Mike Adams presents Discovery #4, arguing zinc deficiency drives multiple chemical sensitivities based on Dr. Sherry A. Rogers' 1991 research showing 54% of patients had low serum zinc levels. He explains how modern agriculture depletes soil minerals, impairing liver detoxification enzymes like glutathione conjugation and citing a study where 25.9% of adults self-reported MCS symptoms. Adams links this to processed foods, electromagnetic sensitivity, and recommends specific mineral testing alongside bioavailable sources like pumpernickel bread, warning against overconsumption while suggesting supplementation to restore the body's ability to neutralize environmental toxins. [Automatically generated summary]
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Zinc Deficiency and Detox00:03:49
Welcome to discovery number four.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and this is one of hopefully hundreds of discoveries I'll be bringing to you.
These are discoveries that have been found by my AI research agents looking through science papers, documents, and books that we have indexed that are part of our in house index of over 100 million documents that are cataloged and used by brightlearn.ai as well as brightanswers.ai.
And this discovery. is based on the work of Dr. Sherry A. Rogers, who wrote a book in 1991 called The Cure is in the Kitchen, as well as supporting peer-reviewed literature on detoxification biochemistry.
And the discovery is fascinating because it finds that chemical sensitivities are caused by deficiency in zinc and magnesium in particular, especially zinc.
We'll get to that.
In this study that was authored by Dr. Sherry Rogers, 250 consecutive patients that showed up to visit Dr. at a private environmental medicine practice, 54% of them had abnormally low serum zinc levels.
And that this low zinc level is a primary driver of illness because zinc and magnesium are essential cofactors in liver enzyme systems, such as glutathione.
Conjugation or methylation, or cytochrome p450, that are used by the body, and the liver in particular, to neutralize toxic chemicals.
So, in other words, if you have good nutrition and you have plenty of zinc and plenty of magnesium, then your body can naturally detoxify a lot of chemical exposure.
If you lack zinc and magnesium and possibly other trace minerals we'll get to that then these chemicals circulate in your body much longer and they then impart much more aggregate toxicity, causing the symptoms that are diagnosed as chemical sensitivity or multiple chemical sensitivity.
And so, of course, a lot of takeaways from this.
Most people, especially in first world countries like America, are chronically zinc deficient.
This is because, of course, in the food supply, modern agricultural practices do not put zinc back into the crops, period.
They put N, P, and K. That's it.
Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
That's what goes in the crops.
No zinc.
Right?
So you're not going to get extra zinc or copper or selenium or other trace minerals from today's crops.
The only way to get actual zinc is to either supplement it, have a trace mineral supplement, or superfoods that are grown in more nutritious soils.
And even then, you have to measure the zinc levels, which can only really be done accurately with mass spectrometry.
Like in my lab, we have mass spec instruments, ICPMS.
That could actually count the zinc atoms in a sample of food.
And we actually test for zinc as well as other things.
So we see a lot of zinc deficiency in the food crops right now.
And since the food is lacking the trace minerals that drive the liver's detoxification capabilities, because most Americans or Westerners are chronically living on processed foods, they are just flat out, you know, not getting the nutrition they need to detox.
Chemical Sensitivity Causes00:07:46
And since we all live in a contaminated environment, you know, our world is contaminated.
There's no way to not be exposed to a lot of these chemicals.
Just riding in an Uber vehicle, you know, somebody's private car, or just going out to eat, just sitting in a booth at a restaurant, or taking a ride on the airplane, or walking around a city, or whatever.
These things can expose you to toxic chemicals.
And then that doesn't mention, you know, the fragrance chemicals in the laundry detergent, and the solvents in the fabric softeners, and all the personal care products that are so toxic to people, the shampoos, and deodorants, and perfumes, and colognes, and skin lotions, and all that garbage, and sunscreen, which is wildly toxic.
Many cases due to the fragrance chemicals.
So, this makes sense, and the fact that zinc deficiency in particular is the underlying cause of multiple chemical sensitivity makes a lot of sense, and it turns out it's actually well supported by mainstream nutritional biochemistry literature.
Now, you may know that I happen to be incredibly sensitive to fragrance chemicals, and it's not that it doesn't cause.
any major symptom with me.
It doesn't cause my skin to break out or anything like that.
I just can't stand it because I'm very, very sensitive to smells and tastes and so on, cleaning products, etc.
But many people have all kinds of problems that are triggered by exposure to these chemicals.
They can have heart palpitations.
They can have respiratory complaints.
They can have fatigue.
Headaches are very common.
Any kind of irritation of nasal pathways, etc.
And other problems.
This can be caused in many people by exposure to solvents or to pesticides, herbicides, various cleaning products, sometimes solvents in a garage setting, like an oil or like a WD-40 type of spray can of some kind of solvent, or even sometimes combustion byproducts, things like that.
So there's a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine a few years back, and it showed that 12.8% of the people who are in the garage setting are in the garage setting.
Of U.S. adults had been medically diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivity or MCS, and that 25.9% of Americans reported themselves as having multiple chemical sensitivity.
The numbers were lower in Australia, but even in Australia, almost 19% of the population self reported chemical sensitivity.
And I guess I would consider myself also to be chemically sensitive to.
Fragrance products, as you know, even though I have plenty of zinc in my diet, I actually supplement zinc.
And of course, you know, I'm the health ranger and I consume a lot of superfoods that are grown in, you know, mineral rich soils and things like that.
So I don't have a zinc deficiency, but I still can't stand to be around a lot of those toxic chemicals.
So, how does this work?
Well, if you look at the peer reviewed literature on this, it shows that because of impaired detoxification capacity, that is, The liver isn't doing its job due to a lack of zinc.
Oh, and by the way, don't forget that zinc deficiency also makes you more vulnerable to other kinds of illnesses as well.
We learned this during the COVID years, and there are all kinds of things that zinc helps your body with.
For example, zinc prevents low birth weight babies from being born.
If the mother has plenty of zinc, then that prevents that.
Zinc is involved in skin healing and skin repair, repair from injury, etc.
So it's immune function, but it's also, it supports liver function and detoxification.
So how does this work?
Well, if you want to get into the mechanistic means of this or the explanations of all this, there are what are called genetic polymorphisms, variances in genetics, in the way people's bodies process antioxidant enzymes and especially detoxification enzymes.
And without zinc, then, depending on your genetics, you can be really, really compromised in that area.
There was a 2007 study at the University of Toronto.
That found that copper, chromium, magnesium, molybdenum, sulfur, and zinc were all lower in multiple chemical sensitivity cases compared to the controls in that study.
So that's interesting because it covers some of the other trace minerals such as copper and chromium.
It's very clear that zinc is the key here, and magnesium is probably the second most important mineral, although magnesium is more of a macro mineral for detoxification.
They impact the functioning of what's called the cytochrome P450 oxidation.
So, this is a family of enzymes that oxidizes or denatures or reduces, or you could say destroys, various fat soluble toxins.
So, these could include, I think these could include also dioxins as well, because your liver will eventually process dioxins away, although those are incredibly toxic as well.
But, phase one of liver detoxification.
Isn't the entire function?
It just breaks down, well, it puts these molecules into a more reactive state where they can be broken down by the second step of this process, which is phase two, known as conjugation phase.
This just gets into biochemistry.
We're not going to jump into all this.
The bottom line is that zinc and magnesium are key, and then there are cofactors that include B vitamins.
B vitamins are absolutely critical here B2, B3, B6, and B12.
And then there are some.
Flavonoids, there's folate, there's vitamin C, etc.
Well, I don't know about you, but I take these minerals and these nutrients every day, and I also get them in superfoods, so I make sure I'm never vitamin B deficient or zinc deficient.
I'm a big believer in B vitamins and also vitamin E for protecting cell membranes, etc., but also in trace minerals like selenium.
And it turns out that selenium is required for glutathione peroxidase, which is this enzyme that breaks down.
Toxic byproducts of the phase one process here.
So, you need all of these really, you know, you need them synergistically, you need them in the right ratios.
And it used to be that you could get all these from food.
Obviously, that is no longer the case.
So, another interesting thing about all of this is that zinc also supports the final phase of transport and excretion of toxic chemicals.
So, after they have been rendered harmless, They've been broken down, let's say, or reduced and processed, then they have to be eliminated from your body, and zinc is also very important in that process as well.
So, zinc also supports glutathione synthesis, and magnesium is required and part of the cycle of glutathione.
Selenium is necessary, as I said before, for the glutathione peroxidase enzyme.
So, all of this makes sense, but if you're missing one of these, then you're in trouble.
Ancient Diets vs Modern Farms00:06:19
So, you know.
Your diet needs to cover these bases.
Trace minerals are critical.
There are trace mineral supplements, or you can eat more seaweeds, or you can eat food grown in trace mineral rich soil, which is increasingly rare these days.
Interestingly, when there are tidal waves that deposit seawater, like in the Indian Ocean a few years back, then that seawater carries a lot of trace minerals with it.
The trace minerals go into the soils, or if there's a flood of a river, like in ancient Egypt, Or, you know, just throughout history, the river Nile or the Euphrates River.
Whenever it was flooded, then the crops grew much better the next year because then there were fresh minerals deposited back on the soils.
And then the people were healthier.
And so flooding was actually a very important part of the cycle of human health throughout the history of human civilization, including in the Middle East, including in Africa, including in ancient Rome, ancient India, etc.
Flooding is a natural part of.
Nutrition, actually, for these very reasons.
But then, of course, now we build dams and we stop the flooding because we say flooding is destructive because we build homes in the path of the floods.
And so we end up with food that's nutritionally depleted.
And then people have chemical sensitivities as a result.
You see what I mean?
Because our population is living on processed white flour, completely devoid of any real nutrition, or processed corn, processed white rice, whatever.
They have no real nutrition.
And so They are not healthy.
And then they end up on prescription pharmaceuticals when the real prescription should just be eating real food.
And it would solve so many things.
And that's what Dr. Rogers was really trying to point out in this Sherry Rogers quote, the cure is in the kitchen.
That was the title of her book in 1991.
1991.
She knew this decades ago.
In fact, other people knew this decades earlier as well.
But this has been completely ignored by the FDA, by the CDC, by the government, by so called dieticians.
It's been ignored by doctors in the medical industrial complex, etc.
Because that whole system makes money off of people's ongoing sickness and disease.
The system doesn't make money from people being healthy and having good nutrition.
And you may recall from one of my earlier discoveries that I covered here that one of the best ways to get zinc into your body, even if you're a vegetarian, Is through pumpernickel bread.
Yes, pumpernickel comes back around because that bread has a much lower level of the typical plant phytates that are found in wheat and other crops that would reduce zinc bioavailability.
But in the rye, the rye based pumpernickel bread, because of the specific strains of bacteria there, such as the lactic acid producing bacteria, etc., you end up with much lower levels of phytates and As a result, then the zinc is more bioavailable.
So, people in that was in ancient northern Germany, sort of pre-Dramatic people near the Westphalia area.
When they ate pumpernickel bread, which admittedly has a pretty wild taste to it, not my favorite taste, but it's got an amazing history, but they were able to get zinc from rye, which grew on poor soils in harsh climates, much colder climates, that would wipe out wheat crops.
And so as a result, those individuals became more successful as people.
They had better immune function.
They had more success with childbirth.
They had healthier kids, etc.
And those people became, for the most part, modern day German people.
That's part of their history.
When they couldn't get zinc from meat, which is another common source, or from shellfish, then it's kind of hard to get sufficient zinc from plants if you're getting it out of modern farms that have been zinc depleted.
So keep that in mind.
Zinc is something you probably want to look into supplementing.
Selenium, also.
You have to grow food in selenium rich soils in order to get selenium, and it has many other benefits related to things like cancer and blood sugar regulation, things like that.
Sulfur compounds are critical.
This is why a lot of people take MSM as a supplement, or you can do what I do, which is each day in my smoothie, I put sprouts of cruciferous vegetables because we sell that at our store, by the way, healthrangerstore.com.
If you want to get broccoli sprouts, It's a powder of cruciferous vegetables.
It's a sprout powder, very dense with sulforaphane, which of course has sulfur in it.
You can just chuck that into a smoothie and blend it up and drink it.
I do that every day.
You can also get sulfur compounds in garlic, in some seaweeds, and as a dietary supplement, like I said, like MSM.
There's also some people take DMSO, which has sulfur in it as well.
It's kind of interesting.
I'm not recommending that you do that.
You would need to research that yourself, but I'm just saying that's another.
That's another source of potential dietary sulfur, but I would strongly recommend you get sulfur from food first, and that's cruciferous vegetables or garlic or things like that.
So, magnesium is pretty easy to get from plants because it's a macro mineral in plant chemistry.
So, you can get magnesium from any kind of leafy greens, you can get it from beans, you can get it from seeds, things like that.
It's not challenging to get magnesium if you have really any kind of a Plants in your diet.
The hard part is getting the zinc or the selenium or sometimes the sulfur or the copper, things like that.
That's where you might need to supplement.
Essential Mineral Supplementation00:10:01
So, this zinc deficiency observation also may explain so called sick building syndrome, where people live indoors a lot and the building is off gassing a lot of toxic chemicals.
Often, this is from newer construction where there's, let's say, there's glues from.
Even from the carpet or the walls or the furniture.
That's a real common thing.
All kinds of particle board furniture.
It's off gassing formaldehyde and dyes and varnishes and all kinds of things that come out of a new home.
Anyway, that's called sick building syndrome.
You will be a lot more resilient to that if you have proper trace minerals zinc and selenium, sulfur, copper, all these things that we just talked about.
So indoor air is a big issue today.
But you can be more resistant to it with good nutrition.
Chronic fatigue syndrome is very common in a lot of people.
CFS.
There are multiple causes of so called CFS.
Mineral deficiencies aren't the only cause, but they can be one cause that can be relatively easily remedied with supplemental nutrition.
So keep that in mind.
Chemical sensitivity.
And I'm wondering also about electropollution and electromagnetic sensitivity.
Now, that's not the focus of Dr. Rogers' work.
And I don't know for sure that zinc or trace minerals would make you more resilient against electromagnetic pollution, but it's a theory that I think should be explored more and studied more.
And certainly it might be a benefit of having good nutrition that not only makes you more resilient against chemical exposure, but also potentially against electromagnetic exposure.
That's something to keep in mind.
I do want to mention as a side note one of the most important things you can do is get a Tan, that is, have darker skin, because we know that melanin in the skin blocks over 99.99% of 5G signals.
And so, darker skinned people have a natural kind of electropollution protection mechanism.
I've talked about that study before.
And if you are pale white, then those signals, whether it's 4G or 5G or other sources of electromagnetic signals, they will penetrate deep into your body and they can cause havoc as well.
So, actually, having some natural, common sense exposure to sunlight, having some pigmentation on your skin that's normal and natural, can actually protect you against electromagnetic pollution.
But that's a completely separate topic.
Also, a zinc deficiency causes people to heal slowly.
Skin wounds won't heal up quickly.
And also, there can be strange things happening with your fingernails, like malformed fingernails or weird patterns on fingernails or toenails.
So, if you suffer from any of those things, Look into your zinc supplies or your zinc levels, and you might find that you are low in zinc.
So, one of the things that you can do if you're working with a naturopath is you can get a baseline, you know, you can get your blood drawn, and you can have it have a report generated on your levels of zinc and plasma, magnesium, and things like that.
You also should look at the foods that you're eating, and if you're not eating enough cruciferous vegetables, especially sprouts, then you might want to start sprouting.
Broccoli and eating those broccoli sprouts.
Maybe you need to have more onions or garlic.
Onions also contain quercetin, which is very important when combined with zinc because that creates, of course, ionophores that are responsible for cellular protection against toxins or even, let's say, spike protein, things like that, right?
So onions are really important.
If you're not getting enough vegetables in your diet, you may be deficient on many of these things.
Magnesium.
Is easy to supplement if you're not getting enough.
But the macrobiotic diet, which is what Dr. Rogers was promoting, naturally provides lots of beans and legumes and seeds and leafy vegetables and things like that.
So the macrobiotic diet is a diet that typically provides sufficient trace minerals.
However, because of our poor soils these days, eating a macrobiotic diet alone is not enough to guarantee that you'll have sufficient levels of all of those minerals.
It's important to also consider supplementation.
Now, some of the sources I use to research this include studies from the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
I have studies from Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews from 2023.
I've got the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health from 2021.
I've got the American Journal of Public Health from 2004, and so on.
Lots, lots of different studies here.
I'm not going to go into all of them, but I've brought up a couple of dozen studies here that support.
What I've said in this report.
Bottom line, number one, improve your food sources to get more sulfur, which is found in cruciferous vegetables and garlic and onions, etc.
Secondly, zinc is often missing from your diet, and that's something that you can easily supplement.
You can get trace mineral drops, you can get trace mineral supplementation.
I think we even have a variety of these solutions at our online store, healthrangerstore.com, if you think you are deficient in it.
Any of these trace minerals.
I also encourage you to work with a naturopathic physician to get a baseline panel run, find out if you're deficient or not.
I don't do that myself, but I recommend that you at least consider it.
I don't do it because I just live a lifestyle of having plenty of nutrition all the time.
So I don't bother with the tests.
I really don't.
I don't, frankly, I don't even personally, I don't go see doctors at all.
But that's just me.
Because I have a very unusual diet and lifestyle and lots of healthy natural things that's pretty uncommon, and I avoid most of the toxins that most people consume.
So that's not real common.
For most people, I recommend working with a naturopathic physician and considering trace mineral supplementation.
But remember, zinc also is something that you could overdo and you don't need very much.
So you do want to do some research, you can use our online research engine, brightanswers.ai.
You can conduct research on how much zinc that you need, how much you should be getting.
And if you ever feel like zinc tastes really bad or really heavily metallic, then that's an indication that you have too much zinc.
Most people don't have too much zinc, but you also don't want to overdo zinc.
Just like you don't want to overdo iodine.
And iodine deficiency is common as well.
But iodine is a relatively heavy metal also.
A heavy element.
So you don't want to overdo iodine, you don't want to overdo zinc, you don't want to overdo copper.
You know these are all minerals that have a range of efficacy.
As long as you stay within that range, you're going to be great.
Most people are deficient in in all those things.
Some people are getting way too much.
So use your common sense and don't take this as professional medical advice, but get some professional assistance.
You know a naturopath.
But improve your diet, improve your nutrition And supplement, probably you need to supplement zinc, even if you're eating organic, just because zinc is just not that common.
You know, it's missing in the soils.
So that's something to really look into.
All right, so anyway, that's discovery number four.
And you'll find more discoveries on brightvideos.com.
I'll be covering these also at naturalnews.com.
And you'll find an infographic on this as well that also talks about common sources for zinc.
Meats are good sources for zinc, also some shellfish, etc.
But if you don't eat meat, then it can be very challenging to get sufficient zinc into your diet.
That's why a lot of vegans are zinc deficient.
And that's why sometimes they have a lot of skin problems and chapped lips all the time because they don't have zinc to heal their lips.
Yeah, I've noticed that too.
If you've noticed that, that's why it's a zinc deficiency.
So, anyway, keep all that in mind.
Follow me.
I'm healthranger at brightown.social.
I'm also on X. Healthranger is my username there.
Or again, naturalnews.com or brightvideos.com.
And if you want trace mineral sources that are laboratory tested and ultra clean, we do sell those at healthrangerstore.com.
Although I'm not making any specific, you know, curative claims or anything of that kind for the products that we sell.
But we have trace mineral drops and electrolyte drops and things like that.
You can check that out at our online store, healthrangerstore.com.
All right.
Thank you for listening.
And, hey, look forward to bringing you more discoveries.
In the weeks ahead.
Take care.
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