Hi guys, Dr. Minkoff here.
Today I want to talk about heavy metal toxicity.
This is how I got into alternative medicine.
My wife got heavy metal toxic,
and I switched from being an emergency room physician to doing this.
So, I've been at this for about 20 years
It's a very pertinent topic
because it was a problem then
and it's definitely a problem now.
I think the original question is,
"Where do we get these things from?
"Where do these heavy metals come from?"
First of all, they are in the environment.
Depending on where you live,
aluminum,
and arsenic,
and cadmium,
and lead,
and mercury,
these are the main heavy metals.
They're all over the place.
The lead in the soil of the United States
and most of the modern countries
is saturated with lead.
And that's because from about 1910 or 11
when they first started making cars,
to about 1962,
cars were burning leaded gasoline.
Those lead fragments were spewed all over the environment
and so lead is virtually everywhere.
It's in the food that we eat.
It's in the air
and
practically all of us are actually lead-toxic.
If we take a patient and we do a challenge
where we give them either a supplement or a drug,
where we test then, their mercury or their lead,
we will find it, especially lead, in large amounts.
So, it's everywhere.
And it's a big problem.
It causes hypertension.
It causes anemia.
It causes lack of growth, mentally, in children.
It causes Parkinson's disease.
It causes seizures.
So, this is a big problem.
So,
environmental sources are really important
Other environmental sources are like volcanoes.
They spew out lots of heavy metals,
especially mercury.
Some years back, I had a couple of patients
who were coffee farmers on the island of Kona, Hawaii.
And of course on Kona, the Mauna Kea is an active volcano
and it spews out mercury
and it gets on their fields
and it gets in the air and it gets in them
and they would come every year
for 2 months with their mercury levels sky-high.
We would do a chelation treatment on them.
Their mercury levels would go down
and then they would go back to the coffee farms
and we did this every year for several years.
So, environmental sources, including volcanoes.
Now, because these things spew up in the air,
whether it's the lead or the mercury,
it gets in our lakes and streams.
It gets in our environment.
It would be very interesting,
that if you took,
and here's one of the other sources of heavy metals,
especially mercury,
is if you look at the amalgam fillings,
the silver amalgam fillings that are in people's mouths,
those fillings are about 50% mercury.
Now, mercury at room temperature of course is a liquid
and most of us played with mercury when we were little kids.
They add to that copper,
tin,
silver,
sometimes zinc,
to make this amalgam
and then it's put into the tooth.
The problem is that if you're eating foods that are hot
or you're chewing,
mercury at room temperature is a liquid
but it actually boils at only 110 degrees.
Hot cup of coffee or soup is like 140 or 150.
So, that mercury will vaporize off
and it will get in your throat.
It will get in your cells.
You can swallow it and it will get in your body.
So, that's another source of heavy metal toxicity,
is your own fillings.
There have been lots of experiments done in goats and sheep
where they do new fillings on them
and then they put a label,
like a radioactive label, on the mercury
and then they can track with scans,
"Where does that mercury go?"
over the period of 3 or 4 months in that goat or that sheep.
And it goes into their brain,
into their heart,
into their kidneys,
and into their liver.
It moves
and it causes a problem and toxicity.
Now, what's interesting is an average amalgam filling,
that's a silver filling,
is about 500 milligrams, about a half a gram.
If you ground it up real fine
and you put that in a 10 acre lake,
and then you had the EPA come in
and check for safe mercury levels,
they would put an advisory on that lake,
that if there were fish in there, you couldn't eat the fish.
So, this stuff is very toxic in very small amounts.
That's one amalgam in a 10 acre lake.
Now, what do you think happens in a
3 meter body?
And the person has 8 or 10 amalgams.
The mercury comes off and it enters their body
and they get full of it.
And so this isn't a good thing.
Mercury in some states now is illegal
in amalgams, especially in children,
but a lot of places, they still do it.
So, it's definitely a problem.
Another problem that can happen
is if you have a pregnant woman,
and I had a case earlier this year,
of a child who had developmental delay
and we were looking to find--
The pregnancy was apparently normal.
The delivery was normal.
The child had normal growth and development,
but at about a year of age,
and this child did not get any kind of vaccines,
the child's developmental milestones started falling off.
And by two years old he still couldn't talk
and he had definite delay.
And I got a history from the mom that during her pregnancy,
she had several mercury amalgam fillings placed
and those mercury amalgam fillings,
when we tested the baby, the baby was high in mercury.
Now, those fillings off gas.
A pregnant mother will dump her toxins into her fetus.
The body actually uses the fetus as a dump site.
And so, the baby developmentally got mercury
while he was growing
and then manifested a
developmental delay once he was born.
So, he's now on the mend
because we're treating him for heavy metal toxicity
and his milestones are improving.
He's beginning to talk.
This is treatable,
but ideally, you never do that.
You don't ever get mercury fillings
and you certainly don't get them during pregnancy.
Now, another thing that can happen
is that in some of the vaccines,
there is a compound called thimerosal.
Now, if thimerosal is ethylmercury,
it is mercury.
It is used as a preservative in vaccines
and sometimes doctors get vials of vaccines
which are multi-dose vials.
So, there's maybe 5 or 8 or 10 doses in there.
They can put the syringe in,
pull up one dose give it to one kid,
do the next kid, do the next kid, do the next kid,
and they generally have this preservative, which is ethylmercury.
Thimerosal is the trade name.
And like flu vaccines, most of them have mercury.
And if you give someone a flu vaccine,
it's not like it's just off gassing off the teeth,
or like it's in some piece of fish that you ate,
this is injected mercury
and hepatitis vaccine which is given to very young children,
usually in a day of birth,
most of those have thimerosal.
And so, what you're doing is giving a baby
50 billion parts
of mercury right into this little infant
who doesn't really have an immune system,
doesn't have good detox system,
and that's more than 100 times
what the legal allowable amount of mercury is,
even in drinking water.
So, these are sources of heavy metal toxicity in us
and in our children.
Now, some foods, especially fish, are high in mercury.
And the bigger the fish,
the more likely that that fish has a lot of mercury.
So, the big predator fish:
Tuna.
Mahi.
Grouper.
Shark.
Mackerel.
These fish eat other fish
and they grow old and they grow big,
and in the process, they accumulate a lot of mercury
and so when we eat those fish,
our levels of mercury go up.
One of our routine tests, is to test mercury levels
on virtually everyone that comes in, in the blood.
And people who eat a lot of fish,
they have high mercury levels in their blood.
It's not good.
Okay?
If you like fish and you want to eat fish,
the smaller the better.
So, sardines are good.
Most shellfish is okay.
Moderate, wild caught salmon is okay.
But, I wouldn't eat fish too often
because these fish are contaminated.
The ocean is contaminated and these fish pick it up.
There's also a lot of heavy metals in pesticides.
So, we find arsenic levels elevated in many people.
Chickens are given arsenic along with their food
and so chickens tend to have higher levels.
Brown rice
tends to have high levels of arsenic.
So, people who smoke, they always have extreme high levels of cadmium.
Cadmium is another heavy metal.
It's in the cigarette smoke and when they breathe it,
they get enormous levels in their body.
And I think part of the problem with lung cancer and smoking
is that cadmium can be a carcinogen.
These heavy metals can be carcinogens
and they poison people.
So,
those are common ones.
Now, sometimes people have occupational exposures.
They're welders,
or they're solderers,
or they're jewelers
or they're doing grinding or filing,
and they get these metals which aerosolize
and they get exposed too.
And so, they have to be careful with that.
Dentists have a huge risk of getting heavy metal toxic
and any dentist worth his salt
will wear a full hazmat suit with a breathing mask
because when they take their high-speed drill
and drill out a mercury filling that's broken
or that that needs repairing,
that mercury gets hot and it's gonna aerosolize
and it goes all over.
And when dentists are checked for levels of heavy metals,
especially mercury in their brains and their pineal glands,
they have very high levels.
I'm gonna talk a little bit later,
many people who have mental illness like psychosis
and things like that, have heavy metals that are high.
And dentists have supposedly the highest suicide rate of any profession.
I don't think it's because they hate what they're doing.
I think that they get alteration of brain and mental function
because they're heavy metal, mercury toxic.
Now, sometimes you're exposed to these heavy metals
with the cookware that you use
and if you're using aluminum, you're getting it.
If you're using aluminum foil to wrap your food, you're getting it.
If you're using standard deodorants,
they have aluminum, you're getting it.
Aluminum is very highly associated with Alzheimer's disease.
This aluminum comes in,
it goes to your brain,
it gives you a problem.
So, these are other sources.
Now, cosmetics can be high
in heavy metals as well.
Lipsticks with lead
and certain other cosmetics.
Hair dyes can be very high in these things.
So, your exposure is,
you get it from here and you get it from here
and you get it from here and you get it from here
and these things can really build up
and they can cause you to be sick.
Now, what do they do?
When heavy metals come in the body,
if this is heavy metal "X,"
they come in the body as a charged particle.
So, whether it's aluminum,
or lead,
or arsenic,
or mercury,
or nickel.
In the body, they're a charged particle.
They are a free radical.
They are missing electrons.
Usually 1, 2, or 3, depending on the heavy metal.
And when they come into the body,
they are going to rip electrons off healthy cells
in the blood vessels.
They're gonna rip them off the inner lining of your blood cells.
We know that heavy metals are associated
with cardiovascular disease
because the inner lining of the artery,
these cells,
when they get electrons ripped off their surface,
it causes damage to that cell.
It's an injury.
It's almost like a chemical assault.
And that causes this injury,
and the body makes a bandage over it
which is a cholesterol plaque.
So, many cases of heart disease
are because these heavy metals cause oxidative stress.
Now, they can cause kidney disease,
liver disease,
heart disease.
Some years ago a group of medical doctors
did a study on patients that had
what is called cardiomyopathy.
Which means that the heart muscle itself
doesn't have enough energy to really pump very well.
And these people didn't have it
because their heart arteries were blocked.
They had it because their heart muscle
was contaminated with heavy metals.
And they found that in people that had the cardiomyopathy,
that was from heavy metal toxicity,
versus the cardiomyopathy
from a known viral infection,
or from lack of blood supply,
that the levels of heavy metals
in the heart biopsies that they did
were thousands of times higher
than what they should have been.
And so, these are poisons.
They're tissue poisons.
They're cellular poisons.
They cause oxidative stress.
They go into the mitochondria the cell
and they prevent the cell from actually being able to make energy.
They also kill neurons.
So, neurons are the cells in our brain
and our spinal cord.
And when you put mercury next to a neuron
at very, very tiny doses,
that mercury will kill the neuron.
And so, we don't want to lose neurons
because these things are associated with premature Alzheimer's disease,
with Parkinson's disease,
with ALS,
because neurons are dying and there's a problem.
So, these are very important things
and because they do these things,
they also poison enzyme systems.
And so, what we want to do is avoid them
as much as we can,
so that we can keep our body healthy.
Now, people get all kinds of signs and symptoms
from heavy metal toxicity.
They could have headaches
or they could have nausea and vomiting.
They could have chronic pain.
They could have fibromyalgia.
They can have all kinds of psychological-type symptoms
from mania to
depression,
to sleeplessness and so,
it can manifest in many ways.
Oftentimes people will get diagnosed with chronic fatigue
and their heavy metal toxic,
or they have dizziness,
or they have disequilibrium,
which can be a problem.
A very interesting study was done
in criminals
with another heavy metal called manganese.
And they were measuring levels of manganese in the hair
and they found that white collar criminals
had elevated manganese
that was higher than the average population
but
homicidal maniacs, people who had killed people,
had very high levels
and they could sort of track the amount between,
"you're not such a bad criminal,
"you didn't kill anybody,
"you just stole from him or did something like that,"
or, "the guys who are really bad, life sentence types,"
had really high.
So, these can have a definite psycho-emotional effect
and it's very important that these people be identified
because they may be salvageable
by getting the heavy metals out of their body.
Okay.
So, what can you do?
First thing is reduce exposure.
Okay?
Non-toxic cosmetics,
antiperspirants that don't have aluminum in them,
use natural type cookwares,
cast iron skillets tend to be fine,
high-grade stainless steel tends to be fine,
Corning Ware tends to be fine.
Don't use aluminum pots and pans.
Don't wrap your food in aluminum foil
because you're gonna get aluminum.
If you smoke, stop smoking
or at least cut your smoking way back.
Get the metal out of your mouth
by a natural biological dentist.
And if you come in to get your mercury removed
out of your mouth,
and your dentist doesn't have a hazmat suit,
tell them, "I'm going someplace else"
because you can get in big trouble
taking these things out
without having them,
if they don't believe that it's toxic,
and they're not wearing this stuff,
then they're not going to do a good job.
And we have had scores of cases
where the dentist said he took out all the heavy metals
and then what he did was put a gold crown
on top of the heavy metal.
Now, you get a battery effect.
You have a gold
and you have a mercury next to each other
and it produces an electrical current.
And we can measure the electrical current.
I can put a voltmeter on the tooth
and then on the cheek,
and I can measure direct current voltage
coming out of that tooth.
Now, a normal neuron fires at about 70 millivolts.
I have seen teeth up to 350 millivolts,
24 hours a day, coming out of that tooth.
Where does it go?
It goes down the jawbone.
It goes into the brain.
It also pumps the mercury out of the tooth,
the deep parts of the tooth,
and it pushes it into the root of the tooth
and into the tissue.
I have somebody that I saw this week.
There was a gray tattoo
next to the molar tooth.
But on the molar tooth, there was a gold crown,
then when the dentist pulled off the gold crown,
there was mercury underneath,
and that mercury had been pushed out of that area
onto the gum
and it produced a mercury tattoo.
And now I have that person taking a cotton ball with water
and opening up a capsule of chlorella,
which is an algae
but it binds mercury very well,
and they put that wet cotton ball on their cheek
by the gum.
They let it sit there for an hour,
they pull it off,
and over a few months time,
that mercury tattoo will all be tapped off
and the mercury will be out of their gum.
Okay?
So, normal dentists don't generally care about this.
They don't understand it.
They don't know it
and that's why you want to see a natural dentist
who's certified to remove this stuff.
There are several dental organizations that certify dentists.
The one I can remember off the top of my head
is called IAOMT.com
It's an international organization.
I-A-O-M-T.
And this is a group where you can look on there,
put your zip code in,
find the dentist near you
that is somebody that you go to,
who will do this safely.
Next thing is,
what we want to do is, some foods are high in mercury.
So, we talked about fish.
So, watch out how much fish you eat.
Eat little fish when you eat it.
High fructose corn syrup often has mercury in it.
If you're drinking sodas with high fructose corn syrup,
which you shouldn't be doing anyway,
you should not drink that stuff
because it has, many of the times, it has mercury in it.
The way this stuff gets out of the body
is through mostly stool
and to a certain extent sweat.
So, saunas are good.
They help you sweat this stuff out.
You've got to have a bowel movement at least every day.
It helps get this stuff out.
If you're chronically constipated,
the metals don't come out.
Of course, plenty of water, so that you flush everything out.
Stool binders like chlorella,
clay, can be helpful in binding these things
when they're coming out of the intestine
and to help you get rid of it.
There are lots of different, what are called chelators.
"Chēlē" in Greek means crab or claw
and the idea is that this substance
is like this,
and the metal will stick in there
and then when you
relieve it, get it out of the body,
it comes out.
So,
there are many chelators.
This can be done both intravenously and orally.
There's a couple of them that are really good
that we have an association with,
called Metal Free.
The thing that you've got to do with this,
is you want to make sure that before you start any chelation,
that your vitamin and mineral balance is good.
You have plenty of vitamin D,
plenty of magnesium.
You should measure these levels.
They're good.
And you want to make sure that your hormones are good.
You're not hypothyroid.
That your other hormone levels are in good range.
That you're eating a diet that is like paleo-type.
That you're not doing a vegetarian diet.
They have trouble excreting this stuff.
So, a paleo diet
where you're eating some animal protein and lots of vegetables.
High-fiber is good.
And the other thing that you want to make sure of
is that you're getting enough essential amino acids.
The whole detox pathway in the body
is dependent on essential amino acids.
So, your liver can't get rid of this stuff
if you don't have these there.
The best product I know is called PerfectAmino.
It has the 8 essential amino acids that are needed to do this.
And so, if you put this combination together
of something like Metal Free and Perfect Amino
and also a good multivitamin
where you're getting the rest of this stuff
and some kind of a binder like chlorella or clay,
you can ease these things out of your body
on a very low level
and you can clean yourself out from these things.
When I first started doing this,
we thought that you had to get this out
as soon as you could, like rapidly.
And we found that people would get sick.
Because the body would start to mobilize the heavy metals
and then the liver was so overloaded
it couldn't get rid of them.
And then they would get weird symptoms.
So, this should be done slowly.
On a low level.
If you're starting to feel like you're not doing very well,
you just cut it back.
Because then the body can catch up
and then you can tease these things out
and you can actually get better.
So, things to remember:
Don't detox until your body's ready.
Make sure all of your hormones and those things are good
before you start.
Make sure you're on a really good diet.
And make sure that you're having good bowel movements.
And then avoid heavy metals as much as you can
in terms of the foods you eat
and the exposures that you get.
And then people can get better from this and they can feel good
and this doesn't have to be such a big burden for them.
Okay?
Hope this helps.
