof that they're not just associated. These are definitely bad for you and bad for your cardiovascular system. So you know heavy metals are probably bad for humans, but how specifically? In the Journal of the American Heart Association, there's a paper about lead and cadmium, and lead and cadmium have been shown to be cardiovascular risk factors. Why has this changed the game? Why is this important? What does it tell us about what we used to think, and what's it mean for your health? Well, I'm Dr. A. I answer questions here on this channel. I've been in the world of medicine as an educator, writer, researcher, and physician for the last three decades, and it's a lot of fun answering questions that get sent in. This is a little bit more about a paper, and I've gotten this question generally speaking, so I just put them together into a question. If you want to go look at this paper in In the Journal of the American Heart Association, this is Lamas et al. L-A-M-A-S is the doctor's name. Et al. means a bunch of other people wrote, and it's called Lead and Cadmium as Cardiovascular Risk Factors: The Burden of Proof Has Been Met. And that is Journal of the American Heart Association 2021. So it's a recent paper. But what's this burden of proof has been met? Well, for a long, long time, because I teach about heavy metal toxicology, et cetera, we would teach that there's these associations between cadmium and these diseases and, uh, you know, arsenic and these problems. Now there's obviously acute toxicity. Uh, there are cases such as I've testified on in other forums, not on— I don't testify on YouTube, just tell you stories. Uh, I've testified about cases of acute arsenic poisoning where someone tried to kill a bunch of people and killed one. Uh, thankfully the other 15 were able to be treated and they lived. Obviously there's acute poisoning, but what about low-level exposure? My colleague and friend, the late Dr. Walter Crinion, Used to be very, very big into researching low-level exposure and its effect on your health. And that wore off on me because we would teach together. When they say the burden of proof has been met, what they're saying in the Journal of the American Heart Association is we've thought for a long time, these things are bad for you. They appear associated with bad heart problems. Now we see why. And I think this is opening the door to an understanding that, that non-deadly poisoning levels of metals Environmental toxin levels of metals are still important to look at as far as your health goes, and still important to minimize, because obviously if these things, just these 2 metals do this, imagine what others that we haven't talked about, like arsenic and other things do. So just, I want to go through, you can read the paper if you want to, but I just want to go through really quickly. Why would these, why would they say the burden of proof is met that cardiac disease and these metals can be associated with each other? But, but what do they do? Well, In both cases, they get involved where other minerals should be. So they substitute. So lead or cadmium can substitute for other things. So for example, lead will substitute for zinc or calcium. Now zinc is incredibly important in a lot of your antioxidant processes. Calcium is important in actually making your action potential, the electrical charge in your heart muscle operate. So these are pretty big deals, right? They Lower levels of antioxidants. Both of them, cadmium and zinc. Both of them decrease nitric oxide. So you've heard of nitric oxide that helps the blood vessels relax. If we have low nitric oxide, we have tight blood vessels. We have higher blood pressure. Other problems go on. Both of them lower nitric oxide. Lead actually blocks the synthesis of glutathione, which is one of your primary antioxidants. And while it does that, it decreases another primary antioxidant called superoxide dismutase. That's bad enough on its own, but it also decreases peroxisase activity. So that's a long word, but what does that do? Why would we decreasing that be bad for my heart? Well, peroxisase, when you decrease it, it decreases the benefit your HDL, the good cholesterol, gives you. So when you have this effect, your HDL is not as good for you anymore. The other thing it does as both do is epigenetic changes. So remember, we talked about genetics and how that's the code, but epigenetics are what affects the code. Heavy metals are huge negative effectors on epigenetics. Now, cadmium has an additional nasty, nasty negative, and that is it damages your mitochondria. The tissue in your body with the most mitochondria per cell is your heart. That's because it has to run 24/7. It can't ever stop. We got to keep it going. Well, if you damage the mitochondria, the high mitochondrial tissues like neurological and heart feel it first. Cadmium is super mitochondrial poison. Cadmium also decreases nitric oxide. It lowers your glutathione levels. Cadmium also substitutes for zinc, which means it's going to mess up a lot of other things. And it's also an epigenetic poison. In this paper, when they say lead and cadmium, we've, we've now got proof that they're not just associated. These are definitely bad for you and bad for your— Health. Cardiovascular system. Very, very true. Now, done other shows on the long podcast, some of these short YouTube videos about metals and chelation and removing them and all that. If you're going to get into that, you want to work with a healthcare provider who is trained in environmental toxicology, environmental medicine. So one of the things you want to look for if you're searching them or whatever is training and expertise in environmental medicine, because they'll know how to assess for these low-level exposures and what the most appropriate way to treat them And, and work with them is. All right, well, I'm Dr. A answering your questions. Thank you so much for all of them. Thank you, all you subscribers. Please like, share, subscribe, hit the notifications. It helps us here at the channel. Channel's going great. We're getting a lot of new subscribers, and I love that. I love answering your questions, and we do try to get to as many as we can in the questions on YouTube. So I'll see you all in the next video.
