Nutrition

What do you recommend for mercury de-toxification?

This  is a very commonly asked  and important question.   Many people believe, perhaps reasonably, that  since they have mercury emitting fillings, that they are “mercury toxic”.

First, an actual diagnosis of “mercury toxicity” is made only on the basis of specific laboratory tests (urine, blood, hair) by an experienced and qualified health care practitioner.   From  that diagnosis,  specifically designed de-toxification protocols can be determined.   The difficulty in finding such a medical practitioner and the expense of  the tests, which may, or may not, be covered by insurance prevents many people from seeking it out.

However, it is wise to always be in optimal health prior to beginning any endeavor that may add stress to you physically and emotionally.   Adding to that, it is now recognized that dental disease is directly related to many systemic illnesses.   Therefore,  it may be prudent to act to optimize your health prior to mercury filling removal.

To that end, there are a number of programs that may have some benefit at both enhancing your overall health and removing toxins, including (but not  limited) to mercury.  The following information is presented as a basic and general guide.   Please do not construe this as specific information for you, as an individual.   It is our intention that this be accomplished directly between you and your qualified health care provider.

The contents of the IowaMercuryFreeDentistry.com site, such as text, graphics, images, and other material contained on this site or linked to this site are for informational purposes only.  The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.  Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.  Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on the IowaMercuryFreeDentistry site!

The following links and articles are being provided without endorsement or recommendation.   It is up to the reader to do their own research and contact appropriate competent health care providers to make their decisions.

Resources:

Preparation for a safe and successful amalgam removal.

By Leo Cashman,  DAMS   (Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions) [Excerpted]

1- 800-311-6265

First Aid for the mercury poisoned. The patient who is struggling with health issues and realizes he/she is to some extent mercury poisoned then asks: what can I do to alleviate this problem right now?

The answers fall into the following categories:

Natural and organic diet,

Clean out other bad habits,

Supplement with the vitamins and minerals you are likely to be deficient in.

Diet. The diet part consists of eating helpful foods such as eggs, onions, garlic, and vegetables and fruit in general, especially if organic. Protein is important, as we need it to make glutathione, the body’s natural detox substance, and when we run low on glutathione is exactly when we become more noticeably mercury poisoned. Along with organic eggs, the best protein foods may be organic chicken and turkey, although beans are also good, except for soybeans. Fish is probably too risky for mercury, especially the larger fish. Stick to the smaller safer fish if you want to eat fish occasionally.

Bad foods include sugar, alcohol and caffeine, although anything that falls in the “junk food,” –chips, French fries, fried and greasy food in general, are to be avoided. Regular milk is also best avoided – it makes mercury harder for the body to deal with – but organic butter, especially raw organic butter, may be helpful. Don’t chew gum, don’t snack and brush teeth immediately following each meal (don’t wait a few hours).

[Basic, Generalized] Supplements. When mercury poisoning sets in, a person is likely to be deficient in vitamin C and the B vitamin complex, and the minerals magnesium, zinc and selenium. All of these should therefore be supplemented, but in the right form and in suitable amounts. So, until a health professional provides a more fine-tuned list of supplements, a good list of these supplements would be:

Vitamin C, as a mix of buffered ascorbates (such as Super Ascorbate C, by Twin Labs),

Vitamin B complex (don’t use a B complex with the B12 being cyano-cobalamine)

Magnesium Chloride (spray on magnesium oil).

Zinc, as zinc picolinate,

Selenium, as seleno-methionine.

The amounts would vary with the size of the patient but, for an average sized, say 150 pound person, it would be about 3,000 to 4,000 mg per day of the vitamin C; 400 to 500 mg per day of magnesium, 15 to 25 mg of zinc, and 100 to 200 mcg per day of selenium. This targeted supplement package would be more helpful than taking, for example, a typical multi-vitamin which would likely have too much calcium (which is antagonistic to the magnesium needed) and might have a cheap form of vitamin B12.

Vitamin D   Another likely deficiency for some is vitamin D and, except for people who are getting outside in the summer outfits, making vitamin D from the sun, a daily dose of cod liver oil, so as to get 2,000 to 4,000 IU of vitamin D daily is likely to help.

Digestive Enzymes     If there is any sign of not breaking down food in the stomach well, enzymes may helpful in digesting a meal.

 These supplement ideas do not really detoxify you from mercury, but they may help you feel less sick from mercury poisoning. The vitamins and minerals should be continued on through the amalgam removal state and through the detox stage, stage3.

Anti-fungal program. We have separate articles about this but, suffice it to say, the anti-fungal program can start now if, like most mercury sufferers, you harbor fungal overgrowths in some parts of your body: e.g. big toe, skin rashes, vaginal yeast infections, sinus infections, and intestines (causing indigestion and bloating even after a “good” meal). In brief, the anti-fungal program is: 1) restricted diet with no sugary or yeasty foods, and 2) anti-fungal supplements, such as olive leaf extract, monolaurin, caprylic acid, grapefruit seed extract (each time to run out of a bottle, you buy a different anti-fungal supplement, so you keep rotating it). No drugs!

Water that has no fluoride added and that is naturally low in fluoride ( ask about measured fluoride levels in the water – you are looking for 0.2 ppm or less fluoride in your water). Make sure you don’t  buy just  drinking water which may be just tap water that has been filtered.  If that tap water had been fluoridated, then the filtration did not take out the fluoride.

Lifestyle.

Some people need to quit smoking.

Some need to get away from a moldy house or a toxic workplace.

Everyone needs to minimize EMF exposures, and cell phone use should be reserved for emergencies only.

Sleep in a dark bedroom, with no lamp cords or electric clocks plugged in; all plugged in electric cords give off an alternating electric field that interferes with proper sleep: the pineal gland does not produce its hormone, melatonin, when it is over-stimulated at night by those electric fields.

Mercury needs to wreck a good night’s sleep anyway, but let’s not let EMFs and alternating electric fields add to that problem.

If you have serious concerns about possible “sick home” problems, a “building biologist” in your area may be able to do an assessment in your home for mold, chemical problems, carbon monoxide, and electric field, magnetic field and radio frequency (RF) pollution. Making the recommended changes can help make a big difference.

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Practical De-toxification

By Leo Cashman,  DAMS   (Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions) [Excerpted]

1- 800-311-6265

Recently, there has been a steady flow of new supplements for detoxification onto the market, giving people alternatives to drugs such as DMPS and DMSA that were once dominant in mercury detoxification.   Sometimes those drugs were dramatically helpful but sometimes, for at least a substantial number of people, the drugs produced adverse side effects, indicating perhaps an inability of the patient to clear the drug-toxic metal complex through the liver or kidneys and out of the body, or perhaps indicating that the drug had cleared zinc, an essential trace mineral, out of the body. Some reactions were dramatic allergic reactions to the drugs, and their use has continued to remain controversial.

Supplements:

Today, there are many detox supplements available to serve the needs of the needs of toxic, mercury-poisoned people.

The product Chelorex is a blend of vitamins, minerals and supplements designed to be a sort of all-in-one detox cocktail.

Various zeolite based products claim to have an ability to trap the toxic metal atoms and take them out of our tissues.

HMD (Heavy Metal Detox) is a blend of three safe, natural ingredients: chlorella growth factor (CGF), cell-decimated chlorella homicord, and cilantro lead.  HMD is claimed to be “proven to remove mercury, aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, uranium and all other toxic metals, without eliminating essential minerals.”

[metal]  Binders such as chlorella and pectin products continue to have their place in every detox programs and the new super-binder, IMD, (Intestinal Metal Detoxification) is a helpful product that continues to be available.

Our body’s main natural detoxifier is glutathione and metal toxic people are usually quite low in glutathione – it is used up in the never-ending battle to get rid of mercury, for example, when there are amalgams in the teeth that provide a never-ending supply of mercury to the patient.

Supplementing with Vitamin C helps boost glutathione and such foods as whey are precursors of glutathione.  But supplementing with glutathione itself is a poor strategy, as the glutathione molecule gets broken down during the digestive process in the stomach into the three amino acids that it is made out of. But there is a special product, Liposomal Glutathione, that protects the glutathione by enclosing it inside a liposphere, so that the glutathione survives the digestive process and can be absorbed into the intestines. Such a supplement appears very safe because it delivers the main substance, glutathione, that the body makes by itself to bind and remove mercury and other toxic offenders.

Supplementation with some vitamins and minerals remains as a basic feature of anybody’s detox program, and this part of the program can, and should, precede the replacement of the mercury amalgam fillings.

The big five are:

Vitamin C, as a mix of buffered ascorbates;

Vitamin B complex;

Magnesium as magnesium chloride (oil spray)

Zinc, as zinc picolinate

Selenium, as seleno-methionine.

Unless it is summer and you are out there getting plenty of sun, you should probably add a good source of Vitamin D to the list, and there is none better than cod liver oil; the pre-formed vitamin A that is in the cod liver oil helps in the utilization of the vitamin D. The A and the D in cod liver oil are the perfect, natural blend of these two important vitamins.

Diet remains important, and choosing the foods that help and avoiding the foods to be avoided, remains of basic importance. Helpful are foods such as organic eggs, organic chicken and turkey, garlic, onions, and vegetables and fruits in general. But sugar and artificial and junky foods are out, and many people have a fungal/yeast problem and need to strictly avoid the foods that feed the fungi. The fungal problem is evidenced by indigestion and bloating, skin rashes, fungal big toes infections, vaginal yeast infections and thrush (white coating on the tongue), but are also suggested by less obvious conditions like sinus infections, asthma and auto-immune problems such as rheumatoid arthritis.  The fungi thrive on sugar, cakes, cookies and all other sweet desserts. Yeasty foods like soy sauce, catsup, mustard, and other condiments and even bottled juices, and alcohol, are out; they are too yeasty. Cooked food leftovers that sit in the refrigerator for a few days become too moldy/yeasty and are also to be avoided.

Anti-fungal drugs should be used with caution.   They are too toxic to the liver, taken long term, and can be very harsh.   Instead of drugs, gradually win the battle over fungal problems by getting amalgams replaced safely and by detoxifying heavy metals gradually and safely and by reducing the fungal problem at the same time – by the restricted, anti-fungal diet and by taking anti-fungal supplements. What anti-fungal supplement is best?  You rotate between capryllic acid, grapefruit seed extract, olive leaf extract, and other anti-fungals; each time you finish a bottle of one of them, replace it with a different anti-fungal, so that the fungal organisms cannot adapt to what you are using.

The detox effort, the battle against both the toxic metals (e.g. mercury) and the battle against the fungal organisms, can be won at the same time. Detoxification is a trail and error process. Each patient has to experimentally find the right mix of methods, the right dosages, the right pace for himself or herself. It is best to let symptoms and signs of de-tox happen and not try to suppress them with aspirin, Tylenol, anti-biotics, or other suppressive drugs.

Skin Methods:

The whole category of “skin methods” for heavy metal detox has been around for a long time, and it has also expanded and remains very important. Most patients combine one or several skin methods with one or more supplements for active detox, in the six month to a year time that is needed for the typical heavy metal detox. Even 25 years ago, we knew about Epsom salt baths and baking soda baths for helping us detox through the skin. We knew about using saunas to sweat out the toxins and then we would shower off the sweat, to make sure that the toxins are not re-absorbed back into the body. But, in more recent years, the clay baths have been added to the list and they have become an excellent addition to anyone’s detox program. Some of the calcium bentonite clay products are better than others, and some are more for internal use, e.g. colon cleansing, while others are more for detoxing while you bathe. And some are better at not clogging up your plumbing.

Oil pulling is also a newer skin method, although we might better call it a “mouth method,” because, upon arising in the morning and before breakfast, we take some sesame oil into the mouth and swirl it around the mouth, through the teeth and around the tongue, giving it five minutes or so to absorb toxic metals that are moving around in the blood vessels that pass through the tongue.    Then spit it all out, don’t swallow it!   Oil pulling has stood the test of time and it is not a fad.

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How to Overcome Fungal and Yeast Infections using Metal Detoxification, Restricted Diet, and Anti-Fungal Supplements

By Leo Cashman,  DAMS   (Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions)  [Excerpted]

1- 800-311-6265

In a healthy person, Candida albicans is yeast that is a normal inhabitant of the intestinal tract.

When friendly flora are killed or diminished, as by antibiotics, alcohol or poor diet, the Candida overgrows, leaving a person with digestive problems and low energy. Symptoms may include: fungal toenails, acne and other skin conditions, allergies, asthma, sinus problems, bloating and indigestion, fatigue, brain fog, inability to concentrate, depression, constipation, multiple endocrine problems, such as low thyroid function and adrenal fatigue, and auto immune disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and multiple sclerosis.

Candida ferments sugar to produce a waste product, acetaldehyde, that is similar to alcohol.

Like alcohol, acetaldehyde easily enters the blood and crosses the blood brain barrier; it is the reason that “brain fog,” headaches and depression are associated with yeast overgrowth.

Candida can shoot out inflammatory chemicals at the endothelial cells that line such places as the gut, sinuses and the vagina, making it easier to colonize the lining of the tissue. These chemicals cause local inflammation, with bloating, swelling and pain, in those tissues.

Candida can hijack unsaturated fats and insert an oxygen molecule into the fat molecule’s double bond, creating oxylipin, a compound highly inflammatory to the whole body. This creates general confusion to the immune system and can help trigger an auto immune disease, including rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren’s syndrome, and autoimmune endocrine failure, as happens with Addison’s disease, insulin dependant diabetes mellitus, Hashimoto’s disease, celiac disease, myasthenia gravis, and primary hypogonadism.

Infectious candida releases aspartyl proteinase, a protease enzyme that has the ability to digest structure proteins that make up such tissues as are found in the digestive tract, the rectum, the sinuses, the mouth, lungs, vagina, and the skin.

Once Candida becomes infectious, it tends to hang on, ebbing and flowing in intensity for many years and possibly for life.

When infectious Candida permeates into the blood, it is serious and possibly life threatening. When it metabolizes heme, it produces carbon monoxide and sidetracks hemoglobin production. Anemia may indicate a Candida infection. AIDS and cancer patients frequently die from Candida infection. In can invade the heart, the pancreas, spinal vertebrae, the lungs, the spleen, the kidneys, and the brain. When Candida shows up in an HIV positive person, it is typically a key turning point for progression into AIDS.

Premature babies are more prone to Candida infection. Signs of this infection are: low birth weight, thrush, diaper rash, and colic. The neurotoxic Candida waste product acetaldehyde, along with other toxins and unfriendly bacteria, may trigger the mysterious Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

CAUSES OF CANDIDA PROBLEMS

Antibiotic use

Birth control pills

Cortico steroid hormones

Pregnancy

Sugar

Refined foods,

Yeasty foods such as vinegar

Condiments

Beer

Leftovers

all promote the problem of fungal overgrowth.  Toxins that weaken and suppress the immune system, including, most commonly, mercury from dental amalgam fillings, promote fungal overgrowths. Candida thrives in the presence of mercury, taking up the metal into its cell walls, and relieving our own cells of some of the burden of mercury poisoning.  So, fungal overgrowths are believed by some to be a survival-and coping mechanism your boody’s own immune defenses use to survive mercury poisoning.

The mercury-poisoned patient will not be able to conquer his Candida fungal problem without having his mercury amalgam fillings removed (safely!) and detoxifying mercury and other heavy metals.

Candida biofilms are parasitic infectious structures that line feeding tubes, catheters, knee replacements, braces, dentures, bridges, etc.

Obesity and leptin excess associated with it produce inflammatory and immune reactions, that are linked to autoimmune disease. So, both the leptin driven inflammation of obesity and the Candida driven inflammation can work against the same person.

RECOVERY FROM CANDIDA PROBLEMS

Certain drugs such as the anti-biotics, and prednisone and other steroids, are notorious for promoting fungal problems are best avoided or to be used as a last resort. Natural alternatives to anti-biotics include essential oils and colloidal silver. Look for natural alternatives to birth control pills; seek out alternatives to drugs in general.

Anti-fungal diet: avoiding sugar, alcohol, leftovers, moldy foods and mold/fungi in general, sugary types of fruits (dates, bananas, and sweet juices), honey, and refined carbohydrates. Avoid soy sauce, mustard, catsup and other condiments. Bread, crackers, cakes, cookies, ice cream and other processed foods need to be avoided. Food is best eaten fresh and leftovers that sit in the refrigerator for a few days are best avoided because they tend to develop a subtle mold problem, even though they seem to look and taste OK.

Coconut and coconut oil have antifungal, anti-bacterial anti-viral fatty acids – monolaurin, lacto ferrin. Raw garlic, raw chives, raw onions, and other foods have anti-fungal properties.  Even carrots and broccoli have some anti-fungal properties.

Anti-fungal supplements may include: lactoferrin, monolaurin, aklyl glycerols, all found in breast milk – are safe and natural. Health food stores sell these and other anti-fungal supplements such as: olive leaf extract, grapefruit seed extract, and capryllic acid. Rotate what you use as your anti-fungal supplement, so that the fungal organisms cannot adapt to what you are using to kill them off. So, each time you run out of a supplement (such as capryllic acid), buy a different product (such as olive leaf extract or grapefruit seed extract) for your next anti-fungal supplement product. Oil of oregano is one of many essential oils that can be effective. Oregano oil and colloidal silver are sometimes used to help kill Candida in the sinuses. Tea tree oil is used to kill toe nail fungus and acne infection.

Probiotics: foods and supplements containing the right bacteria, to restore the necessary beneficial flora. There are important foods that provide the same kind of help:

Special foods that help. They include cultured foods such as:

Yogurt

Kefir

Miso

Sauer kraut

Cultured raw vegetables.

Cultured, fermented raw vegetables are an excellent way to improve digestion, help heal the gut and restore friendly bacteria to the gut. They are prepared using a starter culture that is added to chopped raw cabbage, carrots, garlic, and sometimes sea vegetables. Fermentation in a canning jar occurs over a period of three to six days. Several spoonfuls of the cultured vegetables, eaten like a sauerkraut, improve digestion and add to the nutritional content of the meal.

To read about successful approaches to overcoming fungal Candida problems, see the bookConquering Yeast Infections – The Non-Drug Solution by S. Colet Lahoz, RN, MS, LAc, available from East-West Clinic, phone 651- 429-9595.

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More resources:

“Lifestyle based” supplementation:

Lifestar     http://www.lifestar.com/

 “Vitamin based”  supplementation:

“Before your Dentist removes your silver fillings you MUST
read this”

http://completehealthdallas.com/MercuryAmalgamRemovalSafely.html