Heavy metal detoxification is something I have been dealing with personally for about 4 years. I got started when I heard a speech by a doctor talking about the symptoms of lead and mercury poisoning. I recognized several of these in myself so I started reading up on how to get these things out of my body.
I tried a few things like chlorella and some oils from a German naturopath but I did not feel any different. I will have a post of the common symptoms of heavy metal toxicity and the ones that I had personally later on.
Here is what I figured out about how the body does heavy metal detoxification. This process is called ‘chelation’ (pronounced ‘key-lay-shun’) by the way. Your body has a natural chemical called glutathione that resides inside all cells. This ‘inside’ part is important as I will show later. Glutathione binds to foreign substances (ie toxic heavy metals) and your body excretes them via your normal elimination process. You might be asking how you can get sick from things like lead and mercury if your body is able to excrete them naturally? The answer is two-fold. First if you are exposed to a high level of heavy metals your body will not be able to deal with them fast enough and you get sick. When this occurs you need to take an external substance to get the heavy metals out of your system. This is the first scenario.
The second scenario involves what some call the ‘Bathtub Syndrome’ It goes like this. Think of your body as a bathtub with toxins entering and exiting every day. Things maybe fine for years. Then something traumatic happens such as a physical injury or emotional trauma. This lessens your bodys ability to rid itself of heavy metals like lead and mercury. In a sense your ‘bathtub’ can not hold as much water anymore and the toxins begin to spill out of it, and you become sick (called ‘symptomatic’).
Reading this you might think ‘well I will just take more glutatione’ to get the extra heavy metals out of my body. This will not work very well (if at all) because when you take glutatione it will only circulate OUTSIDE of your cells. The glutathione needs to be INSIDE your cells for proper heavy metal detoxification. What you need to do it create glutathione inside your cells. This is to say that your cells themselves need to MAKE glutathione. To do this you need to take the pre-cursor to glutathione. A ‘pre-cursor’ is the chemical that is needed for the body to make another chemical. The pre-cursor for glutathione is N-Acetyle-Cysteine or NAC. NAC is a very inexpensive supplement that can be bought just about any where.
As far as the actual chelation supplement there is only one scientifically proven FDA approved supplement and that is dimercaptosuccinic acid or DMSA. DMSA can be quite a bit harder to find but I will show you where I get mine in a following post.
