Tuna fish has been the main source of relatively inexpensive tasty fish loved by many Americans for quite some time. However, if you’re pregnant, the FDA and Environmental Protection Agency recently recommended that you limit eating tuna fish to six oz. per week. This is due to the high mercury levels in tuna. Mercury is known to affect the neurological development of a fetus and young children.
However, tuna isn’t the only culprit. Mercury levels are high in a wide range of fish. If you ask your doctor for a mercury level test because you feel tired and depressed for no reason, your doctor will dismiss the issue. At the same time, he or she will probably be all too willing to write a prescription for antidepressant medication without a second thought.
You’ll get the same dead end response for your concern about dental mercury amalgams. If you persist and convince your medical doctor to check your mercury level, he’ll order a blood test for mercury which will most likely be negative. At this point your doctor will probably say something to the affect of “I told you so.”
The negative result occurs because the blood test doesn’t measure the accumulation of mercury or other heavy metals like lead or cadmium at the level of organs and tissues. It is an incorrect test for this purpose.
Whether you like it or not, we accumulate toxins, especially heavy metals, during our life time from the environment, diet, and often from routine dental care. Lead toxicity, demonstrated even at the lowest measurable lead level, reduces a child’s IQ. There is no safe level of lead. (Richard L. Canfield, Ph.D. New England Journal of Medicine 2002).
Lead toxicity is a lot more common than you may think for the general population. Young children are highly susceptible to the neurologic developmental problems caused by lead and other heavy metals. One of the cost effective ways to screen for heavy metal exposure is with hair tissue mineral analysis conducted by a reputable lab.
How about mercury toxicity? Mercury usually does not come out of your hair, especially mercury from dental amalgams. A chelating agent like DMPS or DMSA is used to measure and treat for mercury toxicity. (See my article on Chelation Therapy for Heavy Metal Toxicity under “Articles” on my web site.)
Lead and mercury have synergistic toxic effects. They have a one hundred fold increase in toxicity when they are both present in one’s body compared to lead or mercury exposure alone. Mercury is known to be the most toxic substance after radioactive elements such as plutonium. Dental mercury amalgams are placed in millions of mouths of Americans every year. This mercury, in their teeth, sits between their brain and thyroid.
It is not uncommon for people to be exposed to multiple toxic metals including lead, mercury, tin, arsenic, nickel, aluminum and cadmium. The magnitude of heavy metal exposure has been down played by our medical community. Medical schools aren’t training our young physicians on heavy metal toxicology. These new physicians are only being taught how to treat symptoms with medications.
The medical conditions associated with heavy metals are too vast to mention. Whether young or old, heavy metals create an oxidative stress and inflammatory response which affects your psycho- neuro-immuno-endocrine systems and contributes to medical conditions from Autism in children to cancer and Alzheimer’s in adults.
If you feel down, tired, anxious, or depressed, have a sense of heavy feelings without any reason, and all standard medical tests are negative, consider heavy metals exposure as a cause of your problems. Heavy metals exposure will make you feel heavy. You have a choice. You can test yourself with a hair tissue mineral analysis and chelating agents as well as be treated by physicians experienced in chelation therapy. Or you can try chelating tuna fish and cleaning up Planet Earth.