The Dr. Hyman Show - How Metal Toxicity Affects Health And Aging

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Unfortunately, in today’s world we’ve become exposed to a greater number of environmental toxins than ever before. Heavy metals including mercury, lead, and arsenic pose many threats to our health, from increased risk of cancer to autoimmune disorders, hormonal imbalances, gut issues, and much more. In this mini-episode Dr. Hyman talks to Dave Asprey about the best ways to test for and detoxify from heavy metals. Dave Asprey is an expert in biohacking and reversing the aging process. He is the founder and CEO of Bulletproof 360, creator of the global phenomenon Bulletproof Coffee, a two-time New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, serial entrepreneur, and global change agent.  Listen to Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dave Asprey: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DaveAsprey

Coming up on this mini episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you're going to live to 180, you are going to be full of metals. Metals inhibit mitochondrial function, they lower your testosterone, they cause hair loss, they cause graying, and they cause cancer, as well as actually a whole bunch of other diseases. So you've got to lower your exposure to them, and you have to get rid of them as you live. Hi, I'm Kea Perowit, one of the producers of The Doctor's 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 fracture of so well. 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 talk about how to do that in the book. But if you don't know that metals matter and you're just gonna keep the same fish, you have a problem. Can you measure how much metals you have in your system? Yeah, there's two ways in superhuman 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. So here, let me just share with you, as a practicing physician who,

one, suffered from mercury poisoning. Had it too. And two, have 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 and underappreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don't know how to think about, test, or measure. And personally for me, I lived in China and it got huge exposure to mercury. I don't have great genes of detoxifying.

And it destroyed every system in my body. It 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 CPKs were like 600. My liver was affected.

My immune system was affected. I started developing 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 in thought yeah 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 I think, you know, I would say that for many of my patients who suffer from weird or strange ailments,

it's right at the top of my list 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 days. I mean, if you're eating a lot of sushi, you'll see it's high, but 90 days you stop, it'll go away. You can look at your urine,

but your urine also wasn't going to be high unless there's an current exposure 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 chelator and you collect your urine for six hours hair tests also check for fish methylmercury which is where we mostly get our our mercury from but 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 in people who have a mouthful of fillings and And that's called the Quicksilver test. And that is surprisingly high in people who have a mouthful of fillings. And you can see the difference between fish or a dental mercury. And the treatments are, depending on the person, can be very aggressive depending on what they need. I have a patient who's got this terrible autoimmune disease and we're giving her intravenous support. Other people can use oral support there's medications and but it's it's a it's a whole process that has to be done safely and it's i think your point is really well taken i think it's an underserved 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 a there was a um an article in new york times that i was quoted and it was based on these special forces oh yeah those guys get led right yeah so this guy this guy came to see me whose job was he was a you 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 they're not 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 right right and do 4 000 push-ups and like you know yeah don't sleep for three days. I mean, 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. I'm like, oh, we blow stuff up. We shoot things. I'm like, oh, okay. And so I said, let's check your heavy metals.

And they were sky high. We put him through a whole program. He was, you know, metabolically his system wasn't working. He was overweight. He had prediabetes. He had cognitive dysfunction. He had all these 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 because his medical crew and everybody dismissed him. And he completely turned around. And the guy who was the lead expert at Mount Sinai, who measures bone lead, which is theai who measures bone lead 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 lead how can you be an expert in lead and not know how to because the

body it drives me nuts 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 a in fact an fda approved drug called dmsa it's designed for lead removal and actually removes mercury so i think you know for people listening if you have any strange or weird ailments, if you have anxiety, depression, insomnia, autoimmune disease, gut issues, fatigue, cognitive issues, it may well be heavy metals. And you need to find a good functional medicine doctor to help you diagnose that. And you go to functionalmedicine.org or ifm.org, and you can find a practitioner who may know how to do this.

I'm going to go a little bit broader than that. 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 it was 40 it was 40 to 20 to 10 to 5 to 5 and now they're finding even down to one they're seeing cognitive impairment in kids cognitive impairment and

increased risk of cardiovascular disease and now the people who are the experts in lead are 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. And it's so strange, Dave, because medicine just ignores this,

but in the journal Circulation, which is one of the top cardiology journals, there was a paper a number of years ago that showed that if your lead level was over two, which is quote within the normal limits, which by the way affects almost 40% of the population has this lead level, that your risk of stroke goes up 89%.

The risk of a heart attack goes up 150%. The risk of death goes up from a heart attack 55 percent 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 what are the what are the basic tips if you're not going to get chelated what are the basic tips for detoxifying for detoxifying yeah not just metals or you mean metals metals like how do you i mean how do or it works for everything, but how do you? One of my favorite compounds is glutathione. And you can increase glutathione levels by increasing vitamin C,

by taking N-acetylcysteine. I manufacture a glutathione pill. You can get intravenous glutathione, which. Lipoic acid. And you do IV glutathione at your clinics, right? Yeah. Yeah, and we do it at Upgrade Labs in LA for people to recover better. Alpha lipoic acid is another thing.

Selenium can help. And zinc can help. The natural chelator. Cilantro. But surprisingly, you want to take cilantro only after you've removed most of the metal from your body because 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 going

to build some of these in on a regular basis. And then you need fiber. You need to poop and pee and sweat. Shocking how those work. Yeah. Metals are a 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 bodies 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 veggies like broccoli, bok choy, 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 lead or other poisons in

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 into this mini episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing it with friends and family. Until next time. Hey everybody, I just wanted to remind you all that the information in this episode is not intended to be used as medical advice. Always work with your doctor and if you can, find a functional medicine doctor. My staff, including physicians and nutritionists at the Ultra Wellness

Center in Massachusetts, is trained in functional medicine to find the root cause of disease and create health for you every step