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March 22, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
45:44
Mercury toxicity expert Dr. Chris Shade interviewed by the Health Ranger
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Hello and welcome to the Health Ranger Report.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, editor of naturalnews.com and research director at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab.
And this is an interview with one of the world's foremost experts in mercury toxicity and mercury detoxification.
His name is Dr.
Chris Shade.
He's got a Ph.D., He's an expert in environmental science, and he has a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His area of specialty is in aqueous metals speciation and mercury analytical chemistry development.
He knows more about mercury than anyone else that I've ever interviewed, and he gives us a wealth of useful information in this interview about how to avoid exposure to mercury, what are some of the side effects of cumulative mercury exposure in your body, and then some of the best ways to remove toxic mercury from your body's organs, tissues, blood, and digestive tract.
So just truly a wealth of information.
If you'd like to check out his website, it's quicksilverscientific.com.
He does not do testing to the general public, but rather he runs tests for chelation experts And naturopaths who have customers who are suffering from metals toxicity and want to have metals removed.
So a naturopathic physician or a chelation practitioner would take a sample of blood from you and perhaps a sample of hair and some other things, urine perhaps, send it.
To this company, Quicksilver Scientific, and they would be able to do mercury speciation on those samples and give your practitioner a wealth of information about exactly what's going on in your body when it comes to mercury.
So let's get right to the interview.
Let's get started with...
Can you first just explain to our listeners...
You know, your background and your specialty, your lab, and why you're the best in the business at this specific knowledge base.
Oh, sure.
Well, I've been incredibly highly trained for this.
I got my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in environmental mercury chemistry.
It was a very detailed look at how mercury moves from one place to another, how it moves We had complicated mathematical models for how it moves everywhere.
We needed really sophisticated analytical techniques.
The bulk of my PhD work was developing an analytical technique where we could separate different forms of mercury and look at them at really, really low levels so that we could sort of inform the models and be able to look at mercury moving through the environment.
At the time, all the best mercury guys seemed to be in environmental.
Like I said, we had these great tools for both analysis and computational work to predict what happens.
When I left there, I got my PhD, I developed this analytical technology, and I used it some for environmental work, but I found that there was a big void in clinical metals toxicology.
They just didn't understand a lot about mercury.
Mercury was all just one form to them.
It was like it was all the same thing.
And the testing was all based on what they call a challenge test.
Give you some chelators and see what you pee out, you know, see what comes out of the urine.
And again, there was no regard to form, and there was no real understanding of how one person excretes versus another person, and where in the body these forms might be.
And there was just a big void out there.
And, you know, the biggest single differentiator that we brought is to be able to separate what's called methylmercury, which is the form in fish, from inorganic mercury, which is a form that you get from your dental amalgams, But you also get it because some of the fish-based form breaks into this other inorganic form.
And these two forms move real differently in the body, and so it was real important to be able to measure them individually in the blood and then look at them coming out in the hair and urine so we could see how you were distributing the two forms and how well you were excreting them.
So that was the biggest first thing we brought out.
In one of your lectures, I recall you saying that I think the inorganic form, most people believe that it is not that toxic, but as you said, once it gets into the cell, it's far more toxic than the main cell.
There is so much misunderstanding out there, a lot of what I do.
Like if you came to an eight-hour seminar with me, which I give a lot, the first part is kind of deconstruction of what people think.
And so people have an impression that nephylmercury is the worst form, and that impression goes back to feeding studies.
So if we were going to take pure salts of it and have you eat them You would absorb the methylmercury more, and so you'd die faster from the methylmercury because the inorganic mercury doesn't get absorbed across the GI tract.
But once you're at a cellular level, if we took just cell cultures, growing cells, and we exposed them to one form or the other, the inorganic mercury would kill them faster.
Well, see, that's interesting because...
You know, inevitably, I've got to ask you about vaccines because one of the, you know, obviously the flu shots still, I think they inject, what, 20, 40, 50 micrograms of mercury?
Yeah, generally about 25 micrograms of ethyl mercury.
So there's a lot of debate, obviously, about, you know, whether that's toxic or not.
But my question to you is, obviously, that bypasses the digestive tract.
Yeah, now that's an interesting form there, ethylmercury.
It's similar to methylmercury in that it's very mobile in the body.
It can cross the blood-brain barrier, just like methylmercury.
But it breaks down into the inorganic mercury very, very quickly.
And to me, that makes it much worse than either of the other forms, really.
When you look at, there was a study done on monkeys.
And they compared methylmercury, the kind from fish, with ethylmercury to determine if they were using the right toxicological data for figuring out whether vaccines were going to be toxic.
And they found that the ethylmercury went in and out of the brain faster and left less total mercury there.
There was less ethylmercury left over.
Compared to the methylmercury where it went in and stayed a little bit longer before it came out.
But the ethylmercury, the kind that's in the vaccines, left a whole bunch of inorganic mercury deposited in the brain.
Interesting.
That form of mercury is very, very, very slow to come out of the brain.
What, like decades or years or what?
Months to years.
And it's so slow that they don't even have good data on it because when they do these studies, they're studying an animal for a period of days to weeks.
And it wasn't enough time to get a real number on how long it takes to come out.
So one form is moving in.
It's transforming to another form that's somewhat trapped there and that is the form that does the most damage.
And there was more debate on this over the years, but it's starting to settle down and it's starting to be recognized that the inorganic form is the most toxic one to the cells.
Let me help set the context for those listening.
Your company is a lab that is used by clinicians all over the country.
So someone listening to this, they can't be a customer of your lab.
They would go to a clinician or a naturopath or someone expert in chelation.
That person would send samples to your lab, correct?
Exactly.
Exactly.
You just hook up with a practitioner, a naturopath, osteopath, MD, and they would arrange for the testing.
Now, how can the people listening to this tell their clinician or naturopath to ask for your lab?
You just have to give them our name.
Maybe just Google us.
The name of the company is Quicksilver Scientific.
We're on the web.
Most of the information on our website is for practitioners.
It's behind a login.
There's a lot of training information.
But there's simple contact information and emails in there for them to request a kit.
And we'll contact them and we'll send the testing kits out to the practitioners for free.
And then they'll arrange for the patient to do the testing.
Is it hair and urine?
It's blood, hair, and urine as a panel.
Traditionally, blood had been kind of maligned, but that's because the bulk of everybody that was doing the testing was using these urine challenge tests.
Whenever you get going down some pathway, you tend to malign all other pathways as if they're not relevant.
And so people will say that mercury is only in the blood for two days.
When the half-life of mercury in the blood has been established for 20 or 30 years as being anywhere from 40 to 70 or more days, depending upon how long you can detoxify, how fast you detoxify.
And so blood is actually a very good measure, but it really needed this technology that we use called mercury speciation where we separate the two forms of mercury because the fish-based form dominates the total amount of mercury in the blood.
So everybody used to measure what's called total mercury and that was dominated by how much fish you ate and behind that was the signal for the inorganic mercury and if you don't separate the two you can't clearly see what you're getting In that pool of inorganic mercury, and that's because of how much sticks onto the tissues versus stays in the blood.
And for methylmercury, it's a little bit more tilted towards the blood.
So even if you have the same amount of both forms in the body, you'll see much more methylmercury in the blood.
When we measure it, we measure them individually, and they both have separate reference ranges.
So you can see where you are in those two pools, the one the methylmercury, the other one being the inorganic mercury.
And of the two, we're even more interested in tracking where that inorganic mercury pool is.
So we have that blood speciation, and then we compare that to hair and urine.
Hair is all methylmercury, and it can be used as an index of how fast you're excreting methylmercury, whereas the urine is almost all inorganic mercury.
Now, urinary mercury has been used for years to look at exposure to inorganic mercury, like from amalgams or from industrial exposure to mercury vapor, But it could be low for two reasons.
It could be low and that's good because you have low exposure or it could be low because your kidneys have stopped efficiently excreting the inorganic mercury.
So that would be a false negative where you're low because you can't excrete.
Now that we have this blood inorganic mercury number, you can very clearly see that.
So you'll see this pattern with low urine, high blood, and that's a bad pattern to have.
And there we have to go in and fix the kidneys.
And incidentally, just to tie it into one of the big themes these days, you know how leaky gut and GI health is a very big theme these days?
Yes.
Well, when you have leaky gut, you translocate a lot of what's called endotoxin, which are parts of bacterial cell walls from the GI tract into the blood.
Ooh, not good.
It's not good.
And here's the real deal.
is end of
Endotoxin is synergistically toxic with mercury and with cadmium and lead and what they do together is they fry the kidneys and I found a beautiful paper that was done where they looked at mice and they were giving them endotoxin and it was a little bit toxic on the kidneys and they gave them mercury and that was a little toxic on the kidneys and then when they gave the two together It was over eight times more toxic to the kidneys than either one of them alone.
And what it did is it stopped mercury from coming out of the urine and kept it in the body.
And that's a very dangerous, toxic spiral of death right there.
You got it.
It's that downward spiral is what that is because now you're holding on to things and everything's accentuating.
Inflammatory states are accentuating.
That's going to accentuate the leaky gut.
The whole thing is going to start spiraling out of control, and that's the picture of the diseased person that you see.
And along with that leaky gut and those inflammatory states, you're going to get leaky blood-brain barrier, and then you're going to be putting endotoxin and mercury at higher rates into the brain.
And you can see that's the picture of the really sick person that we get these days.
You know, that's fascinating, and I have a lot of personal scientific interest in this.
One of the things that I do, in addition to being a journalist, is I run an in-house ICPMS lab here, where we test raw food materials.
You do?
I do, yeah.
Oh, wow!
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
And, I mean, one of the things that I know is that mercury is really sticky to all of the, you know, the uptake.
The glassware, the plastic.
It sticks to everything.
Everything.
And, you know, like, for example, we spike our samples with a little bit of gold to try to hold that in suspension.
Right, to keep that moving.
Yeah, but I'm finding, you know...
Not just mercury in a number of things, but I'm finding a lot of cadmium now that you mention cadmium.
Just the other day, I was running a certified organic beef jerky, and I found 4,000 parts per billion cadmium.
Wow!
Yeah, and that...
Yeah, cadmium's a demon these days, and it's hard to get rid of.
You can address it the same way that you address mercury, but it's...
Just slow to get out of the body, and it's a wicked nephrotoxin.
Really bad on the kidneys.
Yeah, yeah.
And then, like you said, the combination, man.
It's synergistic combinations.
And from what I can tell, I've listened to your lectures and many other people, the ACAM lectures and doing my own research, there's just nobody that can avoid These exposures.
Even if you eat organic, and that's what I'm finding that's really freaking me out.
That's the troublesome thing.
Yeah, and people are doing juicing, and some of the juice is contaminated.
They're doing sprouting, and the sprouts, I found quite a bit of lead in some sprouts the other day.
Oh, yeah.
Any of the leafy greens, I mean, this is a problem is that they collect the things that are depositing from the air.
And so if the farms are anywhere near a road, you're going to get lead and cadmium depositing on them.
I have a, you know, one of my clients, you know, is a vegetarian, Sikh, and...
She has chronically high cadmium, and it's really hard to bring it down.
We got rid of everything else, but the cadmium keeps coming.
I said, you know, this must be from all the leafy greens that you're getting.
You know, she's eating all organic, but, you know, if the farm is near any roadway, you're going to get a lot of deposition.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and I read that brake pads of vehicles release cadmium just from using the brake.
Wow.
I didn't know that one.
Actually, something I learned maybe from your lecture or someone right before you is that one of the top sources of atmospheric mercury in North America is forest fires.
Well, that's a redeposition.
You burn it, it goes up into the air, and it comes back down.
We had all those forest fires here in Colorado for the last year, the year before, and Colorado State University is doing a whole study on enhanced deposition in the lakes around here.
We're doing the analysis for them.
So it would be really interesting to see that come out.
People get sick during these fires because they're getting all this smoke, but they're getting a lot of metals as well.
So when the fire heats up the mercury and it vaporizes, but then the soot collects it and redeposits it.
So, it is a tricky thing.
You know, we have a lot, and out here in the Rocky Mountains, there's a lot that actually comes from the gold mining that's happening a little bit further west of us in Utah and Nevada.
And so, a lot of that gets moved into the forest, and then the forest burns, and you get a lot of that moving around.
It's really a tricky thing.
But, you know, the biggest source for everybody is fish and amalgams, and they dwarf everything else.
Yeah, well said.
And amalgams, I still can't believe they're legal to use.
It's atrocious.
I mean, it's really a bad thing to have.
People don't look at everything that's going on there because you swallow more mercury from the amalgam as a corrosion product that comes off of the fillings.
You swallow more than you inhale.
The inhaled part, you absorb like 80% of it.
The swallowed part, remember I said in the feeding studies when you swallow the inorganic mercury, and that's the corrosion product, you don't absorb much of that, but it's highly corrosive to the epithelia, the cells lining your GI tract, and it causes changes to your immune system and the way your immune system reacts to things, and it causes changes to the flora, what grows in the GI tract.
And so it's got this very systemic effect beyond just the mercury that you inhale.
And changing the GI tract and causing trouble in the GI tract actually shuts down your detox.
So one form you're inhaling really effectively and the other form you're swallowing is going through your GI tract and ultimately sealing up the path out of the body.
Yeah, very, very bad news there.
And the World Health Organization, as you well know, has an initiative where they're trying to get member nations to move toward a mercury-free medicine.
But they're managing, the lobbyists are managing to get amalgam drugs.
Right.
You know, take it off of the desk.
Right, right.
So it's like, oh, we totally want to be mercury free, but the biggest source of mercury to everybody and everything around us, we're just going to ignore completely because of dental lobbying.
Yeah, exactly.
And that has got to stop.
It's been actually a couple years since I talked with Charlie Brown over at...
Yeah, he's the guy who's got his finger on the pulse of that.
Yeah, right.
And I remember he was very optimistic about a lawsuit effort a couple years ago, but I haven't heard anything about that yet.
It was against the ADA. Yeah, I think it's a mixed, you know, sort of like two steps forward, one step back.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, well, let me ask you another basic question for our audience.
Can you...
They hear elemental, inorganic, ethyl, and methyl, and maybe organic.
Are any of these overlapping, or how is this structured, these different forms?
You could first take a structure of organic versus inorganic.
Organic just means that it has some carbon groups attached to it.
And that would be the methyl and ethyl.
So methyl the fish form, ethyl the vaccine form.
They're in a certain behavior group.
They're highly absorbed.
They move very fluidly through the body.
And then you have the inorganic mercury forms.
One of them is elemental mercury.
See, there's a confusion there.
Technically, elemental mercury would be an inorganic mercury form because it doesn't have any organic forms bound to it.
But as chemists, we just put it on its own space, elemental mercury.
And it's the liquid that we're used to seeing, that liquid metal.
It has a vapor form.
It goes up into the sky.
It's what you inhale off of your amalgams.
And then there's this inorganic mercury, what we call inorganic mercury, that's the mercuric ion, Hg2+.
That is the form that the elemental mercury breaks down into.
So you absorb it, it goes through your lungs, it passes through your body as a mercury vapor and then it breaks down into this mercuric ion and that's when it starts being toxic and that's when it starts binding onto enzymes and membranes and that's when it starts interfering with your biochemistry.
You've got the organic forms, methyl and ethyl, then you have, let's put elemental to the side, and then inorganic mercury, the mercuric ion.
Okay, and then I'm going to say something that's obvious to you, but I need to repeat it to our audience, that mercury cannot be created or destroyed in the body or in burning or anything.
A lot of people might think of Chemical compounds, like a bisphenol A. Right, like pesticides, we can break them down.
Exactly.
But, you know, everything, the table of elements, you know, you can't transmute one thing to another.
And if you could, you just make endless gold and be done with it.
We can do that.
Yeah, it would be great.
When I was training on the ICP-MS, you know, my instructor was joking that, That some of his customers swear that the machine is making up elements, you know?
Yeah, 8,000 degree plasma, you know, things can happen.
Yeah, weird things.
So this is important because your specialty is how mercury moves through cells or through the environment.
Mercury, you never get rid of it.
All you do is you move it from one place to another.
Well, you move it out of your body.
You don't destroy it in the body, but you connect it onto things, and glutathione is the main thing you connect it onto, and you move it out of the body.
So detoxification is really where I spend most of my time on.
Researching and developing things, and that's what I like to talk about the most.
I talk about the testing part of it, but the detoxification is probably the biggest thing for me.
Okay, so on that area, two points that I'd like you to address.
One is there are a lot of genetic dispositions either in favor of or opposing good elimination of mercury.
I'd like you to speak to that.
And then secondly, In cities like Austin, Texas, where I live, they take all the human waste, the bio sludge, and then they compost it and sell it as fertilizer for home gardens and commercial agriculture.
So we've got the mercury that you're eliminating going back into the soils, back into the food, back into the people.
Yeah, those are two big elements.
Now, the first one is something that fascinates me, and that's something I'm really focused on right now, and that's the genetic disposition, either in a positive or a negative way, predisposition to accumulate mercury or to excrete mercury.
We put it that way, but it's sort of predisposition towards toxicity or resistance to toxicity.
This is where All the clarity is going to come in the next couple of years.
This is what everybody is hidden behind.
People do epidemiological studies and they'll say, okay, we've got a lot of people exposed to a certain amount of mercury and the mass seems okay.
We don't see any problem with the mercury.
Yet, when you're on the ground, you're dealing with people day to day.
You're seeing these people who are having serious problems You get the metals out of the body and they're much better.
So you know that it's a problem, but people are hiding behind the data on the whole populace being able to deal with it.
So recently there was a study that was tracking a population of children in Portugal and half of them had amalgams and half of them had composite fillings.
They tracked them for seven years, and for the bulk of them, on the average, testing them all neurologically, you didn't see a big issue with the mercury.
There was a couple of things that did come up, like potential nephrotoxicity, but they were like, no, we don't see any problem.
And then they separated them into genetic subsets and they took one subset that they predicted would be more susceptible to the mercury and they looked at their neurological tests across their mercury exposure and there was a stunning, stunning susceptibility.
There was a very strong signal of neurological damage from the mercury in these kids where they're saying there was two to three year developmental delays.
I don't remember the specific number, but in general, up to 10-15% of the population is going to be susceptible.
Maybe up to 5% is very susceptible.
These are not insignificant numbers.
These are large amounts of people.
As we start reanalyzing I think it's going to become very clear that there is a really significant set of the population that has been damaged or severely impaired by
the population.
That's going to be really exciting and in fact the people who made the panel to look at the data in Portugal are going to sell that commercially for about $99.
With the testing that we do, so we can look at your levels really clearly, and we can match it to genetic susceptibilities, because I look at these levels, and you're either forced to take a zero-tolerance policy, and so you can have any mercury, but everybody's got some.
Or you can throw your hands up and say, well, we don't know, so we're going to ignore it.
Now we can say, look, you've got a high susceptibility, a moderate, or a low susceptibility.
If you're low, you can go up to this level without worrying about it.
If you're moderate, you should stay below here, and if you have high susceptibility, we want you as low as possible.
This is where we're going to get a lot of clarity in the next couple of years.
Now, along those lines, a follow-up question, the FDA just recently basically shut down that genetic testing company, 23andMe.
Oh, what a crime, man!
Yeah.
Yeah, because it seems like that could have given consumers a lot of clarity about the very things you're talking about.
Oh, completely!
I got my data set from there.
I've been mining all kinds of genes out of there.
It's got all the potential susceptibility genes.
In the background, they don't even have it up front.
It's not part of the 23andMe stuff.
You've got to know what you're looking for and get into the raw data set.
There's a website online called geneticgenie.org.
You could take your output from 23Me and you could get all your methylation genes, which is for B vitamin cycling.
There's a couple that Amy Asko uses to look at different problems, neurological problems of B vitamin cycling.
They will also give you the whole panel that Genova does on genetic susceptibility to certain kinds of detoxification problems.
So you could get that for free as an output from all the raw data you got from 23andMe.
So I don't know why they're shutting them down.
I mean, that's just, that's terrible.
Because there was so much information you got from that.
Yeah, it's a real mystery.
But, you know, the journalist in me has to think, well, this is about protecting a monopoly.
You know, this isn't about serving the public health.
I can't see how it's serving anybody.
I mean, their site is very clear that all these things are just odds ratios, and they're just taking journal articles and saying, well, you know, looking at all these articles, you might have this or that increased risk.
I mean, they were very, very good about it.
I just saw that today that they were getting heat from the FDA.
I think it's terrible.
In fact, we need to cover that story.
I haven't had time.
Yeah, you do.
I mean, it's just breaking now, so...
Yeah, right, right.
Anyway, the second question about using the human biosludge as a crop fertilizer.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of crazy.
I mean, I can see using it, but more kind of a wildland.
I don't know if I'd want that being recycled directly into the food supply.
You're getting all those metals out of there.
You know, the cadmium and lead as well.
You're just going to start kind of accumulating metals in there.
I like the ecological idea of recycling the waste, but that's a troublesome one.
Yeah, right.
Well, it seems like if you look at the rise of a civilization, when you have the industrial age, that's when you really start getting metals out of the ground and refining and concentrating them and putting them into the environment.
Very well said.
And then, what do you do then?
It's like we are at that stage on our planet where we're post-rise of industry, but we're now in the thick of contamination, and we don't know what to do.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, we're kind of, you know, we're not as acute as we used to be.
You see, China and India are in acute exposures right now.
I mean, they're just so highly poisoned.
But we're dealing with all that residue, and we're kind of into that, the next generation, which is the plastics generation.
And so we have this residual metal going on and now we're into acute plastic exposure and acute, especially as we get into all this genetic variants that allow people to just dump tons of pesticides.
We're just, I mean, we're really strongly into the organic toxins right now.
But you've got to think very carefully when you do these things that look good ecologically, like recycling waste.
There's got to be a lot of metals analysis on that stuff.
Well, exactly, and I'm pretty sure here in Austin they're not analyzing anything on that.
Sludge is always, I mean, you just start Googling that or look through the literature, sludge is always super high in metals.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to get my hands on some of that stuff, actually, and run it here.
Yeah, you got it.
You got it.
I'm thrilled to hear you got a lab down there.
I got some stuff for you.
Oh, good.
Well, we're not doing speciation or anything, but I think we are going to add...
Yeah, but just general metals, there's a lot that could be done with that.
Yeah, yeah, we're finding interesting things.
That's what, you know, we've always done this specific metals panel, but now we're starting to do just a blood metals panel.
We did specific mercury work.
You know, most advanced mercury testing you can get bar none.
But now, a lot of people, you know, they've got copper-zinc imbalances.
People with really high copper and low zinc are going to have a lot of neurological problems.
Depression, anxiety, psychosis.
And so you've got to see those things as well.
And what if it was cadmium and lead?
And so we just do a basic metal scan for those in the blood.
You know, it's funny you mention the copper-zinc ratio.
You're right on, and I think that...
I'm actually finding a lot of supplements that are ridiculously high in copper.
Really?
One of them that I just tested, I won't name it, but it tested, I think, 55 parts per million copper.
Jeez.
And was it using copper as a...
Was that just accidental copper in there?
No, that was intentional.
It was a copper sulfate ingredient that was formulated in.
And you've got to think, well, not very many people are deficient in copper.
Yeah, I mean, a few are, but that's something where you've got to be careful how much you give.
I guess the RDA is two milligrams of copper.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, if you're staying down around there, then it's fine.
But I've been seeing a lot of, since we started doing the Total Metals panel, I got a lot of people high copper and low zinc, and it's that ratio between the two that determines where the issues are going to be.
I'm not surprised to hear that.
That's right in line with what I'm seeing in the supplements, you know.
And that's a big thing in the autism world now, you know, they turn from, you know, they used to have too much of a mercury focus.
Yeah.
And now they're looking at, you know, what is the child dealing with now and what are the levels now?
And you see a lot of these very high copper accumulators.
And, you know, I have a friend who runs a naturopathic mental health clinic up in Toronto, deals with a lot of schizophrenia and they all have very high copper levels.
I mean, that's a really big risk factor for a lot of neurological problems.
Not surprised to hear that.
Is there a chance that your company may ever offer a kit directly to the public?
Yeah, that's what we're working on doing now.
In fact, you know, to be truthful, in some states they're called direct access states.
You know, a patient can call us up directly and we're allowed to sell them testing directly.
But we're working, like there's places like Favon Labs and Direct Labs where they've got authorization networks for all 50 states.
And so we're trying to work into that.
And you know how the vitamin D testing is on blood spot cards now?
We're developing that now so we can have a quick screen.
We might just do blood or blood and urine where you're going to do it on these cards and send it in.
You can do it at home.
You don't need the phlebotomy, the blood draw, and we'll be able to offer that out directly to the public.
If it comes up high, you've got problems, you can go in a little farther and get the more specific testing, but it'll be such a great advance in what's available to the public.
You know, I can't tell you how many people call me up and they're like, I'm in rural Georgia.
I got all the markers of having a mercury problem.
I got nobody here to help.
And it's not just like out in the sticks.
You know, we only have so many doctors that use our stuff, you know, a couple of hundred and there's so many people out there and they just can't get access to it and they go to their doctor and there's resistance or they go to some old chelation doctor and all he knows is chelation challenges and, you know, sick people, that just makes them worse.
So the public really needs access to good testing.
There's a lot of You know, focus on the chelators, but what about sort of natural botanical chelators?
Are there things that people could eat that would...
Oh yeah, I mean that's...
You know, you've seen me talk about the testing, and you saw the ACAM thing, so I wasn't able to talk about any of the product system that we developed.
But we developed the whole product system for maximizing the glutathione system and its transport of mercury out of the body.
And that's not just mercury, because cadmium and arsenic travel on that same conveyor belt out of the body.
And there's three parts you need for really effective detoxification.
One, you need high levels of glutathione, intracellular glutathione.
Two, you need an enzyme called glutathione S-transferase.
That's what's going to link the metal, pull it off of the cellular proteins and link it onto the glutathione.
Then you've got a glutathione metal conjugate, and then you need the transport proteins that take that out of the body.
They'll take it out of the cell into the blood.
From the blood, it'll go into the liver and then out in the bile tract and into the GI tract.
You've got transporters taking it from the blood right to the GI tract, and you've got them in the kidneys as well.
So you need all three of those.
And so we designed a three-part system.
Part of it is using advanced delivery techniques like liposomal delivery.
We have a liposomal delivery, a sublingual delivery of glutathione, of vitamin C with lipoic acid.
Then we've got a mixture of botanical polyphenolic antioxidants and lipoic acid.
And then we have a specific product that goes to the GI tract that's for binding, specific binding of metals in the GI tract.
We pull them onto either silica particles or carbon particles in the GI tract that you don't absorb, and that pulls all the metal out of the GI tract, which allows the whole transport system to speed up.
That's funny, because I was just researching horsetail shaved grass herb for aluminum binding.
For aluminum binding, yeah.
See, there's always going to be a component of something that needs to go through the GI tract and bind stuff up and take it out.
And, you know, we used to eat a lot of more soil particles than we do now.
We're hyper-clean about everything.
And the soil...
So, in the silica product we have and in the carbon product, there are what are called sulfhydrogroups.
It's the kind of sulfur that's on glutathione, but it's also on the chelators like DMSA or DMPF. And it's stuck onto these little particles...
And that's what mops up all the metals.
And on the natural soil particles, all the metals are bound onto the thiol sites, these sulfur sites, on natural organic matter that's sorbed onto the soil particles.
So eating soil actually has a metal-binding effect in the GI tract.
That's fascinating.
I never saw these supplements on your website.
I know.
I'll send you information on them.
When we went into business, it was right when the FDA was clearing out a bunch of companies that were selling EDTA. These companies obviously had stuff on their websites like Cure Heart Disease, stuff like that.
Exactly what you're not supposed to do.
They kind of had it coming to them.
But the FDA was very aggressive then, and so I put all of my literature about the supplement line behind a login page because it was all really for doctor use.
But now we're going to make a new website and have this stuff much more out front.
But we've got the most advanced liposomal deliveries.
That's something I've been totally obsessing on in the last couple of years.
I've built out a whole GMP lab for making that here because nobody's making...
The level of supplement that I wanted where you're making the particles small enough, the liposome small enough that they'll absorb right through the oral cavity and avoid all the hazards and digestion.
That's what you want for a really good particle.
Can I ask you about the epigenetic harm of these metals?
Yeah, I mean that's something that's just opening up.
How we're modifying expression of genes from a number of things, from the metals, from the different plastics and pesticides that are coming in, and I think that's where we're really going to see the biggest bang for the buck in terms of informing us where things went wrong, because even if your genes are Like we do 23andMe and you have a gene for something, it doesn't mean you can express it.
It may have been genetically modified.
So in the animal studies, I get a lot of my data from environmental studies because the government and industry doesn't fund people to do much in the way of human studies on mercury and other metal toxicity, but they do fund people to do environmental studies.
Yeah, and so you'll see that like when they were doing some fish studies, when the eggs were exposed to high levels of mercury, then the fish that came out of those eggs had deficits in the glutathione system in the brain for the rest of their life.
So they had epigenetically modified the expression of the glutathione system in the brain.
So it wasn't necessarily that they came out with mental deficits, but they were more susceptible to the other toxins that are going to come in and affect them for the rest of their life.
So they had a modified, diminished detox system.
And so if mercury is doing this to us, you look, and if it's doing it transgenerationally, and that's the other study that was amazing, it was on frogs, and they exposed two populations of frogs, Well, they took two populations of frogs.
One they exposed to mercury, the other one they didn't.
And they let them have the tadpoles and the frog babies and stuff.
And they didn't really see any difference.
And then the second generation, they exposed them both to mercury.
So one had two generations of exposure and one only had one generation.
The one that had two generations of exposure, half...
On the second exposure, half the population died.
So in the second generation, it had really minimal resistance.
Wow.
That's just stunning!
I mean, we're in the third generation of having amalgams in three-quarters of the population.
Is that why we're expressing so much...
I mean, we're like wusses now.
Yeah, we're exposed to a lot, but people, in my mind, are too sick for what they're exposed to.
Yeah.
Is it the soup or is it the epigenetic weakness?
Then it also brings up the question of how long will this take to reverse?
Let's say we get all the mercury out of the environment right now.
Are we a hundred years out?
Epigenetics is one to three generations.
Yeah, right.
And how do you reverse that?
How do we reverse it faster?
And the mercury is not gone from the environment yet.
No.
I mean, at least if we're not consuming it and having it in our mouths, like I said, by a lion's shear, it's the amalgams and the fish are just outpacing everything in terms of our exposure.
If we get rid of those, we'll be able to deal with a lot of this other stuff a lot better.
Exactly.
The only strong stuff out there is, was it Prop 63 in California?
Prop 65, yeah.
Prop 65 in California, where you've got to stay below a daily limit.
That's the only thing out there.
And you'll see, I mean, this is an issue.
I mean, you'll see a lot of these ingredients come into you, and the heavy metal testing, their specs are less than...
10 ppm.
Right.
10 ppm!
Right, right.
That's a lot!
I know.
That's a lot!
So, I mean, this is somewhere where, you know, there's room for a leadership role in suggesting what these limits really should be.
You know, and it shouldn't be 10 ppm.
No.
No, I mean, if you have 10 ppm of mercury, you know, you're in trouble.
But a huge amount!
I mean, that's just ridiculous.
Yeah.
Well, there was a skin whitening cream that...
It had, I think, 50,000 PP. Oh, well, skin whitening creams serve mercury, ammonia and mercury compounds, and that's, you know, the highest inorganic mercury in the blood I found was in a woman who was using this.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Okay, well, Chris, thank you for your time, and I look forward to talking to you more via the email or phone.
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