Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

How Lead Harms Your Health

18 Mar 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:18

In this segment of the YouTube video "How Lead Harms Your Health," Dr. Wendie Trubow (Speaker A) outlines the extensive clinical consequences of lead exposure. She explains that lead, a heavy metal, accumulates in bone, disrupting normal bone architecture and increasing the risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis. Lead also penetrates the brain, contributing to dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and broader cognitive dysfunction. Metabolic disturbances such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and type‑2 diabetes are linked to lead and other heavy metals. The discussion connects rising rates of autoimmune disease and early‑onset cancers to environmental exposure, positioning lead as a common denominator. Speaker B reinforces that lead is a proven neurotoxin with no known safe exposure level, emphasizing that any lead exposure is harmful.

Chapters

I want to come full circle for the listeners so that they remember that lead is a heavy metal and you can get rid of it, but not everyone's good at it. And it loves to live in your bones and replace your normal bone architecture, which is a risk factor for osteopenia, osteoporosis. A, you're a specialist in brain health. Lead and other heavy metals are implicated in dementia, Alzheimer's, all types of cognitive dysfunction, and they're implicated in metabolic dysfunction. So any type of metabolic dysfunction, PCOS is included in that along with type 2 diabetes. And so we're looking at this massive impact from things that you might be like, okay, right, I'm not gonna hang out with lead, but if it's in your exposure world along with mercury, all of these things have real clinical consequences. It's not just philosophical, it's real. And given that we're noticing that Autoimmune disease is spiking and cancer, not only cancer in general, but cancer at younger ages is spiking. The only real common denominator is our environment.
Yeah, I mean, so lead is a known proven neurotoxin. There's no ambiguity about this and there's no known safe level of lead. Any exposure to lead is understood to be harmful.