How We Accumulate and Store Heavy Metals in our Body
Heavy metals are everywhere, and as the environment gets more and more polluted, heavy metal concentrations increase. Heavy metals are in the air you breathe (especially if you live in a city), the water you drink, the food you eat, and even in the cosmetics you use.
Heavy metals can be difficult to metabolize and excrete for a number of reasons
You don't have the required nutrients to detox
You are mineral deficient, which are needed to push metals out of the body
Stress, which inhibits the removal of metals and toxins.
Poor sleep, which inhibits removal of toxins.
Fatigued, so that you don't have the energy to detox.
These all throw a wrench into detox and allow the slow buildup of heavy metals in your body, which then begin causing symptoms at some point in your life, and if you've been dealing with any of these issues for years or even decades, you likely have significant metal accumulation.
Your liver and kidneys can break down small amounts of heavy metals, but when you're exposed to heavy metals every day like we are in today's world, your body will bioaccumulate metals and store the heavy metals away.
Your body sequesters toxins in storage receptacles like fat tissue (including your brain) to prevent the heavy metals from traveling through your bloodstream and poisoning your vital organs.
How Heavy Metals Cause Hormone Imbalance
Over time, heavy metals can poison your body in subtle but damaging ways. One such way is hormone imbalance.
Heavy metals negatively impact your hormones in many different ways:
They accumulate in glands where hormones are made.
They directly increase estrogen levels.
They interfere in the delicate feedback loop signaling in the body to make more of a hormone.
They interfere or block hormone receptor sites.
They poison enzymes the create hormones.
They poison enzymes that convert hormones to other forms.
They trigger oxidative stress and free radicals that contribute to cell damage that increases cortisol and inflammation.
Environmental estrogens like heavy metals act through genomic pathways by binding to the estrogen receptor and initiating transcription of estrogen-activated genes and through pathways that involve signaling initiated in the cellular membrane. Metals, including lead, Cadmium, and mercury, can initiate the estrogen receptor by interacting with amino acids at the receptor-binding site, and both metals exert estrogenic changes in countless studies. These actions negatively impact hormone production, conversion, and function.
Metals do all this by poisoning the action of and deactivating hydroxylase enzymes, special enzymes that convert sex hormones like DHEA, estrogen, and testosterone into other hormones your body needs.
The 4 Most Common Hormone-disrupting Heavy Metals
If you have heavy metal buildup, you have to deal with it to aid your hormones coming back into balance. These are the four most common heavy metals that disrupt your hormones and cause symptoms like infertility, fatigue, brain fog, moodiness, and weight gain.
Mercury
Statistically, it is almost impossible not to have some amount of mercury in your body. Almost everyone has had some exposure to mercury from amalgam fillings, air (from coal-burning and industrial manufacturing), water, fish, shellfish, and even medications.
Mercury lowers progesterone levels but increases estrogen. It causes various symptoms, including thyroid hormone disruption, which can lead to weight gain and chronic fatigue.
You absorb mercury from a few different sources. Mercury is in the air we breathe .that has been unleashed into the atmosphere from coal-burning. This is how it then settles into the ocean and accumulates in fish.
The most common source of one kind of mercury, methylmercury, is by eating seafood that's high on the food chain. Large migratory fish eat smaller fish, causing mercury and other heavy metals to bioaccumulate.
If you eat a fish at the top of the food chain, you'll absorb a significant portion of that mercury. That's why fish the EPA suggests avoiding fish like tuna, swordfish, shark, mackerel, and marlin.
Then there is inorganic mercury, like the kind you find in silver-mercury amalgam dental fillings. Women with between 4-10 amalgam dental fillings are estimated to uptake 8-30 mcg mercury daily. However, women with over 10 fillings were estimated to uptake 163 mcg. Then we get an additional 10 mcg of mercury daily from food.
To put this in perspective, the World Health Organisation puts the upper limit at only 2 mcg/kg body weight per day.
Even if you had your fillings removed years ago, you likely had them for a decade or more, and mercury accumulated in your brain and body over that time period.
Cadmium
Cadmium is another hormone-disrupting heavy metal that's all-too-common in our modern environment. We acquire it from cigarette smoke, water, fertilizers, air pollution, fish, coffee, plastics, and some yellow coloring agents. It has been linked to low progesterone and prolactin levels and lowers testosterone in men.
The nasty thing about Cadmium is that one of the places it is stored is the pituitary gland, the master gland that signals to your thyroid, adrenals, and ovaries. Because of this, Cadmium can affect thyroid function and interrupt signals to the ovaries.
Cadmium blocks but also mimics estrogen, which causes fertility problems in both sexes. Cadmium also interferes with estrogen. It blocks the binding of estradiol to the ER-alpha estrogen receptor. Even if you produce enough estradiol, Cadmium interferes in it actually acting upon your cells correctly. Cadmium also lowers testosterone production in males, contributing to infertility.
Most concerning is the fact that Cadmium causes more cancers than all the other heavy metals combined. Cadmium increases the risk of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and many other types of cancers.
The most common and concentrated source of Cadmium is cigarette smoke. Tobacco plants are especially good at absorbing Cadmium from the soil, and smoking tobacco releases Cadmium directly into the bloodstream. This is the main reason smokers have much higher rates of cancer.
Lead
Lead impairs sex hormone production, interfering with menstrual cycles in women, promoting infertility, and damaging testicular function in men.
Lead can cause period irregularity by lowering progesterone and prolactin production. High levels of lead reduce estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol production. These imbalances can all lead to irregular periods and infertility.
Lead levels have decreased since the 1950s, thanks to unleaded gasoline and lead-free paints. However, lead paint is a leading cause of lead exposure, as it's in many older houses under new coats of paint. But when that paint peels off or renovations are done, people get exposed.
Lead is water-soluble and will readily leach into tap water, which is a big problem for the U.S. Occasionally, lead piping will contaminate the water supply, especially as the country's water infrastructure gets older.
Two examples are:
Washington, D.C., which had dangerously elevated lead levels from 2002-2010 according to tests from the Center for Disease Control (CDC)
Flint, Michigan, where lead in tap water reached a crisis point in 2014 and has gone without a fix for more than five years.
Sadly, due to decades of use of leaded gasoline and its continued use in developing countries, lead persists in the air, soils, and water, leaching into our food supply
and supplements.
The FDA does regular heavy metals testing on hundreds of foods. Overall, 20% of 2,164 baby food samples and 14% of 10,064 food samples had detectable levels of
lead.
Arsenic
Arsenic causes testicular damage and decreases sex hormone production. Arsenic inhibits ovarian and testicular and sperm production and function. And in these ways reduces fertility and reproduction.
Dartmouth's Toxic Metals Research Program found that arsenic exposure disrupts the function of glucocorticoid receptors that regulate a wide range of biological processes. Arsenic appears to suppress the ability of this critical receptor to respond to its normal hormone signal.
Glucocorticoids help regulate stress, blood glucose levels, blood vessel function, and lung and skin development, and may also play a key role in suppressing cancer.
Arsenic damages pancreatic cells that produce insulin, the hormone that controls your blood sugar. Impaired insulin leads to weight gain and fatigue. Prolonged arsenic buildup can even damage insulin production enough to cause diabetes.
Contaminated water used for drinking, food preparation, and irrigation of food crops poses the greatest threat to public health from arsenic. It is now recognized that at least 140 million people in 50 countries have been drinking water containing arsenic at levels above the World Health Organization's provisional guideline value of 10 μg/L.
Arsenic is found in pesticides and air pollution from fossil fuel combustion. Conventional
chickens and their eggs are contaminated due to chicken feed containing arsenic, which makes chickens grow faster and giving the meat a healthy pink color. A 2006 report by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found that over 70% of the 8.7 billion chickens produced each year in the United States have been fed arsenic.
Even though the FDA banned arsenic-containing drugs in 2015 that are added to chicken feed, you've probably eaten conventional chickens and eggs for decades. (and the arsenic they contain). Note, these arsenic-laced drugs are still fed to chickens around the world as this is a standard practice worldwide.
Rice also contains moderate levels of arsenic (found mostly in the bran of the rice) because rice plants are especially good at absorbing arsenic from soil. I choose white rice over brown for this reason.
Testimony
A Grave's Journey. Hello all! This is a testimony about the autoimmune disease Graves's Disease and how I quit allopathic medicine and found healing with natural methods and TRS detox. My illness all started after the birth of my first daughter in 2009. At her 4 week check up the pediatrician convinced my husband and I to get a TDAP jab for her "protection." I was raised to believe that doctors know what they are talking about. I also chose a technical career in the pharmacy, so I never questioned any recommendation given to me by a doctor. It was after that jab that started to develop symptoms of Grave's. I lost 70 pounds in 3 months. My heart had a resting heart rate of 110-120 beats per minute. I could not climb stairs or get out of cars due to my knee joints failing. I had a visible goiter. My eyes started to bug. I also shook like I had the chills all the time. I slept maybe 2-3 hours a night. So I went to the doctor, and he diagnosed me with Grave's and sent me to an endocrinologist. Went to the endocrinologist, and they prescribed a drug called PTU's. They were supposed to limit the amount of thyroid hormone my thyroid was producing. They are horrible. I would get such cold flashes nothing could make me warm, not even a hot shower. I went to ER several times due to my heart rate and heart pain. I would be given Valium to try to slow my heart, but nothing worked. After three months of going through the roof storm after thyroid storm, my endo suggested a radioactive thyroid ablation. Never once were natural remedies discussed or the cause of my body doing this discussed. I never knew to ask. I worked in a pharmacy; we dealt drugs all day long. Drugs were the answer I was getting. I went ahead with the ablation 1.5 years after getting initially diagnosed. I regret doing that to this day. Do not do it! There are natural ways to heal your thyroid!!!!! It took 4 years for my thyroid to finally die. Yep 4 years. During this time I still had all the symptoms as before but my TSH looked great so allopathic medicine pronounced me healed. My hormones were shot and I had a terrible miscarriage during that time. I started to hemorrhage and had to be rushed to the hospital from blood loss. I managed to get pregnant with my second daughter after that and thankfully saw an OBGYN that had some sense and monitored my hormones carefully during my pregnancy. It was after that pregnancy that my thyroid finally died. So now I had the low thyroid symptoms; gained weight, tired all the time but could not sleep, hair loss, dry skin, intolerance to heat, all the things. This is when I started to question the "experts". My oldest daughter had to see a specialist due to her having puberty symptoms early, and that specialist opened my eyes a bit. I Googled how to restart my thyroid after an ablation. It can be done!! I made an appointment with a naturopath to see what they can add. That is where I discovered my adrenal gland is fatigued, to put it lightly. It had been doing all the work because my thyroid was malfunctioning. I also learned I was deficient in many vitamins and minerals. I learned that in order to heal my body, I needed to heal the whole picture, not just the one snapshot. I immediately got the supplements that the naturopath suggested and started to get off caffeine and gluten as suggested. No more fluoridated water. I started to feel better. I came across TRS when a friend posted about it on her page. I started to research. It was working for her ... so I bought a bottle. I wanted to do a detox for so long but was afraid of the side effects. I started off at a spray every morning. I wanted to start slow. I didn't overwhelm my already taxed system. After 3 days, I started to get a headache in between my eyes, and my dreams were so intense. Dreams of things like a muddy river turning crystal clear, but the river was in my brain .... That first week was the first time since I can remember where I woke up and felt rested! I continued to up my dose, and my energy started to return. I actually went rock climbing with my family for the first time! I could never physically do it because my joints were so sick. My eyes got clearer, no more red veins, no more puffiness; they weren't dry anymore. My hair stopped falling out! It started to grow back! My sex drive increased to my husband's happiness. I didn't have those sweet or salty cravings anymore and ended up losing weight without trying because I was not snacking. I know this sounds crazy, but my intuition is on point now. No more brain fog! I am working with my naturopath to make sure my nutrition is key during this time. My thyroid labs are doing great, and I have been able to go down in my dose of thyroid hormone. Unfortunately, that is a catch 22 because my thyroid is a dried little prune due to the ablation. My daughters take TRS as well. So do my pets. I fully believe this is the safest detox you can do. I hope this story helps someone just starting their journey! You have options! Allopathic medicine
is not your only answer! I fully believe it will make your problem much worse! I now am on a drug for life because my body's natural method of producing a hormone got radiated. My goal is to try and restart my thyroid gland. Though it may be rare, it can be done. Just get the heavy metals that cause your Thyroid problems out of your body first!
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