if you're going to live 180 you are going to be full of metals metals inhibit mitochondrial function they lower your testosterone and they caused hair loss they cause graying and they cause cancer as well as actually a whole bunch of other diseases you've got to lower your exposure to them and you have to get rid of them as you live hi I'm ki Pirelli one of the producers of the doctors pharmacy podcast genetic variations make some people more prone to heavy metal toxicity some of us are very good at detoxifying while others are not in this mini episode dr. Hyman shares his personal experience with mercury poisoning in conversation with founder and CEO of bulletproof 360 Dave Asprey let's listen in there's compounds I write about called chelating agents that you can take with your food when I eat sushi you need the fat from fish I take chlorella which is a fraction so chlorella will bind to the mercury in the gut so you poop it out but chlorella will not pull mercury out of your brain so what you end up doing is over time you lower the incidence of metal entering your body and you slowly remove what's in your body and I talked about how to do that in the book but if you don't know that metals matter and you're just gonna sort can you gain your measure how much metals you have in your system and yeah there's two ways in Sabri one that I write about the gold standard is you collect urine and see what your body's excreting with or without an agent that may cause you to release more and then a more common and cheaper way but less telling is a hair test and there's there's usefulness for both of those but you can go to a functional medicine doctor and say I'd like to do a heavy metals test and they'll usually order a urine test for you and it's very common to find elevated mercury and lead in fact if you're over 40 you're probably going to find it yeah so here let me just share these as a practicing physician who one suffered from mercury poisoning added two and two halves treated literally tens of thousands of people with metal poisoning and have done tens of thousands of tests and I would say it's probably one of the most ignored yeah and underappreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don't know how to think about well some measure and personally for me I'm a in China and they've got a huge exposure to mercury I don't have great genes of detoxifying and it destroyed every system in my body yes destroyed my gut I had diarrhea for years and bloating and pain it destroyed my mitochondria I developed chronic fatigue syndrome and it was such an extreme version that my muscle enzymes were high my CPK is 600 my liver was affected my immune system was affected I should have building rashes and sores all over I was completely cognitively impaired I couldn't focus think concentrate remember I was you know in you're not native thoughts this was like you know 25 years ago and I was so bad and I literally had to become an expert in mercury and heavy metals and detoxification and I've written a lot about it but I think you know I would say that for many of my patients who suffer from weird or strange ailments it's writing of things to look at and the only way to really know what your body burden is you can look at your blood but that only checks 90 degrees yeah I mean if you're even a lot of sushi you'll see it's high but I need a just stop it'll go away you can look at your urine but your urine also was gonna be high unless there's an occurrence poser so if you're in a lead foundry or you're you know eating tons of sushi you might see a little bit of mercury the only way to really look at your body burden is to do a challenge test where you take a pill it's a key later and you collect your urine for six hours hair tests also check for fish methyl mercury which is where we mostly get our mercury foam with that that also will go away if you haven't eaten fish for a while and then there's another test that looks at the blood work that measures the inorganic mercury which comes from pollution or from fillings and that's called the Quicksilver test and that that is surprisingly high and people have a mouthful of fillings and you can see the difference between fish or or or a dental mercury and the treatments are depending on the person you know can be very aggressive depending on what they need ago I have a patient who's got this terrible autoimmune disease and we're giving her intravenous support other people can do oral support there's medications and but it's it's it's a whole process that has to be done safely and I think you her point is really well taken I think it's an under served an underappreciated component of medicine and hopefully one day we'll get on board with this because it's just I mean it was interesting there was that there was a an article in New York Times that I was quoted and it was based on these Special Forces oh yeah there's guys get led right yeah so this guy this guy came to see me whose job was he was a know Special Forces guy who was a blast expert so they would you know go blow up stuff you know blow up doors blow up this and they had to train and practice and they had indoor practice training and and these guys were getting all sick and now you know the Special Forces guys aren't malingerers they're not whiners and I like oh I don't feel good I don't want to work those aren't those guys these are guys who you know like stay in freezing ice water for an hour and swim you know and do four thousand push-ups and like you know yeah don't sleep for three days these guys are not whiners they're super humans right yeah and so the guy came in I'm like okay well tell me about your job like oh we blow stuff up we shoot thing I'm like oh okay and so I said let's check your every metals and they were sky-high we put him to a whole program he was you know metabolically his system wasn't working he was overweight he had pre-diabetes he had cognitive function yet all this immune issues gut issues all got better and then he started sending all these Special Forces guys to us and we started treating them and they just all got better and one of them was written about in the New York Times Wow as his you know medical crew and everybody dismissed him and he completely turned around and the guy who is the lead expert at Mount Sinai who measures bone lad which is the most accurate way to measure lead in the body it's not an easy available commercial test but it's a very powerful research tool he said these guys had really high levels of lead and he said on the follow-up test he saw the levels come way down and he says he's never seen that in his entire experience and this is a guy who's an expert in how can you be an extra let in not know how to perform as a body it's not because it's not seen as a problem acute poisoning yes chronic poisoning no and there's nothing you can quote do about it it's just nonsense and there's an in fact an fda-approved drug called DMS a yes designed for lead removal and removes mercury so I think you know for people listening if you have any stranger weird ailments if you have anxiety depression insomnia autoimmune disease gut issues fatigue cognitive issues it may well be heavy metals and and you need to find a good functional medicine doctor to help you diagnose that you got a functional medicine org or IFM org and you can find a practitioner who may know how to do this hey I'm gonna go a little bit broader than they go if you are over 50 and you have not gone through a course of chelation you are not doing aging right you have to do this if you are alive in the modern world and you want to live to a highly functional old-age and the reason I say this is that the safe EPA limits for lead used to be 20 parts per million and they cut was 40 it was 40 to 20 to 10 to 5 5 and now they're finding even down to 1 they're seeing cognitive impairment and kids cognitive impairment and increased risk of cardiovascular disease and now the people who are the experts in letters saying quote there is no safe limit of lead and if you are 40 or 50 you cannot be alive and not have a lead burden in your body you must remove it and it's not that hard especially if you're not really sick it's not gonna be a big deal it's so strangely because medicine just ignores this but in the journal circulation which is one of the top cardiology journals there was a paper number years ago that showed that if your lead level was over 2 which is quote within the normal limits which by the way affects almost 40% of the population has that your risk of stroke goes up 89% the risk of a heart attack goes up a hundred and fifty percent the risk of death goes up from a heart attack 55% and this is more than smoking or cholesterol or like and it's like well why doesn't your cardiologist talk to you about this so one of the one of the basic tips if you're not gonna get chelated what are the basic tips for detoxifying for detoxifying yeah I'm not just metals or you mean metals some metals like how do you I mean how do it all works for everything but how do you but one of my favorite compounds is glutathione and you can increase glutathione levels by increasing vitamin C by taking n acetylcysteine I'm manufacturer glutathione till you can get intravenous glutathione which acid and you do IV go to find out your clinics right yeah yeah and I we do it at upgrade labs in LA for people to recover better um alpha lipoic acid is another thing selenium can help and zinc zinc can help the natural q leader has cilantro but surprisingly you want to take cilantro only after you've removed most of the metal from your body because a cilantro can actually move heavy metals into the brain because it's one of the things that can also penetrate the blood barrier so you go through and you say you know I'm just gonna build some of these in on a regular basis then you need fiber you need to poop and pee and sweat shocking how those work yeah metals are real deal and learning how to detoxify learning how to up regular mitochondria and fix them learning how to cool off inflammation these are the central strategies around healthy aging when our body's become toxic every one of our systems can become affected this is just one of the reasons why it's so important to eat clean organic plant-based foods and grass-fed meat eat plenty of cruciferous vegetable kale and brussel sprouts to maximize your dietary phytonutrients and increase your body's ability to detoxify avoiding plastics and using natural simple cleaning products in your home and on your skin are also ways you can help to reduce your toxic burden if you suspect letter or other poisons and paints or floors consult an expert to remove these safely you can't eliminate toxins entirely but you can definitely reduce exposure to these endocrine disruptors and once you get the hang of it you can live clean and green without much effort thanks for tuning in to this mini episode of the doctors pharmacy if you enjoyed this podcast please consider sharing it with friends and family until next time