Podcast episode from the "Feel Freaking Amazing" podcast (hosts Dr. Wendie Trubow and Dr. Ed Levitan) featuring guest Wendy Myers discussing how toxic metals (mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium and others) impair immune function, mitochondrial energy production, sleep, and can trigger allergies/autoimmune reactions. The transcript excerpt explains major exposure sources (fish/shellfish, medications, chicken feed/rice, leaded paint/soil, cigarette smoke, fertilizers) and describes specific immune impacts: impaired macrophage, neutrophil, and natural killer cell function, metal-induced fatigue via mitochondrial disruption, and metal allergies (e.g., mercury, titanium, nickel) contributing to autoimmune disease (example: mercury deposition in thyroid → Hashimoto's).
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So can we drill into. You said you'd come back to, you know, what, what role the heavy metals are playing. Drill into that. In terms of how they mess up the immune system and the gut functioning.
A little bit more. Yeah. And so this is just scratching the surface, but the main metals that affect immune system functioning are the mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium. And these are prevalent pretty much in everyone. Unless you just genetically have an amazing capability to detox, you know, or just, you know, you've been detoxing for a long, long time, you're going to have some level of these in your body. So mercury we are finding in fish and shellfish. It is in, in the air that we breathe. It's in 400 different medications. It's just all over the place. Arsenic, we find that in conventional chicken eggs, and we find it in rice, conventional chicken meat. Arsenic's fed to chickens around the world, or it's in. It's in the chicken feed. And because it makes the meat the grow 50% faster, and it makes the meat, you know, more healthy looking, give it kind of like a pink color. And chicken farmers are paid by the weight of their chicken, so they're looking to get a boost there. And then we have lead. Lead is just. It's just everywhere. I mean, it's in. It was used to be in leaded gasoline. It's still in gasoline in developing countries. It's still in paint, especially white paint in developing countries. Any house in the US before 1978, usually there'll be a layer of lead paint somewhere. They're devastating. To do a restoration or scraping and sanding of a home on the outside of the paint, it's devastating. If you have to have a toddler in your home, you absorb lead, and then, you know, from mother to baby, lead is passed in the bones down to the child as well, because lead is stored primarily in our bones. And then cadmium, cadmium was found in cigarette smoke. It's also found in fish and shellfish as well. It can used in fertilizer. So it'll get me in our soils as well. Leads prevalent, very prevalent in our soils. A lot of lead and arsenic Based pesticides that may have been phased out, but they're still persistent in the soils. So as you can illustrate, lots of ways we're getting this stuff, not to mention the water as well. And so these metals inhibit our immune system in many different ways. So one, metals impact and inhibit the function of macrophages. So these are really important cells of the immune system that are formed in response to an infection, accumulating damaged or dead cells. Macrophages are really large, specialized cells that recognize, engulf, and destroy target cells. Then, number two, we have neutrophils and their functions very negatively impacted. These are the first responders when the body is invaded by bacteria or viruses or other organisms, and they're guided by chemical signaling and they travel to the area of infection and attack. So neutrophils contain tiny compartments called granules in which they store toxic that act as their weapons against microorganisms. So these substances are really effective at killing bacteria and viruses, but they also contribute to inflammation with its accompanying swelling, redness, and often pain. And so if you look at live blood cell analysis with people who are sick with infections, and they have heavy metals, you'll see their neutrophils are really sluggish, so they're just not wanting to hunt around and find a meal. They don't work very well. Number three, metals impact natural killer cel. Most of our white blood cells are these natural killer cells, and they are specialized to kill certain types of disease cells, especially cells that have become infected with viruses and cells that have become cancerous. And so, like I said, metals across the board, negatively impacting these different areas of the immune system. Number two, there's heavy metals that cause fatigue. So there's metals like arsenic, aluminum, tin, thallium and cesium, and these met enzymes that transport nutrients into your mitochondria. So your mitochondria, your little cells, powerhouses that create your body's energy. So when that's negatively impacted, you have less ability to produce energy, less energy to, you know, fuel your immune system. And interestingly enough, you also need energy to sleep. You know, people think you sleep to, you know, wake up restful. You actually, you know, sleep is a very energy intensive, regenerative, restorative process. And if you don't have energy to sleep, if you get poor sleep, your immunity is going to be gravely impacted the next day. And most people are chronically sleep deprived. People, Americans, huge percent of people get maybe five or six hours of sleep a night, which is not enough for them. Over time, they are taking that credit out of the bank. Over time, their immune system begins to suffer and pay the price for that. There's also a phenomena of allergies to heavy metals as well. So people can become allergic to heavy metals just like they can a blueberry or gluten or what have you. And so when people do have allergies to heavy metals, like mercury is a really common one, they can get overreactive lymphocytes, they can have an overreactive immune system where we see like for instance, in the thyroid, as mercury likes to deposit in the thyroid. And when people have an allergy to the thyroid, the immune system can attack the thyroid tissue, giving them a diagnosis of Hashimoto's. And so that's just one example. But if you do have an allergy to metals, you can develop an autoimmune disease because of that. And so there's a lot of people that have allergies to titanium, which is found in joint replacements and tooth implants. People have allergies to titanium dioxide, which is found in countless food and personal care products as a whitener. Also nickel, the heavy metal, nickel can be a big proponent of autoimmune diseases as well. And the presence of that, and we get that in nickels primarily, we're getting that. If you've ever had braces, you'll have a lot of nickel in your body. And also if you eat a lot of fast food and processed foods with partially hydrogenated oils, nickel is used as a catalyst to kind of infuse hydrogen into the fat to make it more shelf stable. So that's a big, you know, big source of nickel as well.
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