Are high mercury levels affecting your health?

Do you eat a lot of fish?

Do you have mercury fillings in your mouth? If you’ve had cavities, open up your mouth and see if the fillings are silver.

Those fillings are laden with mercury, and many of us are affected by mercury overload or mercury toxicity. When it’s really severe, it’s mercury poisoning.

What are the primary sources of mercury?

Mercury sources are primarily fish, and also the fillings in your teeth. There’s a source most people don’t know about and that’s high fructose corn syrup. While most of us know that high fructose corn syrup is very unhealthy, few know it contains mercury residues.

Tony Robbins got mercury toxicity

Tony Robbins was in the news talking about his mercury toxicity. He had been plant-based for many years and then decided to add fish to his diet. He’s a big guy, he eats a lot, and he was consuming a lot of tuna and swordfish.

He was noticing fatigue and memory issues. His wife got quite concerned because he not acting normally. He was irritable and forgetful.

Sure enough, he had mercury toxicity from the excess of fish that he had been consuming.

There are different types of mercury

There are different types of mercury. Organic mercury, or methyl mercury, is found in fish. Inorganic mercury is found in environmental toxins and also amalgam fillings in your teeth. It’s the inorganic mercury that’s considered most dangerous, but you can certainly get an overabundance of the organic mercury in fish and get into serious health trouble.

The CEO of IMAX was similarly mercury poisoned. Unfortunately, he didn’t catch it in time. He walks with a cane, due to the permanent nerve damage caused by methyl mercury.

Tony sought out Dr. Christopher Shade who runs Quicksilver Scientific who helped him reduce his mercury levels very quickly. Fortunately, this prevented any permanent damage, which was amazing.

Mercury can accumulate over time and it’s neurotoxic

Many people are suffering from mercury toxicity and don’t know it. It can bioaccumulate, meaning accumulate over your lifetime.

If you’ve had mercury fillings, even if they’d been removed, if it wasn’t done correctly, that can be a source of toxicity.

Symptoms of mercury toxicity

Symptoms include:

• fatigue
• headaches
• memory issues
• moodiness
• joint pain

Note: If you start to have pins and needles, that can be the early stages of neurologic damage.

It’s very critical to not just change your diet, but measure your levels if you have the wherewithal to do so.

Stopping fish consumption isn’t enough, unfortunately, although it is an important step. Mercury is something that lodges deep in your tissues.

Remember the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland?

Have you heard the expression, “The Mad Hatter”? Alice in Wonderland had a major character who was a crazy hatter. But it’s not fiction; people who made hats used mercury as part of the process of hat making. Hatters regularly went mad due to mercury toxicity.

While we’re not making hats, the truth of the matter is we’re living in a highly toxic environment.

Safe and unsafe fish

When it comes to fish, they’re not all to blame. As I mentioned, Tony Robbins was eating a lot of tuna and swordfish. Shark is on that list, as well as sea bass.

You specifics on the fish that are high in mercury take a look at this blog, Cautions, and Recommendations when Eating Fish.

It’s the bigger fish that accumulate mercury from our toxic oceans.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can enjoy sardines and herring, mackerel, and anchovies, which are tiny little fish.

The joke is you could eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of your life and never become mercury toxic. They have such an infinitesimally small amount that it would never cause you a problem.

The big fish, on the other hand, has 1000 times the mercury that you should be getting in your diet.

If you enjoy salmon there’s definitely some that can be enjoyed. and different types of salmon have different levels of mercury, so you can definitely look that up as well.

How to determine if you’re toxic

You have to get your mercury levels tested, but it must be done properly. I have no vested interest, but our current favorite test is through Quicksilver Scientific. Their mercury tri-test evaluates hair, blood, and urine.

You should have seven times the amount of mercury in your urine as your blood, which means any source of mercury coming into your body is successfully excreted.

Excretion is key. If you have more mercury in your blood than in your urine, that means you’re holding onto it, which is dangerous.

How do you get rid of it?

Perhaps you’ve maybe heard of chelation as a method to remove mercury. I don’t recommend it. Chelation can be too fast. People can react poorly and have crashed on chelation, which is why we’ve never done it here at the clinic.

We’ve been testing for mercury for a long time and our current go-to program was created by Dr. Shade who dedicated much of his life to the subject. He had a very personal experience with mercury have grown up in a steel town in Pennsylvania where mercury “rained down” on him throughout his childhood. The toxic plant has since been shut down.

His Push/Catch protocol is easy, oral and involves no needles like chelation. And yes, that’s what Tony Robbins did.

Precautions

There are right and wrong ways to detoxify mercury and other toxins.

You don’t want to start pulling toxins out if you can’t flow the toxins successfully through to excretion. Your liver and kidneys have to flow the toxins through, the bile from your gallbladder drains the liver cells of toxins, dumping them into your gut, and you poop it out.

Your kidneys similarly drain toxins through their system of tubules and you then pee it out.

Those are your main drainage systems of the body and they must be flowing and moving toxins out.

Trouble arises if you mobilize toxins when the drainage systems are not flowing. Then things back up in your bloodstream, making your symptoms worse due to an increased toxic load.

Have you ever felt worse on a detox program?

Sometimes people do detox programs and feel really terribly on them. You shouldn’t feel this way. What happened is you didn’t get the drainage flowing first and the result was a backlog of toxins that recirculated. Recirculating toxins over and over through your bloodstream and organs is very damaging.

The body likes to “hold on” to mercury

Unfortunately, the body likes to hold onto mercury.

But it’s not all bad news. If your drainage systems are working really well and your gut microbiome, meaning the good bacteria, are healthy, a little magic happens. Healthy gut microbiome can actually turn the inorganic mercury into the safer, methyl mercury and help you excrete it.

So that’s why we work so hard to restore a healthy microbiome and gut. Unfortunately, it’s not something a lot of Americans have, so we put a strong emphasis on the need to restore gut health.

Your genetics comes in to play also

We also look at your genetics. That’s something we do here at the clinic, nutritional genomics.

Tony Robbins mentioned in an interview “my methylation is not very good”. That’s a genetic defect, a common one, where you don’t detox as well as you could from a genetic standpoint. Natural nutrition can augment that defect, so it’s not something you’re stuck with without any recourse.

Let’s sum it up

It’s all about looking at every possible contributing factor. The drainage systems of your body, gut health, the source of what you’re ingesting, and how well or poorly your body excreting it.

The whole goal is to enhance your body’s ability to rid itself of mercury (and any other toxins) while ensuring you change your lifestyle to reduce your exposure.

We use natural things called binders that consist of natural charcoal and other binders. In a single product, there’s a combination of binders that we use attach onto the toxin and just pulls it out of the body before it can be recirculated.

I hope this was informative. We offer so many services here at the clinic and when I recently heard Tony Robbins talking about his mercury toxicity I realized it’s something I haven’t talked about much.

Let’s make sure mercury isn’t impacting your health

We check for mercury and a variety of heavy metals.

If you think your mercury or arsenic or cadmium levels might be high and you’d like some assistance, please reach out.

We’re more than happy to assist. The program is gentle but effective, so you don’t have to worry about experiencing a “crash” because the toxins are being pulled out too quickly.

Are you ready to get healthy?

I hope this was helpful. If your health is not the way you want it to be or a member of your family’s health is of concern, please reach out. That’s why we’re here.

We specialize in identifying the underlying reason why you have the symptoms which are bothering you.

We have great tools to really get the answers of not only “why” but what can be done about it.

You deserve to enjoy great health; please give me a call if you want some help.