It’s true that heavy metals are everywhere: in our air, food, and water. Most people have no idea they’re exposed to mercury, lead, and aluminum daily, and these toxins silently accelerate aging and disrupt hormones.
Dr. Wendy Myers has spent over a decade researching this exact problem, and she’s discovered that detoxification isn’t optional…it’s essential.
In this episode, Dr. Myers discussed the science of how heavy metals damage your body at the cellular level. We talk about where these toxins come from, why they’re impossible to completely avoid, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it. Dr. Myers shares her personal journey of removing five mercury fillings and how that experience shaped her entire approach to detoxification and longevity.
She shares the specific protocols, supplements, and lifestyle strategies (yes, some of them are her personal routines!) that have kept her looking and feeling decades younger than her 54 years.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Myers and I discuss:
- How heavy metals accumulate in your organs and glands, directly disrupting hormone production
- The three most dangerous heavy metals and where you’re being exposed to them daily
- Why infrared saunas reduce mortality by 40% and how to use them for detoxification
- Specific binders and supplements and how they actually work
- Why rapid weight loss without detox support can release stored toxins and cause serious harm
- The limitations of heavy metals testing and why you should detox regardless of test results
- How glyphosate acts like an antibiotic and shuttles aluminum directly to your brain
- The circadian rhythm and sleep optimization strategies that maximize brain detoxification
- Why taking minerals daily is just as important as taking binders for effective detox
- The simple daily detox practices anyone can implement without extreme protocols
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Transcript
Ari: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to The Energy Blueprint Podcast. With me in today’s episode is Dr. Wendy Myers, who is a naturopathic doctor, and founder of myersdetox.com. She is an expert on all things heavy metals and detoxification. That is the main subject matter of this conversation. What are these heavy metals, how we’re getting exposed to them, how we can reduce our exposures to them, and how we can get them out of our bodies? With no further ado, enjoy this conversation with Dr. Wendy Myers.
Wendy, welcome back to the show. I think this is your– Got to be your third time, at least.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.
How Heavy Metals May Accelerate Aging
Ari: Always a pleasure. You’ve been talking a lot about aging lately. I want to get your thoughts, your big-picture paradigm around aging and accelerated biological aging, and how you conceptualize that, and what you think is driving it?
Wendy: Yes. Well, definitely, heavy metals and chemicals are causing aging. We’re getting heavy metals in the air, food, and water. We’re getting it from chemicals in our food, glyphosate, chemical food wrappers, and just a lot of different toxins that cause oxidative stress in our bodies. That essentially, the heavy metals can essentially rust your body, and cause all different kinds of problems; reduction in hormones, your sex hormones, your stress hormones, your thyroid hormones, and reduction in your energy production.
All of these things, over time, accumulate to age you and cause a lot of different stressors on the body that are completely unnecessary. Heavy metals even cause gray hair as well. If you’re drinking from a stainless steel water bottle, it’s going to have nickel in them, and that will serve to not put copper in your hair, which colors your hair, and you can get gray hair as a result of that. I’m 54. I don’t have any gray hairs, because I’ve done lots and lots and lots of detoxing. I just don’t have any of those problems as far as the heavy metals causing aging.
Ari: Given that heavy metals are playing such a big role in this process, and I know this is a big, big focus of yours. In previous podcasts, we’ve talked a lot about heavy metals and detox, and you’ve been talking about this for, I don’t know, probably at least a decade, right?
Wendy: Yes.
Mercury, Lead & Aluminum: Common Sources of Heavy Metal Exposure
Ari: What are, in your view, the major heavy metals of concern? Then, from there, I want to get into where we’re being exposed to these heavy metals.
Wendy: Yes. I mean, one of the biggest ones is mercury. The big exposure is in seafood, though I still recommend eating seafood because a lot of seafood like fish will have selenium in it that will actually help detox the mercury. People also should be taking selenium or eating Brazil nuts. That works, too. Shellfish is pretty contaminated. I do still eat that occasionally, though. We need those omega-3 fats, for sure.
Mercury is also in mercury amalgam fillings. A lot of people still have these in their mouth. They’re still being placed in people’s mouths. People are getting them removed incorrectly, or moved them incorrectly at one point in their life. I had five mercury fillings that were drilled out when I was 21, and I had all kinds of problems following that. Mercury is also in the air from coal burning. A lot of coal burning, industry, manufacturing, burning of petroleum fuels in cars, car exhaust, all that gets into our air. All that has different kinds of heavy metals in it.
Then, we also– Other metals include lead. Lead is stored in our bones and can make bones look more dense. Lead causes mitochondrial dysfunction, fatigue. My clients that have really high lead levels, I call them leadheads because they’ll sleep 12, 14 hours a day. We get lead in fish as well, in shellfish. It’s also– Lead can be in the brake pads of cars. All those brake pads wearing down leads to lead in the air, leaded gasoline.
We had leaded gasoline for many, many decades in our country. All that got into the air, and it’s now settled into our soils. It gets into our food. Even if it’s organic food, it doesn’t matter. If you’re eating organic root vegetables, they can still have a lot of lead in them. Organic means chemical-free, not heavy metal-free. There’s no point in doing any testing because then everyone will be freaking out about their food. [chuckles] That’s why they’re not testing vegetables and things for heavy metals.
This lead can also be in supplements as well. That’s not a huge concern, in my opinion. Lead, we can get it. Then, let’s move on to some other heavy metals as well. Another big concern is aluminum. We breathe in aluminum in the air. That’s the main way that we get it. We also get it from underarm deodorant. Many people have stopped using aluminum deodorant, but they still use it for decades prior. A lot of people are guilty of this.
We also get it. It’s an anti-caking agent in salt, and in flour, in sugar. It just aluminizes it in a lot of different things to prevent caking. It’s very drying. It’s a desiccant. It’s also in vaccines. They don’t have mercury so much anymore. We also get aluminum in cookware as well. If you have really light cookware, like it’s super, super light and it’s metal, that’s usually aluminum. That’s going to put a lot of aluminum into your food.
Aluminum is really devastating to your brain and nervous system. It can lead to dementia in life. It just causes all different kinds of problems. Those are three of the metals. I can keep going. We can do this for hours. [chuckles] I could talk about different metals like arsenic and thallium and cesium. There’s many metals that cause various health issues and symptoms.
How to Reduce Heavy Metal Exposure in Everyday Life
Ari: What do you think are the main things people should focus on as far as reducing their levels? Is it, in your view, more about reducing exposure, or is it more about detoxification, or a combination of the two?
Wendy: Yes. You can do everything perfectly in your environment. You can control everything. Believe me, I’ve tried. You still are going to be exposed to heavy metals. It’s absolutely impossible. I don’t get too worked up about fixing my environment, though I do take some reasonable measures. I don’t get too worried about it in food. I do think it’s really important for people to do detox protocols every day to try to remove these toxins from the body.
It is smart to use personal care products that don’t have a lot of toxins and chemicals in them. It’s smart to try to eat organic food to reduce your body burden of toxins. It’s smart to drink filtered water or spring water, and smart to have a shower filter, because we do get a lot of toxins in water. It’s smart to have an air filter in your home as well. I really like Jasper. Our indoor air can have a lot of different toxins and off-gassing from carpets and things like that.
Smart to use better cleaning products where you’re trying to kill germs and bacteria, and that sounds great, but that can come at the cost of inhaling a ton of different chemicals that are really, really bad for you. It’s smart to try to fix that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so it’s good to just go one room at a time, one thing at a time. You’re going to buy new makeup. Maybe find a better makeup brand that doesn’t have lots of heavy metals in it. It’s just one thing at a time. It’s a big process to replace all these different products. You’ll get there one day at a time, one product at a time.
Infrared Saunas for Detoxification & Longevity
Ari: What do you think are the main things people should focus on as far as reducing their levels? Is it, in your view, more about reducing exposure, or is it more about detoxification, or a combination of the two?
Wendy: Yes. You can do everything perfectly in your environment. You can control everything. Believe me, I’ve tried. You still are going to be exposed to heavy metals. It’s absolutely impossible. I don’t get too worked up about fixing my environment, though I do take some reasonable measures. I don’t get too worried about it in food. I do think it’s really important for people to do detox protocols every day to try to remove these toxins from the body.
It is smart to use personal care products that don’t have a lot of toxins and chemicals in them. It’s smart to try to eat organic food to reduce your body burden of toxins. It’s smart to drink filtered water or spring water, and smart to have a shower filter, because we do get a lot of toxins in water. It’s smart to have an air filter in your home as well. I really like Jasper. Our indoor air can have a lot of different toxins and off-gassing from carpets and things like that.
Smart to use better cleaning products where you’re trying to kill germs and bacteria, and that sounds great, but that can come at the cost of inhaling a ton of different chemicals that are really, really bad for you. It’s smart to try to fix that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so it’s good to just go one room at a time, one thing at a time. You’re going to buy new makeup. Maybe find a better makeup brand that doesn’t have lots of heavy metals in it. It’s just one thing at a time. It’s a big process to replace all these different products. You’ll get there one day at a time, one product at a time.
Infrared Saunas for Detoxification & Longevity
Ari: As far as detox protocols, is that something you think we should get into now, or you want to save that for maybe later in the discussion?
Wendy: Oh, no, we can do it now. I’m a big fan of infrared saunas. Saunas are a super, super important part of detoxification. There was a Finnish study that was done on just regular dry saunas, and they did this over a 15-year period. They found that people that use a sauna five days a week or more, only for 20 minutes, that they had a 40% reduction in mortality from all causes. That’s pretty significant.
Then, if you use it three days a week, there was roughly a 25% reduction in mortality from all causes. Increased frequency dramatically improved the benefits. That could be for a number of reasons. It’s just a reduction in blood pressure. In fact, my mom, she has a sauna, and she normalized her blood pressure simply using an infrared sauna on a regular basis. It relaxes your arteries. It gets you into that parasympathetic mode in your nervous system. It’s reducing stress.
It is increasing microcirculation, so you’re getting oxygen and nutrients to all the various crevices and cracks in your body that need circulation. A lot of people don’t get enough exercise. It’s really helpful for detoxification, obviously, and so getting rid of one of the factors of aging also really helps, I think, improve the numbers, the mortality rate of the sauna users. There are lots of other benefits, just killing bad cells in your body, killing cancer cells, killing parasites and things in your body that are very heat intolerant. There are just so many benefits to using the sauna that contribute to those lowered mortality rates.
Detox Binders: Zeolites, Citrus Pectin & Mineral Loss
Ari: What else as far as supporting detoxification? Are you a fan of greens powders, fulvic acid, humic acid, chelators, the more powerful chelators? What are your thoughts on some of these other compounds?
Wendy: Yes. I’m a big fan of taking supplements and binders. I really like zeolites. I think zeolites are really good, probably one of the most comprehensive detox binders out there. A binder is something that’s just going to attract or absorb, latch onto various toxins in the body. I really like ZeoCharge. That’s a great product. It’s one of those things where it’s going to attract, has a certain charge, so it’ll attract heavy metals, and take them out of the body.
Modified citrus pectin is also fantastic, like Pectosol. I also have Citra Cleanse. Those are really, really good for absorbing a number of different toxins in the body. There’s tons and tons of research behind the benefits of modified citrus pectin. There are other ones as well out there, but I think those two are probably the most powerful, and have the most research behind them, and are super, super effective.
Ari: Is there a concern with something like zeolites that it’s going to remove beneficial minerals from the body, instead of binding to toxins?
Wendy: Yes, you’re going to have that problem with any binder. With zeolites, it could be known to reduce copper levels and zinc levels. That’s okay. Wherever something’s removing heavy metals, it’s possible to remove minerals at the same time. You just have to replete your minerals. It’s just a smart thing to do. You need to be doing that anyways. You need to be taking your calcium, magnesium, zinc, and selenium and other minerals, lithium, and things like that, because anywhere you have a binder like a citrus pectin, that can also absorb minerals as well. Any kind of binder, a clay, this or that, can absorb minerals. You’ve just got to be mindful of that, and do testing if you’re really worried about it.
Ari: Is it more an issue that they’re going to absorb minerals from the meal that they’re consumed with, or that they’re going to actually pull minerals out of your body?
Wendy: It’s really hard to say. I think that when you’re taking a binder, you usually are going to have some food in your digestive tract. It’s good to take binders away from food, away from medication, away from supplements, just to reduce that risk of absorption. I think we always have some sort of food in our digestive tract.
Ari: Is there some research on the selectivity of something like zeolites, as far as what it is selectively binding to when it has options, when it’s exposed to minerals, plus, toxins? Is there a selective affinity for certain kinds of things?
Wendy: That’s a really good question. It’s something I haven’t actually looked into. I’ve definitely looked into the research on the specific heavy metals that zeolite will remove, but not on the selectivity, for sure. There is some research on DMSA and EDTA, where you can see they’re more selective for certain heavy metals. I don’t know if there’s any research on the minerals.
You can look at valence charts. Some minerals and metals have +1, +2, +3. When a chelator is interested in a +2, it’s going to get +2 minerals and +2 heavy metals as well. Naturally, it’s just a certain charge that will be attracted to that binder and will bind to it. It’s just one of those things where minerals and metals can behave the same way in the body.
They can occupy the same binding sites in the body. Where you have heavy metals, you also have minerals. Same with salts. Where you have salts, you’re going to have heavy metals. Everyone’s freaking about heavy metals in the salt. It’s just these are things in our body that can do some of the same jobs. Sometimes when you are detoxing, that’s why you have to take a lot of minerals at the same time.
When to Take Detox Binders: Food, Fasting & Absorption
Ari: Do you have any thoughts around the physiological state that the body needs to be in, in order to detox effectively? Meaning, do you need to be, let’s say, fasted? Do you need to be consuming these on an empty stomach, or is it the case that, if you just consume zeolites, let’s say, at any time of day, with a meal, without a meal, it’s just going to go into the body? It’s going to go into the cells.
That might be another question to address. Does it actually enter into the cells, or does it stay in the blood or the digestive tract? Does it go into the body, do its things, and pull out toxins regardless? Do you need to be in a fasted state, or a prolonged detox protocol?
Wendy: No, it’s going to go into the body regardless. It depends on the binder. Zeolites and citrus pectins just stay in your gut. You can do binders like C60, or they can be called chelators. They can do the same functions. Those things can be used interchangeably. A C60 or an ESS60 by MyVitalC, those will cross the blood-brain barrier and will absorb toxins in your brain.
Everyone works a little bit different. Ideally, you want to take detox substances away from food just so have– They’re not absorbing your food, or your nutrients, or your supplements, or your medications, and so that they don’t have anything interfering in their action. You don’t need to be fasted. It is good when you’re fasting to take binders. That’s a very smart way to detox.
Daily Detox Strategies: Minerals, Saunas & More
Ari: This is something that people can do. You don’t have to do some really dedicated extreme detox protocol for several days, or it’s something that people can just do very easily on a daily basis?
Wendy: Yes. I try to tell people to focus on doing something daily for detoxification. I’m not taking supplements every single day for detox, but I do take minerals every day because those do push out and displace heavy metals from your body. It can take a year to replete your minerals if you are deficient. It can take a really long time. I know we’re exposed to toxins every day. It’s good to take all the minerals that we need, so that our detox enzymes and pathways are working properly, our methylation’s working properly.
I encourage people to do infrared saunas maybe one day, maybe do a colon cleanse, or a liver flush on another day to do maybe. There’s other ways to go about detoxing as well. I do a lot of bioenergetic detox, which is like a whole other podcast. There’s a lot of things that you can do for detoxification that can be done on a daily basis.
Glyphosate, Pesticides & Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals
Ari: Are there other toxins of concern for you beyond heavy metals? Are you concerned, for example, with endocrine-disrupting chemicals and pesticides and things like that, or do you think heavy metals are really the thing people ought to be focused on?
Wendy: No. Chemicals and endocrine disruptors are very problematic. The biggest concern really is glyphosate. There’s 18 billion pounds of glyphosate that’s produced every year. It’s sprayed on all of our crops. It’s used as a desiccant to dry them before they’re harvested. It’s used in the city parks and buildings. Your neighbor’s using it on the weeds in their driveway.
It’s really just everywhere in our food supply. It really is also a concern because glyphosate is almost like an antibiotic. It will kill gut bacteria. It will shuttle aluminum directly to your brain and assist aluminum getting into your brain, which can contribute to cognitive dysfunction, cognitive decline, and different forms of dementia. There’s also all kinds of chemicals in our environment that are endocrine disruptors like organophosphate fertilizers.
There’s also just different chemical like atrazine. There’s a whole list of chemicals that are endocrine disruptors. A lot of them are beauty products like the phthalates and the parabens that are preservatives, or help keep the color or perfume in the product. There are just obesogenic chemicals that also contribute to our stem cells turning into more fat cells, and our fat cells growing exponentially. It’s one of the reasons why we have an obesity crisis in the United States. It’s in large part due to these obesogenic chemicals, and hormone-disrupting chemicals.
How Heavy Metals Can Interfere With Hormones & Thyroid Function
Ari: How does this interface with the story of hormones? Some of these chemicals are endocrine disruptors. They’re disrupting levels of our hormones. How do you conceptualize how that ties into the story of health and longevity?
Wendy: Heavy metals accumulate in our organs and our glands, and they accumulate in your thyroid, in your ovaries, your adrenals, and they wreak havoc on that gland’s function. When they target endocrine glands, it can cause direct dysfunction to the production of hormones. This dysfunction can show up as underproduction, overproduction, or a complete inhibition of hormone production, and they also mess with the tight feedback loop that your glands rely on to know when and how much of that particular hormone to produce.
Some of these heavy metals are like metalloestrogens. They act like these hormones in our body, and it’s a phenomenon known as hormone mimicking. When this happens, heavy metals can block the receptor sites that your hormones normally activate, resulting in either over-activation, or under-activation of the receptor. These heavy metals also poison hydroxylase enzymes.
Some hormones are used as precursors to other hormones. For instance, DHEA is a hormone that acts as a precursor to testosterone and estrogen. In order for DHEA to convert to these hormones, it needs a type of enzyme called hydroxylase. Heavy metals target and poison these enzymes, rendering them useless. This results in lower hormone production. Basically, there’s heavy metals that interfere in your thyroid hormone production as well.
Really, any toxic metal like mercury, lead, cadmium, nickel can reduce thyroid function in many ways. Again, enzyme inhibition, interfering in amino acid absorption. All this hormone production requires energy. A lot of different heavy metals poison our mitochondria and their ability to produce energy. It’s really just an endless cycle of different ways that heavy metals interfere in our enzyme production, protein production, energy production, et cetera.
GLP-1 Weight Loss, Fat-Stored Toxins & Detoxification
Ari: Some of these compounds are also obesogenic. As you mentioned, they’re promoting more fat cells or fat cell growth. There’s also some evidence showing that, in people who are losing weight, where they differentiate between people who have higher or lower levels of certain obesogenic toxicants, the people with higher blood levels of these toxicants have been shown in several studies to have a higher propensity for weight regain.
There’s this sort of resistance to losing the weight. If you do force the weight off, then there’s a higher likelihood that you’re going to regain the weight. There’s another issue that’s also relevant to GLP-1s, and all the stuff that’s going on right now, which is, I don’t know if there’s a lot of good research on this yet, if there’s any research in it, but because so many of these compounds are stored in fat, are sequestered in our body’s adipose tissue as a way of protecting the body from that toxicant.
If it’s floating around in the blood, then all your organs and your cells are being exposed to it. Pulling it out of the blood, putting it into fat cells is a way to protect the body from the harmful effects of this toxicant. Now, what happens when you lose tons of weight very rapidly, and especially when that adipose tissue is full of some of these toxicants, is now you’re reintroducing it into the blood, and now you’re getting a lot of exposure to the rest of the body, to the organ systems, to the brain.
I’ve heard many people discuss now the potential harms of rapid weight loss, particularly rapid weight loss, losing a lot of weight, losing it very fast, and doing it without the context of also using, let’s say, binders to help eliminate some of these compounds that people can really cause a lot of harm to themselves in the process. Anyway, I’ve thrown a lot at you there, but give me your thoughts on all of that.
Wendy: Yes, I think GLP-1s are amazing. I’m a big fan of them. I’ve taken them myself, and I take Retatrutide myself, but it is a big problem when you lose 15 pounds in two months, or even more over the course of time. I think that’s one of the reasons, one of the side effects is fatigue from some of the GLP-1s, because you get tired when your body is having to process all of this garbage that you’re releasing, and many people just don’t.
There’s another problem. If it comes out of fat cells, it can be redistributed somewhere else in brain tissue, or other fat stores in your body. It can be put into your bones. I actually had a friend of mine that lost 110 pounds over a year. She actually developed a cyst at the base of her spine. Why does your body develop cyst? To put toxins into that. She had a big problem there. It was because of this really rapid weight loss. I think it’s really smart to take binders. For anyone doing any type of weight loss, or they’re doing it pretty rapidly, that taking a binder is a really smart thing to do.
Sleep, Circadian Rhythms & Brain Detoxification
Ari: What else do you think we should talk about here? What do you think we’ve missed so far in this discussion as far as your framework, the things that you focus on in the context of health and aging? Toxins, obviously, is a big one. We’ve covered heavy metals. We’ve covered some of the other toxicants and obesogens and endocrine-disrupting toxicants. What else do you think are some of the most important factors in health and longevity?
Wendy: I think that stress reduction and circadian rhythm management is super important for anti-aging. I’m sure you’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast. Getting that morning sunlight when you first wake up sets the stage for your blood sugar levels, for the hormones releasing at the right time, or the melatonin releasing at the right time. Melatonin is super, super important for detoxification of your body and your brain.
I take large doses of melatonin when I go to bed, because it is such an important antioxidant. It’s also super important to go to sleep based on your chronotype, but go to sleep at the right time, because when you’re in that deep sleep in the first couple hours when you sleep is when your glymphatic system is detoxing your brain. If you shortchange your sleep over many, many, many years or decades even because you just feel like, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” which many people take that option, you shortchange yourself on many, many, many hours or years of that brain detoxification. It’s really important.
For me, I need to be asleep at 10:00 PM. It’s really boring, and it takes a lot of discipline to do that, to get in bed and try to be asleep by 10:00 PM, but I track my sleep with an Oura Ring. The earlier I go to bed, the more deep sleep I get. I can get up to two and a half hours on some nights, and that’s when I am maximizing my brain detoxification. You don’t want to shortchange yourself on that.
It’s important to do a little sample study of yourself with an Oura Ring, and to try to find out exactly what affects your sleep, what you can do to improve your sleep, because none of this that I’m talking about, none of it matters if you’re not sleeping properly. You’ve got to optimize that. You’ve got to figure out what’s wrong with it. Your doctor’s not going to help you with that. You have a course on sleep, correct?
Ari: Yes.
Wendy: You’ve got to figure out all these different strategies to sleep. There’s 14 different things that can negatively impact sleep, and you’ve got to go through them one by one by one. For a lot of women in their 40s, it’s lack of progesterone. That’s a complete game-changer for many women, but it’s not that simple. There’s many things that you need to do and experiment with, and you can track their efficacy with an Oura Ring to see if it improves it or not.
Heavy Metal Testing: How Do You Know If You're Toxic?
Ari: I want to come back to toxicity for a moment. We talked about a lot of these different compounds, but one of the things that we didn’t address, and we also talked about, obviously, some of the detox protocols, or supplements and sauna and things like that. What about testing? What about how do you actually find out if you’re toxic in something, and how toxic?
I don’t know if this has changed since I last looked into this topic, but I did spend quite a bit of time on it years ago. When you start to look into some of these testing companies, and you start to understand how toxins are stored in the body, and different kinds of toxins are stored in the body, and we already talked a bit about that. For example, some of them are sequestered out of the blood into adipose tissue.
For those kinds of compounds, if you do a blood sample, how relevant is that to assessing how much of that compound is in your fat cells? Maybe it’s been in your fat cells for years. Maybe there’s very little in your bloodstream. Even the best test, that is sampling from your bloodstream, or your saliva or something like that, may not give any indication whatsoever of what toxins, or how much are in your fat cells. You get these kind, and this is just scratching the surface of the bigger picture of this issue. There’s so many different kinds of toxins.
Do we even have tests for many of these different kinds of toxins? The answer is; no. Where do you go in the body? Do you need to take a biopsy of tissue, of fat tissue to be able to do it? Do you need to take blood samples, hair mineral analysis? Then, there’s lots of different approaches here, but each one is going to be limited or controversial, or have some kind of limitation in what it can tell you.
Wendy: Physically, yes. There are limitations to different types of tests, be they hair, urine, stool, or blood. We see different toxins that come out in different routes in the body. If you’re doing a typical functional medical test, they will have limitations. However, you can do bioenergetic tests, and they don’t have limitations. They detect the frequency of all the different toxins. You can do a ZYTO scan. You can do an Oberon scan. You can do an Oligoscan. Oligo, unfortunately, doesn’t have as many toxins as I would like on it, but these are all very accurate tests that can test all of the toxins in your body, and tell you how much of them you have in your body. However-
Bioenergetic Testing: Can You Trust the Results?
Ari: How much of those are accepted within the scientific mainstream?
Wendy: I don’t really have a pulse on that. I do know ZYTO has been around for over 30 years, and it’s something that I’ve personally used for many years. I use Oberon software as well, and I find the Oberon software is scary accurate on myself and all the clients that I use.
Ari: How are you identifying that?
Wendy: Because I will go through a health history and get all of their symptoms, all of their known diagnoses, all of their health issues that they have. All of them show up in the scan. Yes, in the Oberon scan. It’s really frighteningly accurate.
Ari: I haven’t seen the ones you’re referring to. I’ve used a couple others, and my experience with them has been very, very bad. Some of the bioenergetics scanners or companies and technology purporting to scan bioenergetics. I won’t mention names of companies, but I’ll briefly say that it’s supposed to, for example, scan your fingertip. I’ve done two scans, one day and then the following day, and with wildly different results.
Even apart from addressing many other layers of the technology and the claims and things like that, just looking at the one layer of the fact that it’s giving you two radically different results on the same human from one day to the next, immediately tells you that, at least in the case of this particular technology, it’s not good data.
Wendy: Yes. That can be the case–
Ari: What was worse was that the company then explained to me, when I asked them about this, they explained to me, “Oh, because you did the scan yesterday, it disrupted your bioenergetic field. Therefore, the testing the subsequent day gave a different result because of the testing the first day,” which to me is not at all a reasonable explanation.
Anyway, suffice it to say, I could talk more. I could talk about the fact that I also bioenergetically tested a cherry tomato instead of my finger. It gave me a detailed report with a human body of all the meridians that were disrupted and all kinds of things. I did extensive experiments like this. What was apparent to me is that this technology was total nonsense.
That it was just generating random data that didn’t have any connection to the actual scan that it was purporting to do. None of that means that the ones you’re referring to are not legitimate. I haven’t tested those. Again, my experience with a couple of these technologies has been extremely bad.
Wendy: Yes. I totally understand. There’s a lot of different companies out there that have different types of software. I personally have the software that I’ve used. I’ve had really good experiences from it. Just phenomenal experiences. I don’t know what company that you were working with, or what you’re experimenting with. There is, I think, as far as, what was I going to say? I forget my train of thought. I understand that– [silence] Sorry, I’m losing my train of thought.
Ari: It’s all right. Go back to the–
Wendy: Let’s go back to the heavy metals testing.
Ari: Yes.
Wendy: As far as heavy metals testing, I do like the bioenergetics. That’s not accessible to everyone, though. There are ZYTO practitioners and other practitioners out there. An Oligoscan, I think, is great that you can test your heavy metals with that. For most people, you’re going to do either a hair mineral analysis, or maybe do a urine push test as well. You can also do it for lead. Blood testing is really good.
There are other tests out there. I really like Dr. Chris Shade’s Quicksilver Scientific mercury test. That’s a blood test. That’s a fantastic test to figure out what type of mercury that you have in your blood. I really like hair mineral analysis. Now, we get an AI-generated 40-page report based on the HTMA, and all the different information that can be garnered from the HTMA. There’s decades of research behind HTMA.
There is that factor you mentioned where some people don’t see any heavy metals on their tests. Those tend to be people that don’t detox very well. They have complex chronic illness. They just have something going on, where they’re just not able to release heavy metals. That’s why I like to, for people that are very, very ill and they’re not able to detox, I will use a bioenergetic program on them for a little while to stabilize them until they have more energy, or they’re able to detox, or tolerate detox at all.
Some people can’t even take supplements or eat certain foods. They have to be stabilized first before they can even think about releasing these toxins into their body that will throw them off-kilter even more. Zeolites are very good at reducing detox symptoms. I think that the urine tests, there are some metals we see in urine tests. Some people can’t tolerate the push test where you’re using a chelator to try to push metals into your urine, so you can see them. It’s really uncomfortable. I’ve done it before, and it really can create a lot of anxiety because you’re releasing so many metals into your system. It’s tolerable.
There’s, I think, for a hair test is my first choice because it’s really inexpensive. You can do it at home. It gives you a tremendous amount of information, not just the heavy metals that you have in your body. You can look at your minerals, so you can figure out what minerals you need to take to push out and displace heavy metals as well. That’s basically the range of tests that you can do.
However, there’s no heavy metals test that’s going to tell you all the heavy metals you have in your body. It’s because, like you said, they’re sequestered in different organs and bones and fat. As you start doing a heavy metals programs, as you start doing a detox program, and you test on a regular basis, you can see the different toxins that are starting to come out.
I’ve been doing testing for 15 years. There’s always something new that’s coming out of you that just happens to be coming out on that. That the last few months since you tested, you’ll see different toxins coming out of your body. As far as functional medical tests, that’s the best that you can do, because, unless it’s a bioenergetic test, you can’t see all the toxins that you have in your body.
Is Hair Mineral Analysis Scientifically Reliable?
Ari: As far as hair mineral analysis, the last I looked into this, which must have been at least five years ago, the research was extremely limited on it, and there were very, very few studies. It remained, for that reason, not in the evidence-based category. Not necessarily because it had been tested thoroughly and debunked. Again, absence of evidence is different from evidence of absence. The evidence was very thin.
The other issue is that, that I’ve seen from talking to many different practitioners who use hair mineral analysis testing is that their interpretations of the results can differ pretty dramatically. One person says a ratio of whatever zinc to phosphorus. I have very limited experience with these tests. It’s years ago that I was exploring this. They would look at the ratio between two different minerals in many different cases. You would ask different practitioners what their interpretation of this is. They would explain it in totally different ways. Their conclusions would be different. Their recommendations would be different.
Apart from, and this, also, there’s another issue, which is whether certain compounds end up in your hair is also dependent on metabolic processes and excretion processes and things like that determine whether those compounds end up there at all. There’s a number of layers of issues with these tests. What’s clear to me is that, if you have high mercury in your hair, that’s a good indication that you do actually have high mercury.
If you’re clearly displaying a sign of toxicity in a particular compound, that’s probably a reliable indicator that you have been exposed to that compound, or at the very least, and this is another confounding variable, which is personal care products like shampoos and conditioners, maybe the residues of that have certain compounds in them that are ending up on your hair, as opposed to actually being excreted from inside your body.
Wendy: Oh, yes. Those are very easy to spot, though.
Ari: Right. Okay. [crosstalk] Anyway, my point is to give an overview for listeners of some of the layers of concern that people have with these tests, and why they’re not necessarily mainstream, but what are your thoughts on all that?
Wendy: Yes. They are mainstream because hair mineral analysis uses mass spectrometry, and that’s used in all of the sciences around the world to test for heavy metals and rocks and moon rocks and different sciences. It’s not mainstream in medicine because medicine doesn’t necessarily concern itself so much with heavy metal, unless it’s an acute poisoning. They tend to do blood tests, even though it’s not terribly accurate itself.
Now, we have software, AI software that can interpret a hair mineral analysis based on the research, and give a lot more accurate information that’s based on, it’s like the research is compiled. Some people are into Paul Eck. Some people are into Dr. Watts. There’s different, I guess, schools of thought when it comes to interpreting hair mineral analysis, but there is no perfect test. There is no test that’s going to tell you all the heavy metals that you have in your body.
There are problems with different people’s metabolism. They may not release certain toxins into the hair that are still going to be in their body. Again, it just goes back to there just isn’t any perfect test, but it’s a good enough test to give us information on what minerals people need. It’s a good enough test to give us an idea of what metals people have, and if their levels are coming down, we have new metals that are coming out. We have to do the best with what we have, with the tools that we have. Even with a urine test, you’re not going to see all of the heavy metals as well.
Ari: There’s hundreds of other different kinds of chemicals and man-made toxicants, whatever pesticides, herbicides, other compounds in the environment, apart from heavy metals, that we have exposure to that I don’t even know if we have tests for 80% or 90% of them.
Wendy: We do have a test. There is a company in France that does a hair test for, I think it’s 180 different compounds and maybe more. Again, they’re testing the hair for that. It’s very accurate. Again, I go back to the bioenergetic software because there isn’t a lot of tests. There’s a test at Doctors Data, but it really doesn’t– It’s not testing that many chemicals.
You can test your glyphosate levels if you’re really concerned about that. There’s so many chemicals in our environment that we can’t test for. There isn’t really any need to, frankly. You just need to do some detox protocols, get in your sauna, or get—
Should Everyone Detox? Testing vs. Daily Detox Protocols
Ari: That’s what I was going to ask. Is there a strong case, based on the limitations of all these technologies, and either their accuracy, or what they can test for, is there a case that everybody should essentially just be doing daily detox strategies, regardless of whatever their personal test results are?
Wendy: Yes, exactly. For the majority of toxins, yes. You just need to get in the sauna, or take some zeolite or what have you. Just be doing something. It does make sense to have a sniper approach to supplementation, or detox supplements versus a shotgun approach, where you’re just taking binders, because you can’t– There’s a lot of research that shows that specific minerals detox specific heavy metals.
You can, based on your heavy metals, take certain minerals and certain supplements of known chelators like alpha-lipoic acid or garlic or turmeric or vitamin E or glutathione that are known in the research to detox that specific heavy metal. You can really get very granular as far as taking the correct supplements to remove the metals that have been found in your tests. There is benefit to testing.
I think it’s good to get a baseline also, and then start doing some detox protocols. You start seeing a lot of metals come out. There’s been a lot of people online that are doing N-of-1 testing that they show a vast amount of heavy metals coming out doing infrared sauna, doing different protocols, taking zeolites and what have you, and publish their results online. You can see a massive increase in heavy metals in the beginning, and then a diminishment of heavy metals as they continue on their sauna protocol or what have you, whatever they’re doing. We know that there’s lots of different ways to approach it, but taking various supplements and doing that based on testing, I think it’s a really good approach as well.
Final Takeaways: Heavy Metals, Healthy Aging & Detox
Ari: Wendy, is there anything that you feel is really important that we haven’t touched on in this conversation?
Wendy: Not necessarily. I think we’ve covered a lot of things. Just my plea to people is to add detoxification to all these healthy things you’re already doing. A lot of people are focused on; they’re eating good food, taking supplements, exercising, stress relief, getting sun, getting sleep, and things like that, but because of the exposures to heavy metals and chemicals we have in our environment, and because they’re impossible to avoid, no matter how much you control in your environment, how many changes you make, we get the majority of toxins in the air that we breathe. It’s really important to be thinking about detox strategies and what you’re doing to remove these from your body on a daily basis.
Ari: Wendy, where do you want to direct listeners, and do you want to tell them a little bit about your offerings, your work, your services? Where do you want to send people?
Wendy: You can find me on meyersdetox.com, all the social media at Meyers Detox, YouTube at Wendy Meyers. You can also take my metals quiz as well. It’s metalsquiz.com if you want to look at your relative level of toxins in your body based on your lifestyle and diet choices. There’s a really good video series, a free video series. It expands on this topic as well.
Ari: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Always a pleasure to connect with you.
Wendy: Yes. It’s very good being thoroughly grilled by you. You’re always like, “Okay, let’s see the science and the research on this.” It’s nice to have someone challenging you to answer questions like that. [laughs]
Ari: I’m glad you appreciate it. I appreciated your responses. Awesome. It was great to connect with you, and hopefully, we can do it again soon.
Show Notes
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