Nourished Magazine :: Wisdom to thrive by

Heavy metals are natural components of the Earth’s crust. As trace elements, some heavy metals are essential to maintain the metabolism of the human body. However, at higher concentrations they can lead to poisoning. They cannot be degraded or destroyed but tend to bioaccumulate (increase in the concentration over time).

Heavy metal toxicity is linked with many metabolic imbalances in the humans including obesity.

While there are many ways to reduce the damage done by heavy metals and detoxify from heavy metals, we need to also look at how we can avoid further poisoning.

What you Eat

1. Organic Food, especially animal foods. Many heavy metals are used in conventional agriculture and storage.
2. Fish, especially carnivorous fish at the top of the food chain should be eaten sparingly. Visit Got Mercury to find out more. Be wary of algae supplements like spirulina and chlorella: while many believe them to be detoxifiers of heavy metals, they absorb them so well, they can also be source of contamination. Oysters are the best source of easily available nutrient dense foods from the sea. Check your cod liver oil is free of mercury.
3. Eat a high fat diet. Animal fat helps the process of excretion of heavy metals. Metals are stored in the body fat of humans and excreted via the bile. Probably the worst diet for those with heavy metal toxicity is the common low fat, vegetarian style diet with fish and chicken.
4. Glutathione: supplement and include foods such as rare or raw lamb, raw milk, eggs, asparagus and avocado.
5. Check you source of meat, especially dessicated Liver supplements.
6. Supplement high doses of Vitamin C if you have heavy metal toxicity
7. Filter your water and avoid amalgam fillings and pharmaceutical drugs (especially vaccines).
8. Check your salt - while celtic is the best salt, choose the lightest colours available. Sea salt can be a source of heavy metals

In the Home

1. Be aware that the materials you construct your home from may be very harmful to you and the environment. Try to find an environmental consultant to check the materials you use when building a house. What about mud brick?
2. Avoid new furniture - especially cheap imported furniture. Try to buy locally made furniture and leave on the porch for a few days. Recycled wood furniture may have some issues with the way it was treated but is still preferable to imported furniture which must be insecticided and treated upon importation.
3. Avoid new cars - even a few months will ensure you’re not inhaling fumes from the vinyl, plastic and foam upholstery.
4. Use natural fibre clothing only (organic is best) and watch for flame retardant in pyjamas.
5. Avoid insecticides. Try to create your kitchen so that light gets into each cupboard, insects don’t like light. Use peppermint oil to deter ants and natural skin creams and sprays to deter mosquitos and midgees. Don’t fumigate, keep your kitchen clean instead. Clean kitchens mean clean insects but really, storing much of your food in airtight containers and keeping your kitchen open to the elements makes it unattractive for insects to set up home.
6. Avoid eating out - sadly, most restaurants use quite a lot of insecticides. So too do many stores so shopping at farmer’s markets is a much better option to avoid poisons.
7. Ban smoking inside and suggest your friends who smoke find a additive free tobacco such as illegal ‘chop chop’. It would be nice to see if organically grown tobacco causes such health issues.
8. Be very careful with paint. Use extractors when removing old paint and choose a non-toxic new paint.
9. Avoid plastic packaging.
10. Avoid modern toys, especially PVC, cheap imports with paint, any plastic toys. Kids tend to have more fun with the boxes anyway.
11. Be aware that many child care centres and schools use insecticide often.
12. Don’t tinker with computers or old screens and TVs and dispose of batteries, computers and mobile phones correctly and straight away.
13. Don’t have coloured tattoos as their ink is preserved with mercury
14. Use digital thermometers
15. Ask your family to bury you, not cremate you when you die. Cremation releases mercury into the air.
16. Don’t live in a mining town and try to avoid using products from mining too often: avoid aluminum cans, buy house hold goods like pots and pans that will last a lifetime like glass or enameled cast iron.
17. Ditto for conventional Agriculture
18. Be careful of ceramic plates and bowls from foreign countries, they may have pigments that have heavy metals in them.
19. As you’re about to buy something ask: do I need it? where did it come from? where is it going when I’m finished with it?

Some of the major Heavy Metals and how they hurt us.

Antimony:

A metal used in the compound antimony trioxide, a flame retardant. It can also be found in batteries, pigments, and ceramics and glass.

Arsenic:

Wood treated with chromated copper arsenate, also known as CCA or Tanalith to avoid insect or rot damage.

Agriculture insecticides and some animal feeds.

Conductor in circuit boards, LED lights and Laser diodes, Bronzing and Pyrotechny (fireworks), paint and pigments and smelting of metals.

Some dessicated Liver supplements have been suspected of Arsenic contamination due to the high concentration of Arsenic in the ground water in Argentina, where the animals are farmed.

Cadmium:

Derives its toxicological properties from its chemical similarity to zinc. Exposure is associated with renal dysfunction, obstructive lung disease, bone defects (osteomalacia, osteoporosis) in humans and animals.

Avoid:

Cigarettes: The average daily intake for humans is estimated as 0.15µg from air and 1µg from water. Smoking a packet of 20 cigarettes can lead to the inhalation of around 2-4µg of cadmium, but levels may vary widely. (Note Cadmium toxicity in tobacco is from the phosphate fertilizers used)

Mining: Cadmium is produced as an inevitable by-product of zinc (or occasionally lead) refining, since these metals occur naturally within the raw ore.

Batteries: The most significant use of cadmium is in nickel/cadmium batteries, as rechargeable or secondary power sources exhibiting high output, long life, low maintenance and high tolerance to physical and electrical stress.

Plastics: Other uses of cadmium are as pigments, stabilisers for PVC, in alloys and electronic compounds, detergents and petroleum products.

Non-Organic Foods: Cadmium is in phosphate fertiliser

Chromium

Long-term exposure can cause kidney and liver damage, and damage too circulatory and nerve tissue. Chromium often accumulates in aquatic life, adding to the danger of eating fish that may have been exposed to high levels of chromium. Low-level exposure can irritate the skin and cause ulceration.

Used in metal alloys and pigments for paints, cement, paper, rubber, and other materials.

Copper

Essential substance to human life, but in high doses it can cause anemia, liver and kidney damage, and stomach and intestinal irritation.

Drinking Water: from copper pipes, as well as from additives designed to control algal growth

Lead:

In humans exposure to lead can result in a wide range of biological effects depending on the level and duration of exposure. High levels of exposure cause problems in the synthesis of haemoglobin, effects on the kidneys, gastrointestinal tract, joints and reproductive system, and acute or chronic damage to the nervous system.

Lead poisoning, which is so severe as to cause evident illness, is now very rare indeed. At intermediate concentrations, however, there is persuasive evidence that lead can have small, subtle, subclinical effects, particularly on neuro-psychological development in children. (Lead has been found to reduce IQ in children)

Avoid:

Lead-based paint in older housing or stored in soil and dust (50% of lead intake is from indoor dust.

Mining and Industrial activity

Food, air, water: hard to avoid since crops are contaminated by lead dust

Batteries, petrol additives, rolled and extruded products, alloys, pigments and compounds, cable sheathing, ammunition.

Mercury:

Toxic substance which has no known function in human biochemistry or physiology and does not occur naturally in living organisms. Inorganic mercury poisoning is associated with tremors, gingivitis and/or minor psychological changes, together with spontaneous abortion and congenital malformation.

Monomethylmercury causes damage to the brain and the central nervous system, while foetal and postnatal exposure have given rise to abortion, congenital malformation and development changes in young children.

The major natural source of mercury is the degassing of the Earth’s crust, emissions from volcanoes and evaporation from natural bodies of water.

While humans have always been able to naturally detoxify this mercury, industrial mercury use adds new and dangerous emissions:

Avoid:

Manufacture of chlorine and production of batteries, lamps and thermometers.

Coal combustion

Crematoriums

Amalgam fillings

Pharmaceutical drugs, especially vaccines.

Food Sources: Natural biological processes can cause methylated forms of mercury to form which bioaccumulate over a million-fold and concentrate in living organisms, especially fish. Be wary of sea water plants like kelp and spirulina as well as some internal clays (volcanic rock sometimes has large amounts of heavy metal).

Nickel:

Small amounts of Nickel are needed by the human body to produce red blood cells, however, in excessive amounts, can become mildly toxic. Long-term exposure can cause decreased body weight, heart and liver damage, skin irritation, damage to the nervous system, fatigue, and irritability, hair and fingernail loss, damage to kidney and liver tissue, damage to circulatory tissue.

Nickel is used to hydrogenate vegetable oils.

Uranium

Some believe Depleted Uranium is a major contributor to the diabetes epidemic in Saudi Arabia. Uraniaum toxicity is also believed to be linked to Gulf War syndrome. Source, are Depleted Uranium ’smart’ bombs, mining and nuclear power stations.

Now how do we stop supporting the war? Good question.

About the Author...

A Super Hero and one of many who have realised their true calling as saviors of humanity, healers of our connection with Nature and creators of Heaven on Earth. The Nourisher's gift is the re-spiritualisation of the 'process of recreation' we call eating. Mother of three Super Heroes in training and wife to her God incarnate, The Nourisher hails from the place of feminine healing, Byron Bay, Australia. She gathers together Life Creators from all over the globe at NourishedMagazine.com.au