Mad As a Hatter

How to Avoid Toxic Metals and Clear Them from the Body

What’s wrong when people follow Dr. Weston A. Price’s dietary principles but still suffer from significant health problems? Why do so many people try to eat good fats but find they cannot digest them? What is the reason for digestive distress and dysbiosis despite taking high-quality probiotics and consuming cultured foods and broth? Why are some babies sickly even when the parents eat a nourishing diet prior to conception and throughout pregnancy and lactation?

The answer may be toxic metals. Though we may honor our bodily temples with nourishing foods, we cannot realize our full health potential so long as we remain waste dumps for mercury, aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, lead and nickel. Even the “precious metals” gold, silver and platinum can create problems. Mix well with a dose of chloride and fluoride found abundantly in municipal water supplies and it’s no wonder that so many of us are sick and tired.

Health practitioners over the past few decades have also begun seeing more and people “glowing in the dark” because of nuclear waste and weapons. The use of so-called “depleted uranium” weapons in armed conflicts is suspected of contributing to the “Gulf War Syndrome,” an array of health problems associated with the Gulf War as well as the ongoing Iraqi war and other conflicts.

Although the mental and physical problems from metal toxicity have escalated in recent years, our very language tacitly acknowledges the historic toxicity of certain metals: “Mad as a hatter” from the Civil- War-era’s crazed use of mercury sizing in hat manufacture, “gold fever” from the murderous greed of early prospectors, “lead poisoning” as black humor for “getting shot,” and, more recently, “get-the-lead-out” exhortations from trainers who would have us exercise long and hard in order to sweat out toxins and melt excess fat.

The medical establishment currently recognizes only acute metal toxicity, the type that leads to painful, sudden and severe symptoms, including cramping, nausea, vomiting, sweating, headaches, breathing difficulties, convulsions, and impaired cognitive, motor and language skills. With acute metal toxicity, the effect of consumption, inhalation, skin contact and other exposure is clear. Acute toxicities occur most often on job sites when workers are exposed to hazardous substances, though accidents occur on the home front too. Pesticide, herbicide and chemical fertilizer spills at homes and schools, for example, are some of the common reasons why previously healthy people join the ranks of the chemically sensitive and environmentally ill.

In 1986 Congress established the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the Department of Health and Human Services in order to deal with effects of hazardous environmental substances on human health. In cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the ATSDR compiles priority lists of hazardous substances each year. Out of 275 substances on the 2007 list, arsenic is number one, lead two, mercury three and cadmium seven.¹ Of these fearful four, mercury is the most studied, but all four have similar adverse effects on the body.

Chronic Exposure

Victims of acute metal toxicity make the six o’clock news, but far more people suffer adverse effects from low-level, chronic exposure to multiple metals. Because the symptoms may develop over a period of many years and are often interchangeable with other signs of poor health, sufferers rarely recognize slowly accumulating mercury and other metals as the culprits. Thus, although nearly everyone on the planet carries some toxic load, not everyone shows obvious and distinguishing ill effects. After all, fatigue, digestive distress, aching joints and depression, to name just a few everyday complaints, are considered “normal” in our increasingly sick and aging society. Almost all chronically sick patients, regardless of their specific symptoms or diagnoses, have sustained significant exposure to toxic metals. Mercury toxicity should be assumed in anyone who has—or has had—amalgam fillings or root canals and who also chews.² Aluminum, cadmium, lead, cobalt and arsenic and other metals are rarely absent from such patients.³

Dose, duration, manner of exposure, biochemical individuality, genetic propensity, diet quality and stress levels combine to determine the degree of ill effects. Good nutrition is key because a deficiency of vital metals will lead to their replacement by toxic metals in enzyme binding sites. Lead will replace calcium, for example, cadmium will replace zinc, and aluminum and nickel will replace magnesium and manganese. These substitutions will allow a certain degree of vital enzyme function, but in time lead to physiological dysfunction.^4,5

Sadly, it no longer takes decades or even years to become toxic. Babies are born toxic because mercury and other metals pass through the placenta from toxic mothers. The Environmental Working Group reports that blood samples taken from the umbilical blood of newborns show an average of 287 toxins including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides and Teflon chemicals. This is a primary reason why babies come into this world with compromised digestive and immune systems. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) estimates that over 60,000 US children are born each year at risk for life-long problems because of dangerous blood levels of mercury in their mothers.⁶

Vaccinations containing mercury and aluminum then add to the burden, often sending an already vulnerable child over the edge into autism, ADD/ADHD, life-threatening allergies and autoimmune diseases. Thimerosal has mostly been removed from children’s vaccines. However, old batches are still given to children, if not in the US then abroad. As for new batches, even the FDA admits that they may contain trace amounts.^7,8

The Weston A. Price Foundation has educated parents about how to optimize their nutrition prior to conception. But unless parents also detoxify themselves of toxic metals before conception, this trend will not reverse, and we will continue to see the degeneration of our children’s health.

A Litany of Adverse Effects

Evidence that toxic metals cause, contribute to or accelerate the development of chronic illness is widely available in the scientific literature. Metal toxicity adds to oxidative stress, inhibits antioxidant production and utilization, blocks enzyme functions and poisons sulfur biochemistry, adversely affecting the function of every cell, tissue, organ and system in the body. It would be wrong to blame the epidemics of fatigue, depression, anxiety, food and drug addictions, insulin resistance, diabetes, learning disabilities, allergies, asthma, digestive distress, adrenal gland exhaustion, hormonal imbalances, memory loss and other all-too-familiar health problems solely on metal toxicity but metals certainly can play a major role in these conditions.⁹

Although symptoms of poisoning by the various metals commonly overlap, different metals tend to favor different sites. Mercury and cadmium accumulate heavily in kidneys, but cadmium doesn’t cross the blood brain barrier the way mercury does. Cadmium overload is associated more with peripheral neuropathy than central nervous system problems. Lead deposits primarily in bone, and it disrupts erythropoiesis, the formation of red blood cells, contributing to poor bone health, osteopenia and osteoporosis.^10-12

The litany of adverse effects from exposure to mercury, lead, cadmium and arsenic is a long one. It includes physical, muscular and neurological degeneration. Toxic heavy metals can cause, contribute to or accelerate the development of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and other brain and neurological disorders.¹³

Toxic metals also contribute to the plague of female reproductive system problems such as menstrual difficulties, infertility, miscarriage, pre-eclampsia, pregnancy-induced hypertension and premature births. Toxic metals have also been linked to increased breast cancer risk. A recent study out of Georgetown University showed that the metals mercury, copper, cobalt, nickel, lead, tin, chromium and vanadate activated estrogen receptor alpha sites in human breast cell cancer lines in ways similarly to the human estrogen estradiol. The metals also altered gene expression, perturbed hormonal balance and accelerated the proliferation of the breast cancer cells.¹⁴

Mercury and other toxic metals further contribute to cancer development and growth by preventing the biosynthesis and functioning of vitalethine, an endogenous regulator of key metabolic pathways necessary for a “vital” immune system. Adequate natural vitalethine controls immune responses, probably to all types of cancer and to infectious agents like AIDS. Evidence is accumulating that vitalethine is also crucial for proper cholesterol metabolism, red blood cell production and diabetes prevention.¹⁵ For our bodies to make natural vitalethine, we need the sulfur-containing amino acid, L-cysteine, along with the vitamin pantothenic acid.¹⁶ However, if high-quality, usable protein and cysteine become deficient because of poor diet or poisoning by metals, our bodies will try to compensate by making cysteine from the essential amino acid, methionine through the toxic intermediate homocysteine. Problematic metal toxins in the body may bind and interfere with the conversion of homocysteine, trapping it so that it accumulates metabolically.^17-19

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