Transcript
Speaker: In this video, I'm going to cover heavy metals in a bit more depth. Basically, heavy metals, as you probably know, they're naturally occurring components. They're in the Earth's crust and they're everywhere. So we've always lived with heavy metals and our bodies do have systems and pathways to detoxify and neutralize them.
Speaker: when we are exposed to them in reasonable amounts. Of course, the problem nowadays is that our activities, you know, heavy industry, manufacturing, things like that, mining, they're just causing crazy amounts of these heavy metals to be released into the environment. And where do they end up? They end up literally everywhere in the water, in the air, the soil, and from the soil, they invariably end up in the food supply
Speaker: Once they're in our food they get in our bodies right so as a matter of fact every single person whose hair I've had tested from the age of two to seventy has at the very least right at the very least had significant amounts of mercury and aluminum coming out of them.
Speaker: so unfortunately we're all exposed to them now the problem when we have exposures to heavy metals that we don't have the capacity to neutralize detoxify and excrete they will bioaccumulate they will accumulate in our tissues our vital organs
Speaker: And the biggest problem is that kids with impaired detoxification ability due to genetic predisposition, oxidative stress or other factors that we've already discussed, they will be at a much higher risk of toxicity. And again, this is where even small regular exposures to these toxic metals can have significant negative effects, which is why we need to get a grip on this.
Speaker: Here I'll give you a brief overview of some of the research I've looked at that has made correlations between heavy metals and autism severity. Here's a quote from a study that states, Interestingly, the severity of autism could be well correlated with the level of accumulation of toxic metals like lead and mercury. Low -functioning autism showed significantly higher accumulation of toxic elements like lead and mercury in the hair and nail when compared with high -functioning autism.
Speaker: Low functioning autism also showed a significant decrease in the concentration of trace metals like magnesium and selenium in the hair and nail when compared to high functioning autism. So magnesium and selenium they can be protective against heavy metals and
Speaker: It's a double problem when a child has higher amounts of toxic heavy metals and lower amounts of the essential minerals like magnesium, selenium, and zinc that can help to protect against the negative effects of these toxic metals.
Speaker: So many researchers have actually looked at toxic metals in the hair, urine and blood of autistic children and have found that they're generally higher. The most common metals are mercury -led aluminum arsenic and cadmium. Others have also been found though to be high such as nickel, vanadium, uranium, tin, thallium and a few others.
Speaker: Now, there's been a lot of studies like that, but relatively few of those have actually looked at the heavy metal levels and then tried to correlate them to the autism severity. However, the few that have looked at this seem to find at least some connection between heavy metal status and autism severity. Here is a quote from another study that states,
Speaker: However in autism, the problem appears to usually not be of high exposure, but rather decreased excretion. The half -life of lead mercury and other toxic metals in the blood is weeks to months, so those metals rapidly leave the blood and accumulate in tissue and or bone.
Speaker: Here is several studies that you can go and read in more depth if you are interested into this topic, but I'm just going to summarize some of them in the following slides. So one group of researchers found that higher body burden of heavy metals was associated with more severe autistic symptoms in two studies. In one of the studies, they found that lead, antimony, mercury, tin, and aluminum were most associated with autism severity.
Speaker: Other researchers have found more severe autism to be correlated with elevated mercury and copper, and they also found that lead was associated with a decrease in IQ in their study. Another study found high aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, antimony, nickel, lead, and vanadium in autistic children.
Speaker: most notably mercury lead and nickel correlated with autism symptom severity. And finally, another paper reported that metabolites that are associated with mercury or lead toxicity detected in the urine were significantly associated with increased CARS scores. So the CARS rating scale. So basically the children with more severe autism scores tended to have higher levels of those compounds that indicate mercury or lead toxicity.
Speaker: But in that paper, the researchers also reported that they found lower levels of compounds needed to detoxify heavy metals such as glutathione, which we've already covered, cysteine, and sulfate, which we've also already covered.
Speaker: So I hope that this information illustrates how increased heavy metal burden, low glutathione status and impaired sulfation could affect autistic children, which is why it's important to test for heavy metals. It's important to support glutathione production and it's important to replenish sulfate in your child's body.
