Heavy Metal Detoxification with Dr. Chris Shade: Rational Wellness Podcast 172
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Dr. Chris Shade speaks about Heavy Metal Detoxification with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
5:19 Dr. Shade talked about his experience as a farmer and how he studied mercury while earning his PhD in Environmental Science. He developed a patented a way to separate out and test for different forms of mercury, including inorganic mercury found in amalgam tooth fillings from organic mercury found in fish. The key is that mercury never exists as a free ion but is always bound to something, such as cysteine or glutathione. Also, he realized that the body has an innate system for detoxification, the glutathione system and also the methionine system and rather than using chelators, you can upregulate your natural system. When Dr. Shade was going to school for his PhD and he had 17 mercury amalgams in his mouth and he could feel the effects and he used chelators to reduce the mercury and they made him sicker. This inspired him to develop a better way to get rid of heavy metals in the body.
11:10 Testing for Heavy Metals. Since metals can be stored in our bones and organs, doesn’t it make the most sense to take an oral chelator like DMSA to liberate those metals and then measure urine before and after the challenge? Dr. Shade explained that even though there may be more metals in the tissues than in the blood, there’s a dynamic equilibrium between what’s stored in the tissues and what’s in the blood. Further, these chelators like DMSA do not go into the tissues and the cells, but they simply go into the blood and plasma and they make the kidneys more filterable. And no matter who you are, when you take a chelator, your urine levels go up, so it becomes this excuse to chelate everybody, not a look at where everybody really is with their metals levels. But you can get the same results from just measuring the blood as long as you use the correct reference ranges, though mercury is an exception.
13:16 Nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (NRF2) is a protein that regulates the expression of antioxidant proteins that protect against oxidative damage triggered by injury and inflammation. When you turn NrF2 up, that’s a key pathway and a trigger in the body to dump toxins into the blood. It also triggers the genes for glutathione synthesis, glutathione s-transferases, and transporters for removing toxins from the body. Turning up NRF2 is needed to get toxins out of the cells into the blood and then you need to turn up the filters, which are the liver, the kidneys, the GI tract, and the skin that take toxins out of the blood for excretion out of the body.
14:48 It doesn’t work well to just do serum metals testing through Quest or Labcorp even though it may be less expensive and it may be covered by the patient’s insurance, because they don’t speciate out the different forms of mercury into inorganic (from tooth amalgams) and methylmercury (from fish). It is only measuring methylmercury, which is really a measure of how much fish you eat. If you have inorganic mercury from dental amalgams you would only show a very small amount in the blood and the 95th percentile for inorganic mercury is below the detection limits for Quest and LabCorp. The best way to test for mercury is with the Mercury Tritest from Quicksilver that measures blood, urine, and hair and compares the ratios. Blood is the best way to measure organic mercury, while urine is a better measure of inorganic mercury and the urine:blood ratio provides information about the excretion of inorganic mercury. The excretion of methylmercury is seen in hair and the hair:blood ratio provides information about the excretion of methylmercury.
22:18 The most common symptoms of heavy metal toxicity include fatigue and anxiety. Fatigue occurs because the metals diminish the antioxidant pool in the mitochondria. They suck down the glutathione and the thioredoxin in the mitochondria. Metals also work at the thyroid level, which creates further fatigue. If you have normal or high T4 but low T3 that can be caused by mercury, cadmium, arsenic, or other metals. Metals can also affect the adrenals. And metals can accumulate in the kidneys and burn them out. Most metals are also glutamate receptor agonists, so they drive you into a neuroinflammatory state and this can lead to brain fog and depression and anxiety. You go into a state of hypersympathetic autonomic nervous system, which shuts down detoxification through prioritization pathways. What engages with the mercury are endotoxins from leaky gut, chronic jaw infections, chronic UTIs, gingivitis, and periodontitis.
26:15 It would be great if our body just naturally got rid of all of our toxins or if we could simply do a juice fast, but it’s not true. Perhaps it would be true if “we were living in the mountains, and we were all chill, and we’re eating wild food and getting all the phytonutrients, yeah, we wouldn’t really have a problem, but we’re not.” We’re chronically in sympathetic mode, which downregulates detoxification. We eat inflammatory foods, rather than phytonutrient rich foods. We need to take specific nutrients to activate transcription factors like Nrf2 and activate cardiometabolic factors like AMPK and take things like glutathione to liberate metals from the cells to put them into the blood, so the liver will dump them into the bile and then into the GI tract. And you need binders into the GI tract to make sure toxins don’t get reabsorbed.
27:57 At the cellular level the metals are conjugated onto glutathione and then transported out of the cells into the blood. Then we want to pull from the blood into the liver, dump the liver into the bile, get it to the GI and then stick it on a binder. If there are metals in a cell, the metals are always bound to some some protein. You have to take the metal off the protein its bound to and link it on to glutathione. This conjugation reaction occurs through an enzyme known as glutathione s-transferase, which is synthesized by the cell and if Nrf2 is upregulated, you will synthesize more glutathione s-transferase. Then there are transporters that escort the metal/glutathione conjugate out of the cell. This is phase three of detoxification. These transporters use ATP and magnesium.
29:57 Many of us are familiar with phase one, phase two, and phase three of liver detoxification. But these phases of detox occur in all the cells in all the organs of the body and not just in the liver. Yes, detoxification occurs more in the liver, but if you’re a thyroid cell and you have a toxin in there, you can’t wait for the liver to walk into your thyroid, because it’s not going to happen. So all three phases of detoxification occur in all cells. Dr. Shade points out that when it comes to metals, there is no need for phase one detoxification, since metals are already reactive. Phase one involves taking a toxin like PCB or a flame retardant chemical like a polybrominated diphenyl ether, to take you from being a nonreactive thing to being a reactive thing, and phase one chops into that molecule and makes it more reactive, so that phase two, you can link a glutathione onto it. Most toxins start with phase one but metals pick up at phase two.
32:01 After we attach glutathione to the metal, then it is in the blood and it ends up in the liver. The liver transporters move both bile and toxins together, so you get this flow from the blood to the hepatocyte to the bile. If your bile is not flowing smoothly (cholestatic), then you will have toxin buildup as well. Once the toxin, such as mercury, ends up in the GI tract, the glutathione will fall apart and you’ll be left with methylmercury bound to cysteine that will get reabsorbed in the gut unless you can stick it into a binder so it doesn’t reabsorb. If there is endotoxin or fatty liver leading to inflammation, that can block the bile flow out of the liver. Endotoxin is an inflammagen in that it generates inflammation. Being stressed, being in sympathetic dominance can block the flow of bile and deprioritizes detoxification and digestion. Estrogen dominance, high estrogen levels, can also block bile flow via stimulating glutamate receptors in the brain. Progesterone and herbal bitters open up the liver and facilitate bile flow. There are a number of Nrf2 upregulators that are also AMPK activators, including quercetin, luteolin, berberine, resveratrol, green tea, and lipoic acid. Lipoic acid is probably our best Nrf2 upregulator and it is also an AMPK activator. Fatty and fibrotic liver can lead to leaky liver and AMPK can reverse this. If you consistently eat a lot of carbohydrates, you will be building up fatty deposits in the liver and these fatty deposits are generators of inflammatory cytokines like NF Kappa beta and TNF alpha, which eventually activate hepatic stellate cells, which end up being myofibroblasts, resulting in fibrotic liver and blocking detoxification.
40:31 The best way to stimulate bile flow is with herbal bitters like gentium, dandelion, solidago, and myrrh, which are all contained in a formula from Quicksilver Scientific called Liver Sauce. It also contains phospholipids, milk thistle, lipoic acid, DIM, quercetin, and luteolin. Milk thistle supports the liver and supports detoxification. Most people think of DIM for estrogen metabolism, but DIM is an Nrf2 upregulator and its a Nrf2 epigenetic modifier. Mold can block your liver function and DIM can work against that. DIM can also reverse immunological reactivity to food. Quercetin and luteolin are included as mast cell stabilizers.
47:05 CBD can be helpful if there is a lot of inflammation since CBD blocks inflammation at a brain level first and then cascades down. It helps reduce sympathetic dominance. CBD stabilizes the glutamate receptors and stabilizes the activated microglia. It also helps with kids with autism.
48:23 Oral chelators can be a useful add on once you make sure the cells and liver are working well, the bile is flowing and glutatione system is upregulated using these protocols. Once you have done all this, then you can add in a little DMPS or DMSA or EDTA in small doses to increase the amount of metal toxins being pushed from the blood into the urine and out through the kidneys.
49:28 One of the best binders for heavy metals is the IMD that Quicksilver developed, which is like putting DMPS on a little silica grain. It has sulfhydryl groups, like you find on DMPS or glutathione, and they’re covalently bound on to a tiny silica gel particle with tons of surface area. It is most specific for mercury, cadmium, arsenic, but also helps with lead and nickel. Oral EDTA can be added to help with lead because it is not absorbed in the GI tract. Zeolite and charcoal are good for mold toxins and chitosan, which is a molecular mimic for wellchol, which is part of the Richie Shoemaker protocols for mold. Acacia gum and aloe are added to the Ultrabinder to help with healing the GI tract. The best time to take binders is about 30-60 minutes after taking the Liver Sauce or glutathione. Binders should be taken at least 30 minutes before or 2 hours after meals.
Dr. Chris Shade is a PhD researcher working in the field of nutritional supplements. He is the founder and CEO of Quicksilver Scientific, which is known for its heavy metal testing and detoxification products and its unique liposomal supplement delivery systems. I also want to say that after listening to this podcast, you can get 15% off your next order of products from Quicksilver Scientific by using the affiliate code WEITZ15.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations, including remote consults via video or phone, specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111 or go to www.drweitz.com. Phone or video consulting with Dr. Weitz is available.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hello again. Dr. Ben Weitz here and I’m so excited to be able to speak to you today and I’m so happy that you decided to spend a little bit of your listening or viewing time with me to learn about another important topic in the world of Functional Medicine, in this case, what to do about heavy metals. How to test for them, how to get them out of our bodies with Dr. Chris Shade of Quicksilver Scientific. And today is going to be a broadcast of a Functional Medicine meeting that we did online with Functional Medicine practitioners and they were able to ask questions online, so I asked Dr. Shade their questions as well as my questions, but it is very similar to our regular podcast. I just wanted to point out to those of you listening today education people is a passion of mine, but the way I earn my living is by consulting with patients both in person and virtually Functional Medicine, Functional Nutrition, any sort of health care conditions that they want to address with a root cause approach. And I also see patients in my chiropractic office in my office in Santa Monica for chiropractic care. Anybody interested you can call my office at 310-395-3111. And for those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness podcast, it would be helpful if you went to Apple Podcasts and gave me a ratings and review. And I also wanted to remind everybody who’s perhaps listening on their phone through Apple Podcasts or Spotify or all the other areas that it is on that there is also a video version if you go to my YouTube page, weitzchiro. And if you go to my website, drweitz.com you can find detailed show notes and a complete transcript. So, let’s get into the podcast with Dr. Chris Shade about heavy metal detoxification.
I want to thank very much, Quicksilver Scientific for sponsoring tonight’s event. For all of you listening in tonight, you will get 15% off your next order of Quicksilver Scientific products, if you use the discount code, Weitz, my last name, WEITZ 15 for products ordered from now until September 4th. If you are a practitioner, and you and you do not have a professional account with Quicksilver, you can email Katherine Sumner at Katherine, K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E.S-U-M-N-E-R@quicksilverscientific.com, and she can set you up with an account, so you can receive the discount. If you’re not aware, Quicksilver is Dr. Shade’s company that makes some of the most amazing products for detoxification that are widely used in functional medicine world.
Our topic for tonight is heavy metal detoxification with Dr. Chris Shade. We will cover how best to test for heavy metals. What are some of the most effective and safest ways to detoxify metals from our body? We all know that we live in a very toxic world, and many of us are exposed to various heavy metals in our everyday lives, including mercury, lead, arsenic, nickel, aluminum, and cadmium, which are pretty much always toxic. Then there are other metals that, in small quantities, are essential nutrients, but are toxic if at higher levels, like chromium, copper, zinc, and selenium. Now, there’s a lot of controversy over how to test these heavy metals, and even more controversy over how to reduce metals in our bodies. We’re going to try to clear up some of those controversies tonight. For example, does it require doing intravenous curation to get rid of metals? Or can I just place my feet in an ionic foot bath? Or can I just brush my teeth with charcoal toothpaste? There are many products marketed to detox heavy metals, some of which have no proven effectiveness. We really need to hone in on what products have been scientifically proven to be effective, and what particular protocols are going to work for us and our patients.
Dr. Chris Shade is one of the most brilliant Ph.D. researchers working in the field of nutritional supplements. Dr. Chris Shade is the founder and CEO of Quicksilver Scientific. Quicksilver Scientific is known especially for it’s heavy metal testing and detoxification products, and its unique liposomal supplement delivery systems, among other things. Dr. Shade, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
Dr. Shade: Ben, I’m happy to be here. Love to talk about this stuff. It’s second nature now.
Dr. Weitz: I know you’ve been talking about heavy metal detox and other forms of detox for a very long time, but for those of us who are not familiar with your story, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background in farming and how you became interested in heavy metals.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. It’s really a story about how you get interested, not just in here’s why I detox metals. It’s a lot of people’s stories, like, “I was just shattered by metals, and then all I thought about was getting out from under metals.” When you do that, you get a little like … If it’s mercury, you get a little mercurial centric. But really, it was an education in becoming a holistic thinker. How does nature deal with things? How do people deal with things? How do fish, how do birds deal with things? I was in environmental chemistry as an undergraduate and I remembered learning these stories. Environmental chemistry, you just tend to test where the polluters are, and then you pollute some groundwater, you try to pump it out. You never really get it out. It’s just this kind of futility thing of running after industrial pollution and pretending you’re cleaning it up. But then there’s a deeper understanding called biogeochemistry, which is about how elements cycle in the earth. How they go into the atmosphere, down into the water. How they move through the food chain. What happens in the sediments. How they go into phytoplankton, zooplankton, fish and move on through. That’s really where you understand the dynamics of elements cycling and the dynamics that we were studying with those of mercury. At the time, all the money had gone out of studying mercury in people. This is sort of post the first scare around vaccines and mercury. All the money moved from the NIH and CDC, and moved over to the EPA.
All the studying was on mercury moving through the food chain and how it infected biota. We have very complex models of transitions of mercury forms in the atmosphere, in the rain, in the water, how they partition into different things that bind them in the cells. Key to that is that things like mercury are never present like sodium is in the water as a free ion. They’re always bound to something. It depends what kind of ions are present there, or what molecules are present to bind it. It was very sophisticated, and you know how much is bound on cysteine, how much is bound on glutathione in a cell, in the blood. When I came in over into … Well, I had developed this testing because to really test biomagnification, we had to separate different forms of mercury. That being nepo mercury from fish and inorganic mercury, the sort of primal form of mercury.
When I came over into looking at clinical, I realized nobody was respecting the different forms. Nobody was respecting how the metal is complexed, how it moves. Nobody was respecting the fact that the body has an innate system for detoxification, the glutathione system, and also the methionine system. I brought across these ideas and I said, “Look, you don’t need to just use chelators to do this. You can upregulate your natural system.” First, we should test better and separate the different forms of mercury, and look at how they excrete, and then we should up regulate aspects of our biochemistry, because they’re not only the ones that depurate it, meaning take it out of the system, get it out into excretion patterns, urine, fecal, sweat. They’re also the ones, at the same time, that are making the cells resistant to whatever residual mercury is there. Let’s change the language from this one of, what’s your body burden and how does the chelator get it out, to what is your resistance to metals versus your susceptibility, versus how much is in there? We can work on these different things. We can turn up your resistance, and at the same time, turn up your depuration, how much comes out. In doing that, we found that we got people better, faster. There was less of this, “The chelator made me worse,” and much more of this, “My god, I started feeling better right away and then kept getting better, better, better. At the same time, my blood levels went down,” because we’re working to make the cell more resistant and get this stuff out at the same time. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a place where the two can play together, but the underlying thing is you must upregulate the glutathione system, the underlying detoxification system.
Then if you want to speed up depuration by putting some chelator in to get you to pee it out faster, you can do that, but only once you’ve corrected the system. I developed the testing. I moved in to starting Quicksilver Scientific, first doing environmental testing, and then moving on to doing clinical testing, and then moving on to developing the tools to detoxify. That was really my story of how I did that. Along the way, halfway through my PhD, I had 17 freaking amalgams in my mouth. I had come from Bethlehem, this hell place of Bethlehem Steel, the second biggest steel plant in the world. I was stinking full of metals, and I saw it. I felt it. Then when I went to get the stuff out, I used chelators and they got me sicker. That was really how I knew I was going the wrong way. Then when I went to fixing the system, I fixed myself and developed everything that we do now at Quicksilver Scientific.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. Let’s start with testing. What’s the best way to test for heavy metals? The first part of that question I want to ask is if … I know the answer to this, and this gets asked a lot, but if metals are stored in our bones and organs, wouldn’t it make the most sense to take an oral chelator like DMSA to liberate those metals, and then measure urine before and after? If we’re just measuring the levels in the blood, then we’re not really going to get the levels in the tissues.
Dr. Shade: Well, if that was true, it would be the best way, but it’s not true. It’s not that they’re not stored more in the tissue. There’s a dynamic equilibrium between what’s in the tissues and what’s in the blood, and there’s more in the tissues than is in the blood. But the lie is the idea that the chelators go and liberate this stuff from the tissue. They don’t. They don’t get into cellular. All they do is go into the blood, little plasma and get a little bit of the kidney burden, liver … well, they make that more kidney filterable and then you pee it out. You’re still working from the blood. Why not just measure the blood? Then that whole … and this has been all proved out, but the whole mythology around the chelation challenge was that these things go into the blood, and they go into the cells and give you a representative example of everything, but they don’t do that. You’re working with what’s in the blood. You’re going to strip that off into the urine, and hopefully, you’re going to have a reference range in urine that’s from chelated urine, but it’s not. The reference range is from non chelated urine. No matter who you are, when you take a chelator, your urine levels go up. It becomes this excuse to chelate everybody, not a look at where everybody really is with their metals levels. Urine after chelation, if the kidneys are working, is a measure of what was in the blood. What’s in the blood is a measure of what was in the tissues. Fact, when you go and you turn up Nrf2, that’s a trigger in the body to dump things into the blood. When you turn that up, the blood levels will actually rise for a little bit and then come down. It’s showing you what you need to pump things out of the cells, into the blood. But the measurement [crosstalk 00:12:27]-
Dr. Weitz: Now, can I stop you for a second? I’ve heard you talk a lot about Nrf2 as being a key pathway. Why is Nrf2 so important?
Dr. Shade: Nrf2 is a trigger outside of the nucleus, in the cell, that is a stress response switch. It’s looking at chemical and oxidative stressors in the cell. If those oxidative stressors go up, or electrophilic stressors, that means something that pulls electrons out and oxidizes things like metals do, then this Nrf2 goes into the nucleus and it turns up the expression of the genes for all of the chemo protective system. That’s the genes for all of the glutathione synthesis, Glutathione S-transferases and transporters, all the defense mechanisms against those toxins. That’s what you need to elevate in order to throw things out of the cell, into the blood. Then once you’re out of the cell, into the blood, you need to turn up the filters. That’s the liver, the kidneys, the GI, the skin, even, that take it out of the blood into excretion.
Dr. Weitz: Is it sufficient to just send out to Quest or LabCorp for heavy metal serum testing because this is, say, covered by the patient’s insurance and less costly?
Dr. Shade: Good question. Quest and LabCorp are looking at whole blood mercury, and whole blood mercury, not speciated, not separated into inorganic and methylmercury, is really a measure of methylmercury. If I took you, Ben, and I injected equal amounts. Say you had no mercury, and we injected equal amounts of methyl from fish and inorganic mercury from amalgam, we fill up your blood, and then that would fill into the tissues. Then, after a couple of days, it would come to this equilibrium, and we would see a small amount of inorganic mercury and a large amount of methylmercury, or maybe 10, 15 times more methylmercury. It doesn’t mean it’s because you had more. It’s because of this equilibrium between the tissues and the blood, so it’s more to the tissues for inorganic, less to the tissues for methylmercury. Then that means when you go and do blood mercury, whole mercury, it’s really a measure of how much methylmercury you have, which is a measure of how much fish you eat. Inorganic mercury, if all your mercury was from dental amalgam, then you would … and you had no fish mercury, you’d have a very, very small amount in the blood. In fact, the 95th percentile for inorganic mercury is below the detection limits for Quest and LabCorp.
If you don’t eat any fish, you have a ton of amalgams and you send in a blood sample, you’re not going to see anything. You go, “But why don’t I have any mercury?” Then a good occupational toxicologist would say, “Inorganic mercury, that’s in the urine. You have to run your urine.” Your urine may be high, if your kidneys are working, but if they’re not working, then your urine will be low. That’s a transport system in the proximal tubules that brings mercury from the blood into the urine. If it’s not working, you’ll show low urine. You can have high blood, low urine, that’s called retention toxicity.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so what’s the best way to test for mercury?
Dr. Shade: Well, you got to send it to me.
Dr. Weitz: I know that.
Dr. Shade: The mercury TriTest. The blood, we will show you methyl and inorganic mercury independently with independent reference ranges. Then we’ll show the urine. Then we’ll take your blood inorganic mercury and compare it to the urine on a graph, which will show you as your blood goes up, your urine should go up. Are you on that equilibrium line, or are you off? If you’re not on the equilibrium line, and you’re below it, that means you’re retaining it. The kidneys aren’t excreting it and it’s building up in your blood. Hair to blood ratio, hair is all methylmercury. Blood has both. You compare hair mercury to blood methylmercury, it’s more of a liver proxy for how you mobilize methylmercury. There you’re getting excretion patterns and the relative ratios of methyl and inorganic mercury.
Dr. Weitz: Now, why is hair a measure of how your liver mobilizes mercury?
Dr. Shade: Yeah, I know. The urine, the blood is really, really direct. The hair in the blood, we did that based on some studies that were done by Boyd Haley looking at metals, and these are metals that are mostly detoxified by the liver. They were looking at copper, mercury and I think cadmium, and they saw that in autistic kids, they knew relatively how much mercury should be in their body based on … they were pretty young, based on what their mother’s exposure was. They saw that the more of the sphere of the autism, the lower the mercury levels in the hair. They saw a dysfunction in the transport system going into the hair, so that’s where we picked that up. The reason we relate it to liver, is liver is where all the methylmercury goes out. It doesn’t go out through the kidneys. You don’t get any methylmercury in the urine. You only get inorganic mercury in the urine, and then through the bile, you get methylmercury and inorganic mercury.
Dr. Weitz: What about using hair analysis for other metals as a general screen? Because it’s a easy to do and …
Dr. Shade: There’s this whole cult movement around that and … Yeah, maybe I diminished it by saying cult movement, but all the data, if you look to Natural Resource Council, these big scientific groups, the relationship between mercury in the hair, and fish consumption is just well studied, really well studied. A lot of the others are just all over the map. They’re like, “It’s high. You’re screaming it.” “It’s low. You’re not excreting it.” The basic research on whether that’s relevant to the body is not really there. They’d like to call it hair tissue mineral analysis, and it’s as if it’s the same as taking a biopsy, but that’s not really true. It’s never really been proven out. Now, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a relationship to it, and these guys haven’t built out systems that show things. It’s just not a direct way to do these.
Dr. Weitz: Since we’re talking about the metals, I just want to make a suggestion. You might consider including additional metals besides the ones you include. For example, today I had a patient who had symptoms of metal toxicity, and we’re thinking it might have to do with this metal on metal hip plant implant he had, which is cobalt and chromium.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, we actually have cobalt and chromium in our blood metals analysis, so those are in there.
Dr. Weitz: Those are included? Okay.
Dr. Shade: But really, we’ve got to change the reference ranges a lot. When the cobalt chromium comes up, it comes up really, really high, and then sometimes it’s localized. It’s a little bit difficult to track, but they’re both on the … so we have the Mercury Tri-Test, and then we have the blood metals panel, and the blood metals panel, in the nutrients, says chromium, but you just look for when it goes off the nutrient scale into too much. You got manganese. Do you have the right amount of manganese, or do you have this ridiculously high amount of manganese?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Shade: Or copper. High copper is a real problem and it makes synergistic toxicities with all the rest of the metals.
Dr. Weitz: Right. What are some-
Dr. Shade: But there are some we do need to add, but they’re hard to do in blood, so we’re developing a urine panel, too, and that would be nickel, uranium, and one that’s a rat poison and the one that’s a radiotracer.
Dr. Weitz: There’s beryllium. You’re going to add that one?
Dr. Shade: Beryllium, not really. Beryllium, it’s not really toxic unless you get tons, and then you got ones that are toxic when they’re radioactive, but you can’t really tell the difference between the radioactive and the non radioactive ones-
Dr. Weitz: I see.
Dr. Shade: … like cesium. People want that.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Okay, so what symptoms should alert us to the fact that somebody might have heavy metal toxicity?
Dr. Shade: Well, the fatigue and anxiety are the most quintessential symptom. Fatigue, because all the metals are working at a mitochondrial level to diminish the antioxidant pool in the mitochondria. They’re sucking down all the glutathione and the thioredoxin in the mitochondria, and they’re creating free radical damage, which damages the membranes. Then the mitochondria can’t make ATP. They also work at a thyroid level. If you’re looking at thyroid labs, you look at the TH4, TH3 ratios, and what they do is they damage the ability of the deiodinase to take T4 to T3. You’ll have normal or high T4, but low T3. That’s usually a metal thing and it’s mercury, cadmium and arsenic dominantly, and also, to a second degree, the others. Then it works in an adrenal level.
I mean, the metals really accumulate in the kidneys, all aspects of the kidneys, and they burn those out. Plus the adrenals are trying to keep up with things all the time. Another thing that metals do, which is not … it’s sort of an unsung problem, is a disordered inflammatory response. When you have an inflammatory response, you have a little infection. You have a secretion of both inflammatory and pro inflammatory, and anti inflammatory cytokines. You’re trying to create a fire somewhere and a wall around it, so you’re not burning everything up. Metals are shown at physiological levels, the higher physiological levels, to block the secretion of the counter inflammatory cytokines, so you just have a pro inflammatory storm.
I mean, that’s what’s going on right now, that people get sick, have pro inflammatory and not counter inflammatory, and so the metals do that as well. They’re sucking down, then your adrenals are burned out trying to put out glucocorticosteroids all the time, trying to counter this inflammatory storm that’s coming out of the immune cells at a cytokine level. That’s the way that they burn out your adrenals. You’re burning out all your energy supply, then most of them, and the most notable of which is mercury are glutamate receptor agonists. They wind up the hyperfunctioning of the glutamate receptors, which of course, gets you anxiety, and eventually will drive you into a deeper neuro inflammatory state called neuro inflammation. That’s where you engage also the immune side of the brain, as well as the glutamate receptors, and when those really start going, you don’t just get anxiety. Then you get these deeper brain fog, and these cycles of depression and anxiety, and your whole autonomics switch into a dysautonomia in which they are hyper sympathetic, all right? Sympathetic autonomic nervous system tone shuts down detoxification through prioritization pathways. Prioritization, meaning how are we going to use ATP? Now, if we’re parasympathetic, our ATP is going to be driven towards rest, digest, repair, regenerate, detoxify, all the rebuilding stuff, but if you’re in sympathetic, it’s just fight or flight. You’re going to deprioritize all the regenerative medicine. What really engages with the mercury to drive you into the deep neuro inflammation is endotoxin, which you’re getting from leaky gut, chronic jaw infections, chronic UTIs, gingivitis, and periodontitis, all drive endotoxin …
Dr. Weitz: SIBO.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, I mean SIBO for sure, but then we think it’s all in the gut, but your freaking mouth generates a ton of endotoxin, too.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. What’s the best way to detox? Can I just do a juice fast? Or can I just do a water only fast? Can’t my body detoxify itself?
Dr. Shade: You’re laying up these softballs for me, Ben. It would be nice, if only it were true. If everything else was good, and we were living in the mountains, and we were all chill, and we’re eating wild food and getting all the phytonutrients, yeah, we wouldn’t really have a problem, but we’re not. We’re chronically, sympathetically activated, meaning we’re chronically downregulating detoxification. We’re chronically eating inflammatory foods. We’re eating not enough real intense phytonutrient foods. What we need to do is take all this stuff that activates all these nuclear transcription factors like Nrf2, activates cardio metabolic factors like AMPK, to liberate, to end taking things like glutathione, which are the necessary cofactors. That will liberate the metals from the cells, put them into the blood, the liver will jump them into the bile, into the GI. The kidneys of dumping into the urinary flow, and you’ll get them out. Then you just have to assist the process by putting binders into the GI tract that take the things that come out through the bile and make sure that they don’t get reabsorbed…
Dr. Weitz: Well, hang on, hang on one second. I was trying to mute people and somehow … here, let me do this. Let me mute everybody, and then where are you?
Dr. Shade: There we go.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Shade: Just to throw out this framework for detox, you’ve got a cellular level, I call the microcosmic level, and that’s the conjugation of the metals onto glutathione, and the transport out of the cell and into the blood.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. Let me stop you there. What do we mean by conjugation of metals onto glutathione?
Dr. Shade: All right. Well, let me give the framework. We want to push from the cells into the blood. We want to pull from the blood into the liver, dump from the liver into the bile, get it to the GI and stick it on a binder. Now, how do we get it out of the cell? That’s back to the conjugation thing. If there’s a metal in the cell … remember, the metals are never just free ions. They’re always bound to something, and so you have to take it off of a protein it’s bound to, a membrane it’s bound to, and you want to link it on to glutathione. You need this intermediary. It’s called a phase two transferase. It’s called glutathione S-transferase. It’s going to kind of grab the edge of the metal and the edge of the glutathione, bring them close together, whisper sweet nothings in their ear, and boom, they’re a pair. All right? They let go of the previous one and they go with the new one. All right?
Dr. Weitz: Now, where does this glutathione S-transferase come from?
Dr. Shade: Well, it’s synthesized. You’ve got genes to turn that on. You’ve always got a little bit around. Then when you have Nrf2 upregulation, you’ll synthesize more of it. Then it’ll float around in the cell, and it’s sensing when there is a metal in a bad place. It’ll get the glutathione and it’ll pull those two together, and boom, then you have the conjugation reaction, and you have a metal glutathione conjugate in the cell. That’s floating around in the cell, but it doesn’t passively diffuse across the cell membranes. You have to get it out of the cell into the extracellular space, and then in the blood, and that’s the transporters. That’s phase three. Phase three is transmembrane transporters that use ATP and magnesium to push these things out of the cell.
Dr. Weitz: Hang on one second. You’re referring to, we have phase one, phase two and phase three of liver detoxification, right?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. Well, of all detoxification.
Dr. Weitz: Of all detoxification.
Dr. Shade: Well you call that liver detoxification, but what if you’re a thyroid cell and you have a toxin in there, and you need phase one, two and three. What are you going to do, wait for the liver to walk into your thyroid? It’s not going to happen.
Dr. Weitz: But do you have a cytochrome P450 system in the thyroid?
Dr. Shade: Yep.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Shade: You’ve got all that everywhere. You’ve got multiple copies of it in the liver because the liver has to handle so much. Maybe you got 10x more in the liver than you do in the thyroid, but the thyroid has to be able to do this.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Shade: Now we got to clear up the difference between glutathione … Well, I never talked about phase one with the metals, because metals don’t need phase one. All right? Really, if you’re a PCB or a flame retardant like a polybrominated diphenyl ether, you need a phase one to take you from being a nonreactive thing to being a reactive thing, and phase one chops into that molecule and makes it more reactive, so that phase two, you can link a glutathione onto it. Then phase three can move it out, but metals don’t need that because they’re already reactive. We talk about, well, you need the glutathione, then you need to transferase, phase two, then you need to transport, phase three. Metals pick up at phase two, but most other molecules start at phase one, but not all. They all come into the pathways at different places, like a polyphenol. We don’t often think about, “Well, how am I going to detoxify resveratrol?” But you have to detoxify resveratrol, and you start also at phase two, so it’s more rapid than things that need phase one, two, and three.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so we attach glutathione to the metals, and then we have the transporters to get it out of the organ. Then what’s the next step?
Dr. Shade: Then they’re in the blood. When they’re in the blood, then they got to get out, right? So, you have another transporter at the liver, at the basal lateral side of the liver. This is the blood side of the liver. Now you got to think about, make a little rectangular liver cell, a hepatocyte. You’ve got the basal lateral side that harvests toxins from the blood. Then on the other side, you got the canaliculi side. That’s the side that’s on the bile flow, on the bile canaliculus. Bile canaliculus is like … The bile tree is like an upside down root ball going down to a tree trunk, and the little rootlets, the little tiny hairs of roots are called the canaliculi, and they come together into bigger ducts. The bile canaliculus, your secreting bile salts out of your hepatocyte into the bile. Same transport system that moves the bile salts moves the toxins. You’re moving toxins and bile together, and there’s two transporters that are sisters that live together in that membrane. They upregulate, down regulate together. Right there, you’re like, “Wait. What if I’m Cholestatic?” Well, then you’re toxostatic. You have to move bile and toxins together. They got to go together, or they don’t go. You’re setting up this flow from the blood to the hepatocyte, to the bile. The blood, you have transporters, phase three transporters called organic anion transport peptide, OATP, and it’ll pull that mercury glutathione conjugate into the hepatocyte. It’ll go over to the canaliculi membrane, and it’ll dump through MRP2 into the bile flow, and go into the GI tract. Now, that’s all well and good. It’s methylmercury, the kind from fish, the glutathione will fall apart and you’ll be left with methylmercury bound to cysteine, the amino acid with the sulfur on it from the glutathione. That’s actually the same form that you absorbed from the fish, so you reabsorb it in the gut. When that gets down to the gut, you want to stick it onto a binder so it doesn’t come back in. There’s a lot of toxins that have this reabsorption phenomenon, especially biotoxins like mold toxins, but then in the metals, it’s methylmercury and cadmium are the primary ones. We want to kick out from the cell, go to the blood, pull into the liver, dump into the bile, get to the GI and get a binder. There’s all these ways that we can fuck up. The cell might not be doing it, the liver might not be pulling in, the liver might not be dumping out, or you might be reabsorbing. All that I call the directionality. The baton race needs to be hand off one to one to one, to get all the way down there, stuck onto a binder and then you poop it out.
Dr. Weitz: What are some of the sticking points in the liver that are going to keep us from being able to handle this?
Dr. Shade: Inflammation. There’s a couple main ones. I want to hit inflammation and the prime inflammagen something that generates inflammation being endotoxin. Same thing we just talked about a second ago it stops at cellular level and it stops at the liver level.
Dr. Weitz: What about in NAFLD, which is getting to be really common?
Dr. Shade: Yes, we’ll wind that in, in just one second. Inflammation in the liver, and the inflammation can be from endotoxin, or the inflammation can be secondary to a fatty buildup in the liver, and we’ll talk about AMPK and how that winds into this whole thing. But then stress, just being sympathetically dominant, locks up that bile flow. That’s why when you’re parasympathetic, you get hungry. Why? Because your liver opens up and you secrete bile down into the GI, and you secrete other digestive enzymes. But one of the things that block all that, so I want to set up a connection between the glutamate receptors and sympathetic dominance, and the bile flow. The other thing that can block the flow of the toxins out of the liver is estrogen dominance. High estrogen, whether you’re just estrogen dominant, or whether it’s during pregnancy and it’s temporary, are going to block that bile flow. Now, what does estrogen do in the brain? It makes you glutamate receptor hyperactive, which gives you glutamate dominance, which gives you what? Irritability and anxiety, which is what estrogen dominance gives you, and what does that do on an autonomic level? It puts you into a sympathetic autonomic tone, which is further deprioritizing detoxification, so that whole stress axis just locks you up.
We want to calm things down now on a hormone level. What unlocks all that? Progesterone, because progesterone is a GABA receptor agonist, or at least the metabolites are. Progesterone, if you taste it, is hyper bitter, and bitters all open up the liver. That’s why we use a lot of bitters in opening up the liver. All that is open, close. Fatty liver then, when ever we … That’s more of a AMPK switch. AMPK is what’s activated when you’re carb restricted and when you’re fasting, when you’re on a keto diet, when you exercise really heavily. All that draws down ATP temporarily, and activates the AMPK kinase, which activates burning of fuel. What fuel do you burn? You burn your stored glycogen, you burn your stored fat. If you’re always carb loading, you’re always building up fatty deposits. Fatty deposits are the generators of chronic inflammatory cytokines, like NF Kappa beta, and they build up in the liver, and they generate NF Kappa beta and TNF alpha highly in the liver, which eventually result in activating these hepatic stellate cells, which end up being myofibroblasts, which then start making fibrotic liver. All that is activating all these inflammatory processes which are blocking detoxification. Fatty liver brings with it toxicosis, or toxostasis. Then going the opposite way opens it all up. Now, it turns out, a lot of the things that I thought I was using as Nrf2 upregulators are also very strong AMPK activators. All your polyphenols, like quercetin and luteolin, berberine and resveratrol also do that. EGCG does that. They’re all very good for that. Turns out, lipoic acid is, too.
Now, lipoic acid is probably our best Nrf2 upregulator, and also an AMPK activator. We’ll use that … if we’re going more after clearing out liver, we’re going to use a different blend of things than if we’re going for cardio metabolic strength. We have a product called AMPK Charge. Used to be called Keto Before 6. Puts you right into ketosis. In like an hour, you’re making blood ketones, like nutritional ketosis from eating fries and drinking beer the night before, because it’s such a strong AMPK activator. Now, if we just want AMPK, we get more with the polyphenols. If we want more Nrf2, then we’ll put in the lipoic acid as well, so that we can get the cellular response to detox. AMPK also brings with it a big amount of cytoskeletal organization around the liver. I mean, people talk about leaky gut all the time. Who talks about leaky liver? There is leaky liver.
Dr. Weitz: Of course.
Dr. Shade: There’s leaky liver, there’s leaky blood brain barrier, and as Grace Lou likes to talk about, there’s also leaky vagina. There’s leaky everything, and adds all the integrity of the adherence in the tight junction. What brings them up? AMPK activation. In fatty liver and fibrotic liver, you have leaky liver. AMPK restores that cytoskeletal organization, and it’s also restoring the canalicular membrane, and the transport of the bile and the toxins out of the hepatocyte. It just brings all of that together, and including bringing up cell membrane polarization.
Dr. Weitz: What’s the best way to get the bile stimulated?
Dr. Shade: We use this stuff called liver sauce, and liver sauce, as the name implies, is something that is like A1 for your liver. It does everything. We use bitter compounds, classical bitters like gentium and dandelion, solidago, and then we use myrrh. We have all that in there and then we have phospholipids…
Dr. Weitz: Let me stop you for a second. Those bitters have been a sort of naturopathic-
Dr. Shade: Go to.
Dr. Weitz: … go to for long period of time, but have they really been shown scientifically, to significantly affect bile flow?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. I mean A4M made me put a bunch of slides in my presentation, and yeah, they’re cholagogues, they help regulate bile flow. Every one of them has been studied independently. The last 10, 15 years are ridiculous for how much primary research has come out of the universities looking at all these specific compounds and herbal extracts. They mostly like pure compounds, but they’ll do herbal extracts and stuff. All that shit works and … every part in the chain, sometimes we just know that it brings it up. We got bitters and then PC is part of the MDR, which is a transporter that keeps the bile flowing, that uses all phosphatidylcholine. We got all that in there. Then we got milk thistle and lipoic acid for Nrf2 and AMPK. Milk thistle anchors … This is part of why it’s hepatoprotective, is it anchors those transport proteins in the canalicular membrane, so when the oxidative or chemical stress comes up, they don’t give up on their job, because you’ll see, often they just turn all that transport off. Then what do they do? When there’s too much free radical damage and toxin damage in the cell because you can’t get it up through the bile, it dumps all that stuff out of the cell back into the blood. It’s the backwash of the liver, back into the blood when the liver can’t process. Because say it’s under too much autonomic sympathetic stress, hormone stress, inflammatory stress, it dumps it all back into the blood. That’s all the negative effects people get from detoxification, when they’re, “I’m herxing.” You’re not herxing. Herxing is a specific immunological reaction. What you’re doing is dumping all these toxins from your liver back into your blood. They’re going to your kidneys. You have that lower back pain. They’re going to your skin and you’ve got rashes and itching and they’re going to your brain, and you feel like crap. All that’s because that anchoring through the liver into the bile isn’t happening. Milk thistle helps anchor that as well as bring up phase one and phase two. It’s helping with all the different phases, and then we have an immunologic program in there that’s an AMPK activator, and a mast cell stabilizer, and that’s quercetin and luteolin, and DIM. Now, DIM, why do people use DIM? People use DIM for estrogen metabolites, but they miss the whole bigger picture of DIM. It’s an Nrf2 upregulator. Good, it brings up all this detoxification stuff. More importantly, it’s an Nrf2 epigenetic modifier. When epigenetics block either Nrf2 or some of the mechanisms, some of the … well, just say when epigenetic processes block Nrf2, DIM can release them, and we see that mostly from mold. Mold isn’t always epigenetic. It’s what’s called post translational blockage, but DIM reverses all that. Mold blocks your liver function, and DIM can reverse that. DIM also reverses a lot of the immunological reactivity to foods. The TH cells, you’ve got TH one polarization, then TH2, TH17. TH2 and TH17 are this runaway allergic inflammation, and then there’s T regulatory dominance, which is immuno passivity. DIM pulls you into T regulatory dominance, and takes you away from TH2 to TH17, which are sort of autoimmune runaway reactions. DIM is bringing down inflammation because inflammation blocks detox. It’s unleashing Nrf2 from post translational and epigenetic effects-
Dr. Weitz: You’re saying …
Dr. Shade: … add it’s an AMPK activator and an Nrf2 activator. You want ingredients that hit a lot of targets all at once.
Dr. Weitz: So DIM is something we could use if we have a patient who has a lot of food sensitivities?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. I started using it because I was getting into hormones and I made a nano DIM. I just started taking it, like I do with everything. I’m like, “Oh my god, my food reactivities are going away.” Then all these different changes, I took it for like three months and it was like every week was like a new week. It was like, the sun is shining.
Dr. Weitz: Wow.
Dr. Shade: Then I gave it to other people and a lot of their food reactivities have gone away. It’s one of these unknown-
Dr. Weitz: a clinical pearl.
Dr. Shade: What’s that?
Dr. Weitz: That’s a great clinical pearl right there.
Dr. Shade: Wow. It’s a huge one.
Dr. Weitz: Obviously, gut health is super important because what’s going to happen to the bile if you’re constipated and your gut’s not working right?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. When the bile is not flowing, that will get you constipated. When you’re constipated, it’ll stop the bile from flowing. Those both are feeding against each other. SIBO, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth because your bile is not flowing enough, and bile is a detergent and an antimicrobial in the upper GI. The upper GI isn’t supposed to have all the probiotics. That’s the lower GI. Upper GI is pretty sterile. It’s a chemical reactor. When that stuff crawls up there, it’s because the bile is not pushing it down. Whenever you’re trying to do a SIBO protocol, you should be encouraging bile flow.
Dr. Weitz: It’s interesting because Dr. Rahbar, who I think is listening to this call tonight, he’s a integrative gastroenterologist, and he was telling me how he gets SIBO patients, and a lot of times they’ll have bile that flows backwards. He’ll see it in the upper intestine. He’ll see it in the stomach.
Dr. Shade: Flows backwards. You mean, like they throw it up?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. That’s a problem with the sphincter there, going into the GI and it’s coming back up there. That’s a directionality problem, and that needs to be corrected, and I don’t know necessarily how that’s done.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Okay. I’ve heard you talk about using CBD as an important factor in this process.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. Inflammation and detoxification are fundamental opposites. Inflammation blocks detoxification at a cellular level, at a liver level. It’s just doing it all over the place, and at a brain level. The inflammation is making you sympathetic dominant. CBD blocks inflammation at a brain level first, and then cascading down. It’s taking you from sympathetic dominance to a parasympathetic sympathetic balance. It’s cleaving the cycles of neuro inflammation by stabilizing glutamate receptors and stabilizing activated microglia. I first saw this use in autism. The autistic kids, god, you’d have to … For the first two years, you just talk to them about detoxification. For the next three years, you show them the bottle, and the next 10 years, you start one year, every year you give them a drop more than you used to give them. It was a painfully slow process. Then you give them some CBD and you’re like, “Okay, here’s the adult dose.” I mean, it just created this beautiful window for detox. You do the CBD, you push in the liver sauce, you give them the binder and you’re like, “Whoa, you’re detoxifying like a pro.”
Dr. Weitz: Now, is there a role for using chelators in this process?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. First, restore the whole damn thing and make sure the cells are working, the liver’s working, everything else. Then if you want to poke in a little bit of DMPS or DMSA, I like DMPS, better, or EDTA for sure, and then just do small doses, and that’ll take more out of the blood and put it through the kidneys into the urine. Now, first you want to do that testing, make sure that’s all right. Then you can speed up the process. I remember Huggins used to use five to 25 milligrams of DMSA a day, along with using our metal binder and some glutathione, and a lot of the guys over at Ultra Wellness, Mark Hyman’s group, Todd Lapine does this. He blends it, too. You’re going to do Chris’s glutathione system upregulation. I’m going to do DMPS. You don’t do the chelators without the other. When in doubt, you’re always going to do glutathione system upregulation. If they’re pretty stable and impatient, then you can put in some chelator, too.
Dr. Weitz: Now, which are the best binders and does it depend on each metal? Is there an ideal binder for each metal?
Dr. Shade: Well, we made IMD, which is like putting DMPS on a little silica grain. That one’s super good for all metals.
Dr. Weitz: What is that made out of?
Dr. Shade: These are sulfhydryl groups, like you find on DMPS or glutathione, and they’re covalently bound on to a tiny silica gel particle with tons of surface area. It’s like a little particle with a million hairs that all have sulfhydryls, and any metal that gets near it just getting trapped into these hairs and get taken out the GI tract. Those are most specific for mercury, cadmium, arsenic, but those still do lead and nickel. It’s interesting, oral EDTA is a binder for lead because EDTA is not absorbed through the GI tract, but I think you could just use IMD for all of the metals there. Now, we added zeolite and charcoals, because zeolite and charcoals are going to work on your mold toxins and a lot of the … all the other environmental things, the pesticides, herbicides, the volatile organic chemicals. We actually use a cocktail. We use charcoal, zeolite, chitosan, which is a molecular mimic for wellchol, that’s using the Richie Shoemaker protocols for mold, and then we use IMD. Then we put in some GI candy. It’s a acacia gum and aloe.
Dr. Weitz: This is all included in your Ultra Binder product.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, the Ultra Binder.
Dr. Weitz: And then there’s-
Dr. Shade: We do this combo, pair, push catch liver detox. You do the liver sauce, and then the Ultra Binder a half hour later. Push the toxins, catch them. Then you got all the add-ons. I got neuroinflammation, I add on CBD. I got metals, I’m going to add on glutathione, I got lead. I’m going to add on Liposomal EDTA. You take them all with all the liposoms at once and then go to the binder.
Dr. Weitz: In terms of the binders, when’s the best time to take them? You said a half an hour after you take the liver sauce or the glutathione?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. A half hour’s a nice simple timing. It can be anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes up to an hour. 45 might even be better but a half hour you feel it. You take this stuff and then a half hour later if you’re toxic you’re like, “There’s something happening.” You take the binder and you’re like, “Oh, perfect.” Binder then anytime you get into a detox and you feel funny, more binder almost always blocks the reaction.
Dr. Weitz: Now of course binders will block all these nutrients from having any role either potentially, right?
Dr. Shade: Yeah, if you take your nutrients and your binders at the same time, but that’s pretty stupid so why would you do that. Remember your GI is a tube, one thing in, then the next thing, then the next thing and they all go. It’s funny, they don’t actually mix, they actually go in a line.
Dr. Weitz: They don’t exactly go that quick. Yeah.
Dr. Shade: You take your binder in your wait a half hour, 45 minutes until you eat, and then the binder sooth, and then you can eat. You can take your supplements and stuff. If you want to be really careful, then your wait till lunch for your supplements. If you’re doing something like a serious medication, say you’re doing your thyroid or heart medication, give it an hour, two hours afterward, just to make sure that the binder wasn’t, didn’t have delayed gastric emptying, because it will bind that kind of stuff.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Okay. Who wants to ask questions? We’ve got a few questions. I think I’ve been trying to blend them in. Somebody asked about at the beginning, you were mentioning about resistance and susceptibility. I guess some people can get exposed to toxins and not have any effect, and other people are super sensitive.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, and that is how upregulated your cellular detoxification systems are and your systemic ones. It’s really more, how good is the cell. Because I’ve seen … If the cell’s pushing away really at a fast rate, the blood levels will actually be higher, but the cellular levels are lower, and so it comes down to that coding for those. When that is up, you’re keeping your cellular machinery free of the metals. When you keep inflammation down and you keep Nrf2 and AMPK up, you’ll have higher resistance.
Dr. Weitz: In terms of when you get a complex patient, and this seems to be something that I see fairly commonly. You have a complex patient and maybe you do a bunch of testing and you find out, maybe they have some mycotoxins and they have some metals, and maybe they have a few gut issues. Where do we put metals in importance? Or do we try to … Let’s say you had a patient who had mycotoxins and metals, would you prioritize one and try to remove it, or would you try to do both of them at the same time?
Dr. Shade: I do those both at the same time. The only really question … You might modify some of the things that you’re giving them. But you really want to get all the toxins at the same time, and you can’t pretend like you’re going to kick one out and not the other. Now, maybe Glutathione S-transferases is more important for metals, and make me glucuronosyltransferase is more important for molds. You can either do them both at the same time, or you can go back and forth but there’s no separating the two. You can’t activate one without activating the other, you can favor one, so that’s not really a big question. The big question is the infection versus the toxin.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Shade: Infections block detoxification. There was some schools that said well you … All right, infections block detox, but toxins diminish your immune system. A lot of people said, just get the toxins out, your immune system will pop back up. It’s not been my experience with a lot of other people have been like, “No, you got to clear an infection first.” But it doesn’t mean you do just one or just the other. We’re such a binary brain we think we do one or the other. It’s just relative importance. You’re going to be holding up detoxification but at a lower level, because as you kill things more toxins come out. You’ve got that going on, maybe you got that running at 30% out of 100. And you’re going to run antimicrobials at 70 to 100%. Then as you get a little further into it and you’re wiping out the infections more, you’re going to switch and you’re always going to have both going on, so you don’t get a resurgence of the infection. I start antimicrobial dominant switch to detox dominant. When you know there’s creatures in there, you got to clear out.
Dr. Weitz: I’ve heard some practitioners saying, “Look, you got to fix the gut first, because they’ve got a bunch of gut problems and leaky gut, and you were talking about endotoxins, that’s just going to make the process more difficult.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, but sometimes the got problems or from the toxins, and so the toxins are locking the gut problems in place. You can never just do one damn thing. I mean, that’s just fricking psycho. You’ve got to be blending things. Yeah, you’re working … But when you’re using Ultra Binder you’re working on gut. So to me you’d be doing push, catch, maybe not hitting it so hard, but you got gut problems, so you’re going to put a lot of other gut things in there. You’ll be using the programs just for the gut, you’ll be fasting them more, you’ll be keeping them away from bad foods, but you can’t just ignore detoxification.
Dr. Weitz: One of the questions came in, if you’re using your liver push catch protocol, does drinking coffee affect it?
Dr. Shade: It helps it.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Shade: At least in my espresso centric lifestyle. Yeah, I mean, coffee actually has AMPK activating activity, it has niacin in it. It’s got a lot of different things. People are like, “Oh, caffeine, it’s a toxin.” If you do too much coffee, you’re going to make yourself sympathetically … If you’re wired, you’re going to be sympathetically dominant and you’re not going to do that. But a little bit of coffee … What was the what was the Arrested Development song? Coffee makes you go to the bathroom. I don’t have a cafe but my cousin does. It was in a song. Everybody knows it makes you go to the bathroom, which means it’s a bioflow stimulant. You can do an enema of it, and everybody knows that works, but just a little bit of coffee does that too. The right amount of coffee, good. Too much coffee, you’ll lock up the system.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Somebody asked if you have a really high viral burden and metal toxicity at the same time, but I think we just covered that.
Dr. Shade: Well, yeah. But what do you want to use for that? There’s a lot of different things, but I want to do that always at the same time. Low glutathione makes high viral burden, and so you’ve got to bring glutathione into the system, and the metals are draining out the glutathione. A cat’s claw was the thing that I use the best for high viral burden. A cat’s claw along with push catch and glutathione was how I dealt with high viral burden. But sometimes [crosstalk 00:58:17].
Dr. Weitz: How does cat’s claw-
Dr. Shade: … the other ones that are better.
Dr. Weitz: How does cat’s claw work? That’s an immune stimulant?
Dr. Shade: Yeah, it’s poorly researched, but clinically people show it. It’s an immune stimulant, and it’s immune modulators, so the immune system doesn’t get so hijacked by the viruses. Things like Epstein–Barr and cytomegalovirus I’ve seen the best results with. They have things that block your ability to take the virus and digest it through autophagy, and then mountain immune response to it. The best I can see it’s blocking the blocking of the digestion of the virus to mount the immune attack, but that one’s worked really well for us in the past.
Dr. Weitz: It’s interesting how some of these pathways like the AMPK pathway and Nrf2, are some of the same pathways that are really beneficial for antiaging as well.
Dr. Shade: Oh, yeah, totally. Because, if there’s anything we know longer live people have higher glutathione. I did a glutathione study for LifeWay patches we were trying to … Way back before it was even making glutathione. We’re measuring serum glutathione in people are whole blood glutathione in people and seeing if this product raised the glutathione. But the thing that was so obvious is these people who came in and look super good for their age, all had the highest glutathione. The people that look very dry and [inaudible 00:59:53] burned out for their age, they’re the lowest glutathione. Glutathione, why is that? Because it controls telomerase activity for one. Goes into the nucleus and controls cell division, controls the immune system, it controls detox. It does all these different things. Glutathione is a major antioxidant thing, and so Nrf2 activation as part of that. It just turns up all the antioxidant system. The only down with it is in cancer that system gets hijacked for immortalization of the cell. Everything that’s good for antiaging people worry about for cancer.
Dr. Weitz: Serum glutathione, is that a good measure of glutathione levels?
Dr. Shade: Whole blood.
Dr. Weitz: Whole blood glutathione?
Dr. Shade: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. [crosstalk 01:00:40].
Dr. Shade: If the lab can match it right. It’s very tricky, it’s very labile, it breaks down a lot.
Dr. Weitz: I see. It’s interesting. I wonder if anybody’s looked at whether whole blood glutathione levels are a marker for outcome with SARS-CoV-2.
Dr. Shade: Well, there’s all these anecdotal responses of giving people glutathione and blocking the runaway inflammation of SARS. All the anecdotes we got from people using … As soon as they went on liposomal glutathione, it was like, “ah.” It went from being really bad to being, “Oh, this isn’t so bad.” That’s a definite one.
Dr. Weitz: That was after they had breathing problems or what’s [crosstalk 01:01:31]?
Dr. Shade: They were already sick. These were going through some of the doctors that work for us, so I wasn’t direct on all of them. But they had that whole hyper fluishness, and yeah, there was breathing problems. They weren’t in ICU, but they were having problems. Then over in New York, there were some cases where people were hyper sick and they took glutathione and started getting better right away.
Dr. Weitz: Somebody asked can you measure pyroglutamate, which is a glutathione metabolite instead of whole blood glutathione?
Dr. Shade: Yeah, I can’t really speak to that, whether that’s a good measure.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Okay. I think people are still coming, but I think those are the questions. I have any final thoughts you want to leave us with Chris? [crosstalk 01:02:20] you want to talk about?
Dr. Shade: No, we’ve said a lot there. I think the importance of the of the autonomic system is the thing that’s missed the most often, and how do you get yourself to an autonomic balance, meaning you’ve got good parasympathetic balance. It’s not just things like CBD, GABA also works for that. But it’s getting into breathing, getting into mindfulness. Taking more time for your time for yourself. Yoga, tai chi is my favorite. All of those lifestyle factors are going to be a big X Factor [crosstalk 01:02:50] from getting you into proper detoxification.
Dr. Weitz: Do you recommend sauna and things like that to stimulate detox as well?
Dr. Shade: Sauna is excellent. That’ll take out some of the excess burden while you’re moving a lot of toxins around, the sauna will relieve some out through the skin make that a little bit easier. Foot baths are actually not taking toxins to the skin. They’re an autonomic measure. I’ve had people do foot baths and measured their blood metals before and after the foot bath 30 minute thing, their blood metals go up. That means the tissues dumped into the blood, but the next day they’re back down. The foot baths are relieving the autonomic block. Saunas are working on autonomics if they’re nice, calm saunas, and they’re also relieving toxic burden through the sweat.
Dr. Weitz: What about any these electrical modalities like PEMF?
Dr. Shade: Those all definitely work on autonomic levels. I haven’t measured them. I felt them. I know they do work. You have to set the biochemistry in place, and then what are your different technical modalities, and what are your life’s style modalities. These are all things that add into it.
Dr. Weitz: You recommend infrared sauna for sauna?
Dr. Shade: Infrared is the best yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you for-
Dr. Shade: Thank you.
Dr. Weitz: … spending this time with us. It was fascinating. We all learned a lot, great clinical pearls. Just want to remind everybody that everybody who listened in on this call, get a 15% discount on your next order if they order before September 4th I think, and use the code Weitz W-E-I-T-Z, my last name 15. Thank you, everybody, and we’ll see you next month.
Dr. Shade: Great. Thank you so much Ben. Take care.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
