All Episodes
Previous Next
March 27, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
17:33
The SCIENCE of hair analysis and heavy metals
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
One of the amazing things that you can find out about yourself is your exposure to heavy metals by analyzing your hair for heavy metals.
It's called Hair Analysis and it's one of the things we offer at CWC Labs.
You can purchase a kit at the Health Rangers store To send us a little sample of your hair, and we run it for heavy metals.
I think it's 21 elements, and we send you back the results.
Now, what's interesting about hair analysis is that that phrase has been slandered by a lot of people in the I don't know what you call them, the medical skeptics community.
People like Stephen Barrett, who is a discredited quack watch asshat who has always attacked everything from acupuncture to meditation to nutrition over the years.
And he's been, you know, widely discredited at this point.
And he has attacked hair analysis.
As being quackery, which is insane since all you're doing is looking at the composition of hair.
So I have an instrument in my lab.
It's called ICP-MS. It stands for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.
And what this does is it analyzes the elements in a quantitative point of view.
It's very scientific.
Of almost any sample.
Whether it's hair or apples or soil or water.
And we are ISO accredited.
So it's the most scientific thing in the world is to analyze the matter that things are made of.
So you have to be, frankly, a skeptic retard to think that analyzing the composition of something is somehow quackery.
If your hair contains, you know, 100 parts per billion of mercury, then it contains 100 parts per billion of mercury.
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
It's all about the composition.
Now, some doctors have used this heavy metals analysis, I think, to diagnose diseases, which maybe that's one of the areas that has been attacked, but we don't do that.
We tell you what your hair contains.
It's a simple fact.
It's a scientific fact.
It is a fact of matter and the table of elements and the laws of physics.
You send us a sample of your hair, we tell you what's in it in terms of elements.
It's very simple, and it's not debatable, and it's not fringe in any way.
It's not quackery.
It is, in fact, rigorous, rigorous science.
And that's why heavy metals analysis is used by the EPA. In fact, one of the methods that we use is EPA, an EPA method.
I think one of them we use is called EPA 200.8.
If I'm not mistaken.
And that's a heavy metals method for analyzing toxic elements in water.
And if it were quackery, then why is the EPA... Why do they have this method?
Why is this method used by every water science lab in the world?
It can't be quackery if it is used by every heavy metals lab on the planet.
This is how you analyze heavy metals.
This is how it's done.
Again, the laws of physics.
The instrument actually counts the number of ionized atoms of every element.
And actually what it's doing is it's counting the mass-to-charge ratio, what's called m divided by z, or m over z, or m by z.
And M over Z for, let's say, a lead ion, the mass of lead in one isotope is 206, and the charge might be plus 1 in positive mode, so that would be 206 divided by 1, which is, of course, 206, right?
Or if it's doubly charged, it could show up as 103, because it's 206 divided by 2, so that's a doubly charged ion.
In any case, the instrument merely follows the laws of physics and it is eerily accurate.
It's so accurate and so sensitive that we can detect mercury down to 20 parts per trillion.
I think that's our quantitation limit on mercury.
It might be our limit of detection.
I'd have to go back and check our quality notes.
There's something called an LOD versus an LOQ. The LOD is limit of detection.
The LOQ is limit of quantitation.
And those are two different numbers.
20 parts per trillion might be our LOD. I'd have to go back and check.
In any case, we don't usually operate in the sub-parts per billion range anyway.
We're not dealing with parts per trillion most of the time.
We're looking at anything over one part per billion, including up to hundreds of parts per million.
As well.
So we have a huge range that we can check for.
We test many different samples at these ranges, including people's hair, including water, including soil samples, leaves, tree bark, practically anything that you want to test, you can test with this system.
So we've had people send in a sample and get the results back and it shows how much mercury and lead and cadmium or arsenic that they're exposed to because it shows up in your hair.
And then they might change their diet.
They might stop eating seafood, for example, or they might get cleaner products or go organic or who knows what.
And then six months later, they'll test their hair again and look at the differences.
And they'll see improvements if they've made changes to their lifestyle.
So that's what's great about this.
Using this rigorous science, you can see exactly how much you've improved by reducing your exposure to toxic elements.
Now, where do these toxic elements come from?
If they're in your hair, where do they come from?
Well, they can really only come from two places.
They either come from your blood supply, because that's how your hair is made, by the way.
You have hair generating follicles, obviously.
That's how you make hair.
You know, you grow hair.
Well, what do you grow it from?
It's not magic.
It's made out of things that are in your blood.
Your blood circulates, brings the hair-building nutrients to the hair-building cells, you know, the building blocks of your hair, and then your hair-building cells assemble them to make hair.
It's done by chemistry.
So if you have mercury in your blood, let's say, you're going to have some mercury end up in your hair.
So that's what we might call an incurred contamination of your hair.
Incurred means it comes from your blood, it grows into your hair.
The other source of contamination for your hair might be external contamination or environmental exposure.
So your hair can pick up things from the environment in which you're working.
Let's say you work in a dental office that doesn't practice holistic dentistry.
A lot of dental offices, they're drilling on mercury fillings.
Well, what's happening when they're drilling on mercury?
They are, of course, vaporizing mercury, which goes into the air.
And if you're a dental assistant, let's say, and you have a lot of hair, a lot of dental assistants are women, not all, but a lot of them are women, and they tend to have more hair than most men, just generally speaking.
So a dental assistant who is a female who has a large head of hair could actually be, believe it or not, creating a mercury trap where their hair could be a mercury vapor collector.
I know it's almost kind of funny sounding.
You don't think about these things usually in these terms, but this is absolutely the case.
Your hair can be a sponge for toxic elements in the air.
And it could be air in your workplace or air in your home.
But Aaron, your home, normally you're not getting high exposure to lead and cadmium and other things unless you are a welder.
Now welders have a lot of heavy metals exposure because if you look at the elements that are used in the welding rods and sometimes the metals that they're welding onto, but especially the rods, the rods are made of a lot of toxic elements.
So you can get heavy metals that way, and you can end up with a head of hair that is saturated with cadmium, which, of course, compromises heart health and skin health and so on.
Now, a lot of law enforcement officers who I know, because I do a lot of training at gun ranges and I do a lot of shooting with law enforcement or former Military, Special Forces guys, when they shoot at an indoor range, they can also have a lot of lead contamination of their hair.
And why is that?
Well, because they're shooting lead bullets that are being rifled through the barrels of either the rifles or the pistols.
They have rifling, which means there's a spiral groove cut into the barrel.
And the lead bullet, as it is accelerated down that barrel, it creates friction with that rifling Which puts a spin on a bullet, which gives it a gyroscopic spin so that it maintains stability during its flight.
Axial stability, technically, is what it would be called.
But also what happens is some amount of lead that's in the bullet becomes vaporized.
Now, this is not true with all bullets.
Some bullets are, let's say, brass-plated or copper-plated and so on.
But bullets that are solid lead Can tend to have a little bit of lead vaporize off the edges of the bullet as it is being rifled down the barrel.
And that lead comes out of the end of the barrel and it goes into the air.
So indoor shooting ranges can have a lot of airborne lead.
And that also will show up in your hair.
You'll also inhale it which of course puts that lead into your blood supply which causes it to show up in your hair via incurred lead.
I bet you didn't know that hair science was actually this technical, did you?
It's fascinating.
But you don't know what you have until you look at your hair.
So if you want to look at your hair, just get the kit.
You can buy it at healthrangerstore.com.
I don't know the exact price.
It's, I think, something over $100.
But you don't need to do it very often.
Maybe once, just to see if your hair is clean.
If it's all clean, then you don't have much to worry about.
But if you have super high mercury or super high lead or super high cadmium, then you know, hey, you've got some source of exposure.
And that's just good environmental science, by the way.
Again, this is all rooted in very rigorous science.
And we have done this now, we've done this testing for thousands of people.
And people have used this information to really reduce their exposure and vastly improve the quality of their lives by, you know, avoiding...
All these toxic elements, which can compromise your heart, compromise your fertility, compromise cognitive function, and so on.
We even test for aluminum.
You'll get an aluminum level for your hair, which is very good to know.
Here's the other secret, though.
You don't have to send us your hair.
You could also send us nail clippings, if you want to see how much mercury is in your nails, for example.
Although hair tends to be the best thing.
But Here's a little trick.
You can send us different types of hair.
Maybe I shouldn't say this because it's a little bit gross, but when people want to know environmental exposure plus incurred exposure, they use the hair on the top of their head.
if they want to get just incurred exposure, they'll use armpit hair or pubic hair.
I know it's an odd thing to talk about, but frankly, pubic hair is usually not out in the open in your workplace.
I hope.
I don't know what kind of workplace you have, but probably it doesn't involve you having your pubic hair out in the workplace.
I've never seen a welder.
Welding nude, for example, that's not something that I've ever seen and probably don't want to see that either.
It's like plumber's butt, but all of it, you know, everything out in the open, plus welding.
That's just, no, no thanks.
That's not the construction worker image that I want to have.
So, pubic hair is usually not exposed to whatever's happening, you know, in the air around you.
And same thing with armpit hair or chest hair if you're a particularly hairy person.
If you have a lot of hair on your back or whatever, frankly, you can use that hair too.
You know, really.
You can.
It's your choice.
We'll test it.
Because all we do is we take your hair and we dump it in nitric acid.
We actually add nitric acid to it to digest it, to break it down into its elements.
So whatever's in your hair, You know, if you have like head lice or something and you send us head lice hair, it doesn't matter because the head lice just goes into the nitric acid bath and we end up testing your hair plus the head lice because it's all turned to liquid anyway.
Hey, sorry, I didn't know this conversation was going to get this weird.
But I'm just, this is all scientific, okay?
I'm trying to tell you the actual truth about hair analysis testing.
So whatever's in your hair is going to get digested and counted toward the elements that we're detecting.
So if you have like, I don't know, hair, if you have a shampoo, let's say, that's contaminated with lead, then your shampoo, you know, if you send us your head hair with shampoo on it, that's going to be part of the test.
But If you send us, let's say, your pubic hair and you don't shampoo your pubic hair, because I don't know your habits, hey, I'm a libertarian, do whatever you want, but if you're not shampooing your pubic hair, then the shampoo is not going to be part of the pubic hair heavy metals test.
You see what I'm saying?
I hope this is making sense.
Now, along those lines, you can also send us hair from your pet, your dog, or your cat, or your pet rabbit, or whatever.
Just, obviously, be careful cutting the hair off, because scissors are sharp.
Don't hurt your family pet, obviously.
But you can snip off, like, a couple of grams of hair.
We don't even need that much, frankly, to do this.
Two grams of hair is usually plenty.
That's not even very much hair.
You send us your dog's hair, we'll test it, too.
In fact, When the hair comes to us, we don't even know, obviously, where it's from.
It could be a dog.
It could be your mother-in-law, your relative.
I don't know.
It could be anything.
It could be hair from a petting zoo.
It could be hair that you collected off your floor because you have a dog with a bad shedding problem or something.
I don't know.
That's all fine.
Send us the hair.
We'll test it.
So, science can be used for a lot of important things related to health, obviously.
And this is one of the big ones.
So if you want to know what your exposure is and you want to reduce your exposure, then this is a fantastic way to do it.
The kits are available at healthrangerstore.com.
Now, don't be surprised, by the way, if you find that your hair is a lot more contaminated than your dog's hair.
I've actually tested the hair of wild rabbits and my pet dogs and I've tested donkey hair and I've tested my own hair.
And my own hair is more contaminated than all the other animals that live in the wild.
Why is that?
Well, I still eat food, you know, from restaurants occasionally.
I still eat seafood.
I still eat Food that's not all 100% organic, even though I strive to be organic all the time, but organic doesn't even guarantee no heavy metals, you see.
So I'm eating the human food supply, where most of these animals are eating wild foods, which are vastly cleaner.
So if I really wanted to eliminate all lead and all mercury and everything, what I would do is I would just eat what the wild animals eat.
Which is a very difficult way to survive, by the way.
Digging up wild onions like the hogs in Texas do.
Rooting up onions out there.
Or eating shoots off of small trees or mesquite leaves or whatever.
That's what my goats like to eat.
A lot of mesquite leaves.
So I'm not sure that that's the ideal diet.
But it would be a very clean diet, by the way.
And the science already shows that to be the case.
In any case, hope you found this interesting and learned something about hair analysis and how it's rooted in good science and can help you avoid exposure to toxic elements.
Thanks for listening.
This is Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger, and the founder and lab director of CWC Labs.
Learn more at HealthRangerReport.com Thank you for watching.
If you want to support our mission, visit us at healthrangersstore.com for the world's largest selection of lab-verified superfood and nutritional products for healthy living.
▲
Export Selection