Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, practitioner of functional medicine and non-force doctor of chiropractic.
I'm going to be talking about heavy metal toxicity today, toxins in the air, food and
water, they're in the soil.
The main top five toxic heavy metals that we need to concern ourselves with are lead,
mercury, cadmium, arsenic and uranium.
I'll be talking about some really interesting case results I've gotten with people who've
done that testing identified problems that were being aggravated or directly caused by
excess amounts of toxic heavy metals in their systems.
When we get those metals flushed out properly, then the body just works better, especially
certain parts of the body.
Before I get into that, I want to talk about something that was in the news here recently.
Fish oil, the ridiculous clickbait headline in the medical press is regular use of fish
oil supplements may increase first time heart disease and stroke risk.
Well, I like to tell people, especially listeners to the show, my patients, people who are a
little more sophisticated, anytime you see a headline like this, the easiest thing to
do if you don't have time to delve into and find out what's really behind that headline
is just ignore it.
I mean, that's just a ridiculous thing.
The same article itself later on in the article, it says, continue to eat salmon every day.
It's a really good thing to do whether you've had a heart attack or stroke or not.
These headlines like this contradict themselves in the article itself most of the time.
Anytime you see something slamming a well-known, well-researched vitamin, other nutrient, it's
usually funded by a pharmaceutical company or somebody with a vested interest in poo-pooing
that nutrient when they want to sell you a drug instead.
When you look at the research behind it, the way the study was done is usually poorly designed
from the outset.
We're going to get into the specifics of this one.
When you scroll down, this article, what the data showed in this poorly designed study
showed that people who have already had a heart attack or a stroke or people that are
older benefit from taking fish oil.
Dramatic reductions, 15% reduction in risk of heart attack and stroke.
Numbers close to that.
Don't cite me on the exact number.
And rather, on the contrary, people who have not, younger people who have not had a heart
attack or stroke, this study says that it seemed to indicate that people had a slightly
increased risk of heart attack or stroke if they were taking fish oil.
Well, when you get down to the meat of the article, Elana Natker, registered dietitian
and director of consumer and health professional communications for the global organization
for EPA and DHA omega-3s, those are the main two omega-3s that you hear about all the benefits,
to review everything you hear that's good about omega-3 fatty acids, those fatty acids
are EPA, eicosapentaenoic acid and DHA, docosahexaenoic acid.
So these are only available from the ocean.
When you see vegetable sources that say good source of omega-3s like flax oil, chia seeds,
walnuts, these have ALA, which is a healthy fat and those are good foods.
It's excellent to include them in your diet, but do not assume that you're going to get
the risks for cardiovascular disease and reducing inflammation and joint health and all the
other brain health, all the other benefits that you hear attributed to consuming omega-3
fatty acids.
You're not going to get those benefits from eating walnuts and chia seeds and flax seeds
because they don't have EPA and DHA in them and the conversion, your bodies can convert
the ALA and the vegetable sources into the EPA and DHA, but it's only like 5%.
It's very small amounts.
So to get the benefits of omega-3s that you hear about all the time, including for cardiovascular
health, you need to get those omega-3s from the ocean, either from fish or seaweed.
You can get vegetarian algae oil, which has those two omega-3s in it as well.
It's a lot more expensive than regular fish oil and hopefully it will be less expensive
at some point because they make biofuel out of algae and it's much less expensive.
If it's cheap enough to make biofuel out of, they ought to be able to do the health level
grade algae, which is grown in stainless steel tanks.
I really don't understand why it's not less expensive than fish oil, but currently it
is not.
So the article in question we're talking about here, the spokesperson for the global organization
for omega-3 said, while this study was done on a large population, it was observational
in nature, just watching what people were eating and seeing if there was any association.
It gave no potential consideration of dose.
No consideration of dose.
In other words, it didn't ask people how much fish oil they took.
It didn't consider any confounding factors.
So the people that were younger that just said they were taking some fish oil supplements
that supposedly got slightly increased risk of heart attacks or strokes, they didn't ask
them if they were smoking, what kind of food they were eating, how much fish oil they were
taking.
In other words, it's highly likely that they had other health habits that were contributing
to and risk factors that were contributing to their slightly increased risk of heart
attacks and strokes.
That had nothing to do with whether they were taking fish oil or not.
And it didn't ask them how much fish oil they were taking.
So you can't blame the fish oil if you didn't even ask people if they were taking a sufficient
amount.
It's just a ridiculous study.
But they put the controversial bit at the top and the headline because that's going
to get people's attention.
So that's a long way of saying, here's a perfect example of a study with a ridiculous headline
like this that you can ignore or ask me about it and I'll look up the real story behind
it.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
I always like to remind people periodically the following.
The quality and quantity of food you eat and the level of physical activity you incorporate
into your daily life are almost always the most important two things you can do to enhance
your health and prevent and reverse chronic disease.
So anytime somebody comes to me, if you send a family member, a loved one to see me, we
do some testing, I'm going to identify nutrient deficiencies usually that are underlying
someone's current symptoms and recommend some supplements, probably almost always,
to get their body work, give their body the nutrients it needs to heal and repair itself.
Usually when people have certain health concerns, even severe health concerns that they're taking
medications for, a lot of times these same concerns can be addressed with high quality
and sometimes higher doses of good bioavailable nutrients.
But it is always important in addition to getting those nutrients based on your testing
because everybody's different, that's why you have to do the testing to find out what
you need for your condition.
Everybody always to get optimal outcomes always needs to eat good food and move their body.
So most of the conditions that people show up with are caused by stress, by identifiable
nutrient deficiencies, by lousy diet, by lack of exercise and general neglect.
So if you want to be truly healthy, you have to take responsibility for your own health.
But you do not have to do it on your own.
I'm here to help.
We're talking about heavy metal toxicity this weekend.
So anytime somebody comes to me and has any issue with the following, their brain, an
autoimmune condition, obesity and or fatigue, I'm always thinking we must consider toxicity
testing for that person.
So problems with the brain like anxiety and depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity
disorder, ADHD, cognitive impairment, full blown dementia, brain fog or dizziness, anything
that's not right with someone's brain, we must always think about potential toxicities.
Basically we're all exposed to the toxins that I test for, but we are exposed to different
amounts of them, varying amounts, and your genetic ability to excrete the toxins that
you are exposed to varies tremendously from one person to the next.
And then whether or not you're getting mainly the minerals, the nutrients you need to facilitate
that excretion varies.
So that's why we often need to test.
So anybody with a challenge to their brain, also autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis,
rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, the autoimmune attacking the cells of the
thyroid that cause low thyroid, very, very common, especially in women over 50, lupus,
psoriasis, an autoimmune condition that causes rashes in the skin, irritable bowel syndrome,
all of the inflammatory bowel conditions, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis,
and Crohn's disease, there are slightly different variations of inflammatory gut conditions.
The linings of the intestines are being attacked and decimated and wreaking havoc on often
other parts of the body because of the gut becoming inflamed.
Obesity.
Anybody who's overweight for no reason.
I see people all the time that say, you know, I eat an excellent diet.
I eat lots of vegetables.
I eat chicken and fish.
I eat an excellent diet.
And I just can't shift this weight.
I can't get rid of that last 10 or 20 or 30 pounds.
Oftentimes it is because your body has exposure and a heavy body burden of heavy metal toxins.
And then fatigue.
So anytime someone has fatigue, it's almost never caused by a single issue.
If you have a lack of energy and there's just no explanation for it, again, you're doing
everything else right.
You're getting adequate sleep.
You're eating good food.
You're even taking a few supplements already that are good for you.
Or maybe your energy has just changed dramatically in the last two, three, five years.
Nothing seems to have changed in your life.
But suddenly you have much less energy than you used to.
This is very, there's almost always a half a dozen things that are contributing to that,
which are usually identified for five or six things.
I very commonly see almost any time I order a comprehensive blood panel on anyone.
Things like borderline anemias, vitamin B12 and folate deficiencies, vitamin D deficiency,
chronic infections that you don't even know you have, insufficient protein, common things
like that that will sap your energy.
But always included on that list is exposure to heavy metals like lead, arsenic, cadmium,
uranium.
These things are in the air.
They're in the water.
They're in the soil.
They're in our food.
In organic food, especially processed foods.
It's always a good idea if you have any of those conditions to test for heavy metals.
How do we do that?
Testing for heavy metals is either with a hair test or a urine test.
Your body, and sometimes I do both because they test different things.
When our bodies are exposed to mercury from eating fish, for example, a lot of people,
most people know that there's mercury in fish.
You know where the mercury in fish comes from, anybody?
Coal fired power plants.
When you burn coal, coal is full of mercury.
It's riddled with mercury and mercury is liquid at room temperature.
Anybody who's seen a thermometer knows mercury is liquid at room temperature.
And a little bit higher, it turns into a vapor.
So when you burn coal, mercury becomes a vapor that goes up into the atmosphere, then settles
down when it cools to the ocean, falls down to the ocean, sinks, becomes a liquid again,
and sinks to the bottom.
It is eaten by bottom feeders in the ocean and it works its way up the food chain.
And it's in anything in the ocean.
It's going to have mercury in it.
Everywhere in the world, the ocean has mercury in it.
Anything that's alive in the ocean is going to have mercury in it.
But the amount of mercury depends on how long that living creature has been in the ocean.
So it works its way up the food chain and the fish with the most mercury are simply
the biggest fish.
So of the fish that we commonly eat, the highest in mercury are tuna, shark, and swordfish.
There are some others, but they're less commonly heard about in people's diets.
So all tuna and swordfish and shark is high in mercury just because of the size of the
fish.
You can get tuna pole caught smaller fish, fish that are only three feet long instead
of six feet long.
And it has much lower content of mercury.
It's tested.
You can get tinned in a can.
Tuna that's delicious.
It's a whole filet.
It's not chopped up chicken to the sea garbage.
Any canned tuna, when you go to a sushi restaurant, it can be the best sushi restaurant in the
world.
And that tuna usually comes from big fish and when it's tested, it's still high in
mercury.
So you know, eat restaurant tuna once a month.
No more than that, I recommend.
But you can get pole caught smaller tuna filet in a can in olive oil.
It's delicious from brands like Wild Planet.
Another one is called Safe Catch and these companies and there's some others, but those
are the ones that are on the shelves at Vons where I live in Southern California.
These companies that catch the smaller fish also test it and confirm that it has a tenth
of the mercury of standard large tuna or less.
So mercury is in tuna.
Arsenic is in the water in much of the country.
It's in commercial, all the heavy metals are in commercial pesticides and fertilizers
that are used on our fields.
Aluminum can be an issue.
It's not as toxic as the big five, but if you cook with aluminum cookware or aluminum
foil, it's not a good idea to cook on aluminum foil.
You can cover food that you're cooking with aluminum foil as long as it's not in contact
with the food because in high amounts for some people, aluminum can cause an issue.
So we're only concerned with mercury, lead, so lead from lead paint.
There's again, there's lead in ceramics and in paint on, you know, paint in houses, but
also paint on crafts, on toys, kids toys that are made in China, especially often have lead
in them.
When you get a test, when we order a heavy metal test, it comes with the lab report from
Doctors Data, Doctors Data is the premier lab in the country for testing heavy metals.
They have the best reliability.
You know, how do you find that out?
You take a sample from somebody and send in two samples at different times from the same
person and see if the results come back the same.
Well, they've done that with lots of labs around the country and found out that they
don't come back the same, but the best data, the most reliable lab for testing heavy metals
is Doctors Data.
And that's of course the lab that I use.
And when you get the test back, the report will say, it will say, you know, which metals
do you have an outsized amount of, an unexpectedly high amount of, and then right on the report
it also says these are the sources of those metals so that you can identify whether or
not you're currently still being exposed to them and eliminate that exposure.
And then we come up with a protocol to help your body flush those things out.
So I'll talk about the things we use to flush out the metals here a little bit later.
But here's a case, for example.
I had a 55 year old man with severe rashes on his hands and his arms and his back.
But the worst part was his hands and his forearms.
They were just pink and covered with pussy lesions and it just came, it came on slowly
initially and it would kind of come and go for a while.
But then he wanted, by the time he finally tells me about it, they're just covering his
entire hands and forearms and he's having to wear plastic gloves and it's difficult
for him to work and it was painful and just really, really irritating.
And we tested him for heavy metals and his heavy metals came back off the charts and
I said, you know, it's going to take a while.
It's going to take a few months to flush out enough heavy metals that it's going to make
a difference.
And I recommended an ointment.
You can never fix something like this by putting any kind of ointment on it by itself.
But the ointments you get from stores, the cortisol, the steroid creams that are recommended
for almost any skin condition, very rarely work long term.
They give short term relief for some things, but they never fix the problem.
I do have an ointment that's called EpiShield that has an ingredient in it that comes from
coconuts called monolaurin.
Monolaurin is an ingredient in human breast milk that helps set up your immune system
when you're born, when you're breastfeeding.
And then most of us never get any monolaurin in our diets after that.
You can get it as a supplement called loracidin, loracidin.com for more information.
That same company makes an ointment with that same ingredient in it.
That is very effective on rashes, but usually we have to do both.
So temporary relief and slight some healing of the tissue by using the ointment for almost
any skin condition.
And so, you know, he was really frustrated because a couple of months had gone by and
he wasn't feeling much better.
He came in, he was upset.
He was using some words and I said, I'm sorry, I did tell you that it was probably going
to take three or four months and that's not two months, that's three or four months.
So, you know, I gave him, you know, showed him how to, he wasn't using the ointment every
day.
I said, you know, use it every day.
It'll help.
Ice it.
And, you know, about three and a half months later, it was almost completely gone.
And I talked to him, that was about three or four years ago.
He moved out of state and I talked to him, I don't know, three or four years after this
had all happened and he was still doing great.
He never came back.
So we've had to flush out enough of the heavy metals.
Your skin is an organ of excretion, an organ of elimination.
Normally, when we're exposed to toxins and when we just eat things that our body can't
use to, as nutrients, that becomes waste that we flush out through the kidneys and, and
to the colon.
But some toxins and waste are flushed out through the skin, through sweat glands, through
hair follicles.
And, you know, that's why we sweat.
Part of the reason we sweat is to cool the body, but also most of the things that make
sweat smell are, you know, toxins and other waste that our bodies need to flush out.
And one of the ways that we all flush out some of that stuff is by sweating through
the skin.
So that's why you can test the hair because when you sweat and when your hair follicles
are growing out, some of the things that your body has been exposed to and is currently
trying to excrete will be recorded in the hair as it grows out.
So when we do a hair test, we cut off, we collect a sample that's about the size of
a teaspoon.
It depends on how thin or thick your hair is, but about a teaspoon size little pile
of cuttings of hair.
We trim it off right at the skin, right at the scalp.
And we just use the first inch.
So you need hair that's at least an inch long with no coloring in it.
When we collect a sample from women, I always tell them they can't put any coloring in their
hair for two months.
Most hair grows about a half inch a month.
We need an inch of clean hair, but you can do that.
Just not put any coloring in the back of the skull.
So it's, you know, your hair is usually going to lay down and cover that.
You won't see the grays.
And we just do a few little spots so that you never, you know, you don't notice it.
So we collect the hair, send it into the lab.
Usually a week to 10 days, we get the results back and it'll show.
Do you have an outsized amount of arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, uranium?
And what is your total toxic burden?
So the lab also does a weighted average compared to normal healthy people.
Some of the metals are more toxic than others.
And depending on the amount that you have and which ones you have, they'll do a weighted
total toxic burden.
So this is another metric we can use to compare to later on when we retest to see if you're
improving.
And the things that we use to help your body flush out these heavy metals are, well, so
number one, something anybody can do right now that is a general healthy thing to eat
because we're all exposed to heavy metals.
Something that you can eat to help reduce your body burden of heavy metals is cilantro.
Well cilantro is a very mild, what we call chelator.
It's a very mild agent to bind and help your body flush out heavy metals.
But if you love cilantro, eat as much as you can.
So it takes a lot to have a significant effect.
And so cilantro helps.
Much higher on the list from that is also something that anybody can do.
If you don't mind the taste of super greens, if you like doing a greens shake or any kind
of super greens drink, greens juice, that kind of thing, then the best one to do is
chlorella.
Chlorella is a blue-green algae, kind of like spirulina.
And it's mostly chlorophyll, so it tastes like any other green juice, like wheatgrass
juice or oatgrass juice.
But chlorella has benefits that the grass juices and even spirulina does not.
It is much more effective at helping your body flush out toxic heavy metals.
And so if you like doing a shake in the morning, go to nuts.com.
It's a website that sells nuts, like almonds and cashews, but also all of the superfood
nutrients that you can make your own shakes with, protein powders, et cetera.
Nuts.com is where I send people to get top quality chlorella powder.
That's a good thing to put in a shake for anyone.
And that's one of the first things I recommend to somebody once we test them and identify
a heavy metal burden to help flush that out.
Next up from that, there is a chelating agent called DMSA.
So that's a whole other conversation, but that is just one of the other nutrients that
can help flush out heavy metals that I've used in the office over the years.
There are several others.
There's new things coming out all the time.
Another one is called pectisol, which is modified citrus pectin.
This is also a powder that you just mix with water.
And there are several others.
New things coming out all the time.
I haven't had enough experience with some of these other ones to promote them yet, but
I am studying several other nutrients that I've seen research about recently.
And so I'll let you know more about those when I find out and confirm that they work
well.
So we've talked about heavy metal toxicity needs to be considered anytime you have something
wrong with your brain, depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment, dementia, brain fog,
dizziness, autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's, low thyroid, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple
sclerosis, psoriasis, obesity.
So if you have a weight gain or just the inability to lose that last 10, 20, 30 pounds for no
apparent reason, it is often because your body is storing toxic heavy metals in fat
cells that it can't get rid of.
So we're about out of time.
We'll come back and I'll do another episode next week continuing on heavy metals.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to almost any health challenge.
I'd be honored to help you restore true health and longevity, identify all the areas where
your heart, kidneys, lungs, and immune system, digestive system are silently struggling and
can use a little help.
Remember the condition of your body is far more important than any disease you've been
diagnosed with.
Tune in next Friday right here at 4 p.m. on KDAR 98.3 FM.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Benkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
Dr. Benkley at www.BenkleyHealingCenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.