The Quantified Body

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Kara, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Well, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here and I’ve just enjoyed talking to you for the last ten minutes about all things toxicity. So I look forward to jumping in and talking to your audience.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Absolutely. Yea, I don’t know if it’s a passion of yours. It’s been a little bit of a passion of mine. Toxins and everything. I heard you on a detox summit and it was a great interview you did there. It was one of the better ones on toxicity. That’s why I reached out to you. It would be great to have a discussion with you about it. So, how did you first connect with the topic of toxicity? Where did it come around for you? Is it something you came across in your practice a lot? How did that whole interest start for you?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : That’s a good question, Damien. I did my post-doctorate training at Metametrixs Clinical Lab in Atlanta Georgia. Metametrixs was later, not too long ago, it was purchased by Genova. If you are familiar with Genova, they’re running Metametrixs suite of testing. Metametrixs, it was studying the toxins from a laboratory perspective; and also being part of the medical education team. Not only lecturing, but speaking. Doing consultations with doctors all of the time about the toxic burden. Incidentally, I was also in my clinical practice, and have been all along, so using it in practice. But, I came into the study of toxins from opposed to stuck in a lab.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great, great. In your practice, is this something that you come across quite often? You’re in integrative medicine. I should just take a step back a little bit. We haven’t really talked about integrative medicine. We had Jeffery Bland talking about what functional medicine is. What is integrative medicine in comparison?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] Another really good question. It’s always important to define terms. I imagine you could ask twenty of us who say that we’re integrative or functional and you’ll get little variations of definitions. So, integrative is sort of an over-arching definition that I think acknowledges the value in all forms of medicine. I am trained as a naturopathic physician. We do indeed prescribe medication when it’s indicated, but my core training is in taking a natural approach. As we used to say, removing the obstacles of cure. Working in foundational wellness and health and healing and nutrients and so forth. And then, if medications are indicated, you step in. Or if surgery is indicated, you step in. An integrative approach really quite simply; is acknowledging the value and when to use all of these systems of medicine that we have. A traditional or a conventional western approach, a traditional naturopathic approach. You can pull in paradata. You can pull in traditional Chinese medicine. As you are trained, and as it’s indicated with a given patient. That’s integrative medicine. Now, within that, is functional medicine. For me, functional medicine is a way for us to practice systems medicine. Most functional medicine practitioners would say that they’re integrative. That’s the larger picture. And then, you drill down into particular approaches. For me, functional medicine is a model of being able to practice systems. It’s a way of data capturing, of analyzing the patient that enables us to step back. Actually, Dr. Bland, Jeff Bland, has said “from telescope to microscopes”. You want to look at the being and their environment and then you want to drill down to the molecular level. That’s an incredibly careful and detailed history. To actually be able to capture that, you need a good structure. So, the institute of functional medicine has the matrix and this is a fabulous tool that you use in your chart note. The matrix for capturing systems medicine. Of course, actually; let me go over here and tack on to that what Jeff Bland said. Obviously, you are looking at the being and function and you’re correcting those imbalances. You’re correcting the dysfunction to restore wellness.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Basically, you come from two schools. The traditional medicine schools that we know is hospitals and so on, and you’ve also studied the functional medicine and some of our naturopathic and alternative sides as well. You just try to use whichever tool you think is relative to the situation. That sounds like the best of all worlds. Sounds like the best approach. I would say that’s really the kind of approach we like to get covered on here. Where it’s just taking whatever works and whatever context without any allegiance whatever to any. There’s a little bit of politics and fan stuff going on as always does go on in health. There’s all these different modalities which fit different situations. It sounds really like the best of all worlds. In terms of toxicity, when you’re addressing that, is it more on a functional medicine side? Or would you find a bit of a mix of everything?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] :Addressing toxicity. What do you mean from a functional perspective?

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : What I’m just trying to understand how you approach the whole thing. For instance, when a patient walks into your practice, and you typically decide that there’s some element of toxicity involved in their problems. Where would that come from? Would that come from one discipline or is it like a bit from everywhere?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] :Well, I would say that, conventional medicine. The conventional western model, doesn’t acknowledge the influence of toxins in the disease process. Sufficiently, yet. The data are completely irrefutable, so there’s some movement towards that. It would be as a functional medicine doctor. Baseline, anybody walking into my office has a toxic burden. That has been well established. Anyone coming in to my practice, I know, has a toxic burden. That toxins are influencing the course of disease that they’re presenting with. Most of the individuals that come to see me in my practice have something complex and chronic. I know that toxins are playing a part of that, but the question becomes, for me, as the clinician, in my analysis. My detailed analysis of the patient. Both history and lab, is to what extent are toxins influencing this person’s disease process. Therefore, in terms of our treatment, how immediately and how aggressively are we going to address them? Always a toxic burden, always influencing the course of disease. In fact, when you restore it. When you take a functional, sort of a systems approach, to treating somebody. You take care of their diet and you make sure their nutrients are appropriate. Those extremely fundamental steps are helping release the toxic burden. Toxins are always addressed in my practice. All of those foundational things are addressing the toxic load that we all have. But then, the second piece becomes, once we go in there and do that foundational assessment and treatment. Do we need to then, chelate… move into a more aggressive detox protocol? Do further laboratory evaluations and so forth. For all of the folks who come to see me, incidentally Damien, I do assess, as I talked about on the detox summit. Everybody, I look at whole blood metals and it’s a screening tool.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : So you do that test with everyone who comes into your practice?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea. I sure do. I’m always screening for stuff. You know that whole bloods are reflective of current exposure; going on in their life now. But it’s a screening tool. Then, we’ll go on and do further assessment as I deem appropriate from taking the history.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : So, that’s kind of your baseline. Okay, great. You are saying basically this applies to people of chronic, complex conditions which you tend to treat. Would you say that there’s other people who should think of this also? I’m thinking how far should it go? Like if someone’s athletic performance isn’t as good. Or if their mental performance isn’t as good. Or if they’re just someone normally who’s a bit tired these days, but it’s not, they haven’t classified themselves as actually ill yet. Or, are not going to see doctors about it, but they just don’t feel in top form and are not doing so well in general. Are these the types of symptoms or are there specific symptoms that anyone who doesn’t feel like they’re in a chronic condition yet should look at? As a pointer that this may be something that they should look at.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea. Absolutely. Let me underline it. Let me scream this from the rooftops. We all have a toxic burden. Period. We all do. We’ve all been exposed to toxin. We’ll have an influence in the course of our wellness. We want to consider them. Now, in my practice, most of the individuals who see me happen to have complex chronic disease. That’s just, that’s my training. That’s who I work with.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right, right.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Those individuals, absolutely have a toxic burden. We all do, and there are steps that we all need to take to ensure that we minimize our toxin exposures. As well as our body’s ability to detox. I would say an emphatic yes. To optimize athletic performance you would absolutely want to consider the toxic burden. Or to a little bit of brain fog. So, going back to your question to me. What are some typical signs and symptoms you might see? Certainly, fatigue. Actually, fatigue would be a piece of the puzzle. Brain fog is a pretty classic first type of sign. Allergic disease. When you look at the literature on the impact of toxins, you will see allergies screaming. A lot of the organo- toxins- BPAs, phthalates, parabens, etc., etc. A lot of those, the first reaction is some sort of allergic reaction. That’s because the body wants it out. You’re exposed to something toxic, you sneeze. Or you develop a rash. It’s this reactive response to some bad thing trying to come in.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : You are saying. Would that be like rashes, would that be some tiredness responses to foods? Could it also be like sneezing, like hay fever kind of things?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. They’re broad, and generally speaking, they’re non-specific. Endocrine disruption is another potential reaction. Hypothyroidism, hormonal irregularities. Estrogen dominance and so forth. All of these things can be influenced by toxins. Really almost any symptom can have a toxic burden. This is because when you drill down to the molecular level. When you look at what toxins are actually doing in the body at the molecular level. One of the fundamental lesions is increased oxidized stress. You are causing that fundamental imbalance in the mitochondria. In tissue. Towards different tissue. They’re just doing this fundamental damage process. But, depending on the type of toxin, you can get some idea of symptoms. But, they’re still broad, Damien. I hope that I’m making sense.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. It’s still an area we’re investigating and exploring. One of the ways I look at it, is like, these are basically molecules. The only reasons they’re toxins is because they are unnatural to our body. Our body’s made up of certain types of molecules and atoms. These come into the body and just because of the way chemistry is. Biochemistry is, they connect with, they disrupt, and they change in some cases, how things are working in our body. Because instead of selenium we have some other toxin which is binding to something in our body which it shouldn’t be. It’s kind of like distorting how our bodies are supposed to work. Therefore, they start to work in different ways. Which means we get some kind of symptoms we’re not used to. Which you’ve referred to many. Is that a fair way to explain it?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : I think that, yea, absolutely. That’s nice. That’s a really nice snapshot that’s easily digestible. Yes. What’s interesting, just leaping off of that, is the idea of polycarbonate biphenyls, or PCBs. Talking about an unnatural compound. Something that the body doesn’t recognize. Often times, we store these compounds in our fat. We want to get them out, and PCBs, certain metals and so forth; the body is smart enough to say I don’t know what this does. I’m getting it out of here. The safest place to dump it is in the fat. You’ll see it accumulate there. The half-life, the time these toxins can stay around in the body, it moves into the decades and decades. Because, our body isn’t equipped. We didn’t evolve with these exposures. They are synthetic, as you said. They’re man made. We sequester them, and they stick around, which is a drag. Which is unfortunate. Which is why we would like to minimize our exposure.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : That’s great. I’d just be interested; have you tested yourself? Have you run these whole blood, for instance, screens on yourself? Or other people which are more normal and haven’t come into your practice at a chronic disease level? In comparison, how do they compare to the chronically ill? Are toxin levels lower, or how does it look in your profile versus someone else’s?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : That’s a great question. It depends on what we’re looking at. For instance, if you have a water soluble toxin that our body can get rid of. You might see periodic high levels in an individual. Say that you just purchased a carpet. That carpet is off gassing petroleum derivative molecules that your body can eliminate. You might measure some of those compounds and you’ll see a lot of them in your urine. Then, you step away from the carpet. Your body turns it over pretty quickly if you have good detoxification systems, and you will see them normalize. You can see that in a healthy individual. One of the signs of that, we all have these toxic burdens. In a healthy individual, they’re able to detox and remove and get on with their life. They might notice when they’re in the carpet off-gassing. When they’ve got a little bit of a runny nose. Or maybe a slight headache or a cough. Some of the signs. But then they get out, they deal, life goes on and they are no longer bothered. In the toxic person, yeah, you could absolutely see higher levels. In the person with the complex chronic condition. Part of this is that their body isn’t able to get rid of them so well. They just might have detoxing difficulties. Be it phase one, the first step in detox or phase two. For myriad of reasons, we can have challenge. Maybe we don’t have adequate nutrients to detox. Glutathione, I’m sure you’ve talked to your folks about it before, is really one of the major players in our ability to detox. We actually waste it. I shouldn’t say waste it. We don’t recycle glutathione when we use it to detox. In that complex chronic disease patient with a large accumulation of toxins, they may have spent the glutathione and they have not adequately replenished it yet. Glutathione comes from three different amino acids in the body. That’s how we are able to make it. But, if you’re chronically detoxing, or attempting to detox, you could run out of glutathione. One mole of glutathione detoxes one mole of toxin, be it mercury, or be it any number of different organic toxins. We also can have mutations in our ability to detox. We can have genetic mutations that might slow us down. Make us vulnerable to accumulation of certain toxins. We see that in complex chronic patients as well. In those cases, we make choose to look at those genetic mutations. When we find them, we really want to support those particular areas all the more aggressively. A lot of people have mutations in the glutathione s-transferase enzymes. The glutathione s-transferase enzymes are, as you can imagine, as the name implies. They’re major players in our ability to detox across the body. Not just in the liver, but in the skin,(and) in the kidneys, (and) in the gut, (and) in the brain. We can have mutation in these enzymes and therefore, when we see it in our patients. When we know they have a toxic burden. We need to get in there and really support it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You’ve outlined many different ways in which our detox system may not be able to cope with the flood of toxins we are getting these days from many different synthetic sources. Carpets and heavy metals and so on. Is this something, I guess something I just want the audience to understand, is: Are issues with your detox system pretty rare? When we talk about mutations, sometimes, genetic mutations. It sounds like it could be something rare. One in a hundred, or one in a thousand? But my understanding is that a lot of these mutations today are relatively common. It’s a bit like the MTHFR, which is extremely common these days. There’s a lot of these mutations and just differences in our make-up which mean that maybe we’re not, we haven’t got a super powered detox system which is really working really, really efficiently in terms of chemical processes. It slows it down a bit, and then when you combine that with the fact that we have a lot of toxins around us today, it seems relatively common that they can crop up for some people. That this is hampering them in some way.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea, yep you got it. You asked me about the incidents of mutations in our detox system. Are they common, you asked me? Yea, they sure are. We have somewhere in the order of four million single nucleotide polymorphisms. These mutations that you and I are taking about. These single base para switches, like MTHFR, is the most famous of those. We have somewhere in the order of four million. We have tons of them. Loads of them. Many of those aren’t significant. We have backup systems. There’s a lot of redundancy built into the body. We do have backup systems. So, a lot of those aren’t going to be particularly relevant to us and to disease process. But there are also many that are. So, yea, I would say that all of us, we have some mutations in our ability to detox. The question is, what hand of cards were we dealt? How big of a deal is that playing in our disease process? I do look at detox snips in a lot of my patients. It may not be the first thing I look at. It depends on what someone presents with. I do end up looking at them frequently. The glutathione s- transferase system. It’s huge. We have many of them. In different types and in different tissue locations. When you see one, it’s not the end of the world. Yes, we do want to support it, of course. But, it’s when you see multiple or when you see patterns. MTHFR is a big player in detox as well. Indirectly, but significantly. It’s going to help us make the glutathione that we need for the glutathione s-transferase. It’s a big, MTHFR is a fundamental player in methylation. We detox with methylation also. Everything is interconnected and a nice broad snapshot of what are the genetic issues, and how many and then go back to whether or not you think it’s playing a role in whatever the individual is presenting with. There’s a lot of angles we need to look at here, to guide us in our treatments. I want to step out for just a second. So, as not to overwhelm the listener. Really, the very first thing that we can do, Damien. The very first thing. You know, this, I know this and use this in my practice, is investigate what’s going on in current time, and we expose your sources. Any patient coming into my practice will have a meeting with my nutritionist on clean living, clean eating, clean living in the home and so forth. Lowering the toxic burden is huge.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right. This sounds like your foundational work, that you said you did at first. What are the biggest things that you do there, that you feel are important to clear the way.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Far and away, the biggest thing we can do is clean up our diet and go as organic as much as possible. I would argue, I would say, that most urgently, we want to look at clean fat sources. Organic butters, organic milks, organic meats, etc. They really almost as important would be looking at organic vegetables and fruits and so forth. Going as organic as you possibly can, using the dirty dozen from the environmental working group as our baseline. At lease achieve the dirty dozen. If you can’t eat organic versions of those, like apples.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : This dirty dozen are the ones with the highest levels of pesticides and are there other chemicals involved in those dirty dozen? Is it primarily pesticides? And in many forms, in neurotoxins and different ones?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Primarily, we are looking at pesticides and their many forms. We could move into discussing, that’s what the environmental working group is testing anyway. They’re looking at pesticides. We could then talk about metals, we could talk about genetic modification, but that would bring us into tomorrow. We would be talking…

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Exactly.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : If we go organic, Damien. If we go organic as much as possible, we’re going to bypass all of these toxin issues. To the best of our ability. That’s the foundational. That’s the entry point.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : I guess, because some people are concerned about cost of organics, so I’m guessing that’s where you introduce the concept of the dirty dozen. Trying to focus on the biggest ones?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. Exactly. Focus on the major players. Do not eat non-organic apples. If you can’t find good organic apples, then just skip apples. Secondarily, say you are in a location where you simply cannot find organics at all. I remember in medical school, having a debate with my roommate at the time. “Kara, there are no organics.” She lived in Hawaii. I find it hard to believe there are no organics in Hawaii. “There are no organics in Hawaii’. She argued with me. This was years ago. I don’t know that I buy it. But then, you talk about, ok, how do you clean the food? How do you clean it appropriately? You can do, you can use a vinegar solution. You can soak your fruits and vegetables in there, and you can reduce the pesticide load that way. That’s not optimal, but it’s a whole lot better than not doing anything else. A 10% white vinegar solution that is the cheapest vinegar off the shelf at the grocery store. 10% in a basin of water, and soak the vegetables for three to five minutes. That’s going to reduce the water soluble pesticides. Now, I use the vinegar wash. Actually, I use it all the time for any fruit or vegetable that I’m washing. Because it’s easy. I just have a spray bottle at my sink. I actually just use 100% vinegar. It’s so cheap. I have a bottle of vinegar. I just twist on a sprayer and I spritz it on whatever I need to wash. Let it soak for a period of time. That would be the next best thing.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Great. I’ve traveled in many countries, and I’ve kind of tried to practice eating clean. It can be pretty challenging to find organics in some countries. Especially third world countries. I’ve used a similar strategy as you’re outlining. Focusing on the ones that are cleaner. Avoiding the worst ones, and trying to clean. Thank you for that very practical tip. That’s very helpful for people. Once you’ve done this first…

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Let me just throw in one more tip here. I’m sure you were doing this when you were traveling. You can always bring some extra vitamin C. We were talking about how much we loved that at the beginning. You can bring some extra nutrients to just protect yourself.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right. Absolutely. We can talk about that and the kind of treatments you use which are also helping from that level. Is this the one big pot of your foundational area? Or is there something else you advise your clients to do? Water, or something in the house, or anything like that?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yeah. So the other major things that, guidelines to clean living, yes. You absolutely want to filter your water appropriately. I think charcoal filtration is the absolute way to go. I don’t know what your position is on reverse osmosis, but we can get into big problems if you remove all the minerals from your water. So, reverse osmosis is the cleanest, there is no question about it. But all the minerals are gone. You can develop significant, ironically, dehydration from consuming lots of reverse osmosis if you don’t adequately replenish the minerals. For me, I use, and I recommend, charcoal filtration to my patients.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Have you got any specific brands? To make this a little bit practical in terms of recommendation. If someone wanted to go and get something to help them.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. My favorite brand has been for years. The Multi-Pure filtration system. You can get that. I think its Multipure.com. It’s easy to get. It’s pretty pricey though. They have a bunch of different systems, so there’s different price points on it. The other one, it’s nice, and it has a much more palatable price point, is Usana. I think both of those are quality products.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. I’ve been using Berky. I don’t know if you’ve come across them before.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : I haven’t. I haven’t, but you can send me some information.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : I will. Just a different alternative I’ve seen. I’m not use how they compare to yours.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You go through. You do a whole home assessment with the patient. Just minimize exposure sources in the home. Incidentally, actually, I have a blog. I have a couple blogs on lead. I have a blog at drkarafitzgerald.com, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald.com on lead exposure. It was a case of Parkinson’s disease. This woman was rehabbing a lead house. Lead paint was in this old house they were rehabbing. She ended up getting very, very early onset Parkinson’s disease, and concurrently gave birth to a child who was later diagnosed with Autism. I think both of those were significantly, significantly, significantly influenced by this lead exposure. There are some pretty nifty tools, if you are concerned about lead, with your patients. I often am, if I do a urine, or a blood test. There’s some pretty nifty kits that you can do home lead testing with. You can buy these on Amazon and you can get them at Home Depot or whatever those big hardware stores are in the UK.You can buy lead swab kits and just swab stuff. A lot of ceramics that come in from China and there about, can have lead in the ceramic. You swab this particular lead sticks that I use, and it will change color if lead is present. If you look on that blog, you’ll see. If you scroll down, you’ll see a patient sent in a photo of the positive finding on one of the plates that eats on every day. She’s always had high lead and we needed to do some sleuthing to identify it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Wow. Is this potentially a lot of ceramics? Everything comes from China these days, and having lived in China, I can definitely understand that lead might be in everything. Is lead particles around it, or is this actually they’ve used it in the material itself?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : They’ve used it in the material. So it’s in the ceramic, and it’s absolutely worth it then. It would be great for you to do this yourself Damien and see what you find.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Sounds like an amazing test.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It’s handy and it’s cheap. There are more sophisticated and sensitive tests that some of us use clinically. But this is an easy, easy, cheap way to just get in there and start looking now. When we did it, when I first started using these at the laboratory. We swabbed all of our teacups and tea pots and plates that we had in the lab. We all had different plates in our offices that we from. Eve Brolley, the daughter of the former owners of Metamatrixs, had this beautiful tea pot she brought home from China. It was riddled with lead. It was absolutely riddled with lead. Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : You know, this is really important. Because, if we go back, you said one of the screens you do is the whole blood. The first screen you do is a whole blood test for heavy metals and metals. It would be interesting which metals they are and then you have to kind of go through this detective process. Where is this coming from? When you have high levels of lead or of arsenic and it doesn’t make sense sometimes. Where is this coming from? I don’t know what exposure it might be.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : First of all, which metals are you screening for in that test.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : In my whole blood, and these are all routinely covered by insurance in this state, so it’s extremely easy for me to do. I look at mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic. In everybody. Another great example. A mother and a daughter came to me. Actually, daughter was complaining. Her chief complaint was anxiety. She was in her twenties and it was so disabling. Early twenties, she was unable to attend college. She had to withdraw from college because of this. Relatively recent onset of severely debilitating anxiety. In her history, she did mention. Actually, her mom was with her, and they both were putting massive amounts of effort into eating very healthy. They were buying organic, they were eating lots of fish. They were proud of themselves, and clearly they were doing a good job. One of the things that they had, on a routine basis. Multiple times per week, was sea bass. You and I know, sea bass is very high in mercury. When I got her blood mercury, her whole blood mercury, it was off the charts. That was the smoking gun in this girl’s anxiety. She was becoming mad as a hatter. She was in frank acute mercury toxicity from chronic ingestion of sea bass. Of mercury toxic sea bass. We removed the exposure source and we detox her and her symptoms abated. Considerably. She was able to return to school. She does need ongoing treatment and you need to pay attention to what’s going with her regard to detoxing. It was quite useful in that regard. Sometimes, I’m kind of topic jumping here a little bit Damien. You can reel me back in. Sometimes you’ll see, in fact frequently, we won’t see any evidence of toxins in the blood. That’s because the half-life. The amount of time these toxins actually spend in the blood, isn’t long at all. It’s hours, or a day or two. They’re so toxic. These metals are so toxic to us, that our body wants to clear them out. Wants to take them out of circulation as soon as possible. For lead, we store it in the bone. mercury is going in the fat, etc. So, you will get a lot of people who have no burden at all. For those individuals, we need to drill down a little more deep. When I suspect the metals are in, which I really do for most folks. At some point, after we’ve addressed the foundational, we’re going to do what we call a chelation challenge. We’re going to look at the urine level of toxic metals. I’ll give them a compound that will help draw the chemical, the metals, from the body and dump them into the urine. Then, I get an assessment of total body burden.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. So this is versus the whole blood. Which you were saying, it’s very much on going exposure. I guess, when you are doing that, it’s interesting because it’s the critical. What are you being exposed to every day is more likely to show up there. That’s why it makes a lot of sense if you do that first. Because it could be something that’s going on every single day and making it worse. Versus looking at this urine challenge test, which allows you to see what’s the history, how much have they gotten this burden? When you are doing this, we have spoken a little bit about the urine challenge test before. Which labs do you use? What kind of chelator are you using for provoking challenge?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : I think that Metamatrixs does a great job. In just being really familiar with their analytics, so this would be going through Genova. I think they do a great job. I also think Dr. Sata does a really good job. Those are the major, those are the two labs that I use for this.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Just out of interest, can you compare the two, or basically how they are on different standards? So you have to stick with one. If you’ve got your history with different patients with Metamatrixs, it makes sense for you to stick with that, because then you’ve got this comparison.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. Correct. That’s absolutely right. I mean, you can take a, generally speaking, if you see a high in Dr. Stata, you are going to see a high in any assay. You are going to see it in Metamatrixs, but you are right. There’s different units, there’s different methodology, so it’s wise to just continue with whatever lab you did your baseline assessment. It’s wise to continue your baseline assessments with that lab. Just keep the same test. For chelation, remember, going back to the foundation. We need to make sure that individual can detox. We need to make sure their nutrients are up to speed. That phase one and phase two is good. We need to absolutely make sure kidney function is ideal. That they are moving their bowels. They’re having at least one complete BM per day. Once we have all of that dialed in, then we go in and we do a chelation challenge. For most of my patients, I’m going to use an oral DMSA challenge. Generally speaking, the easiest way to go is 1000mg in two divided doses over eight hours. The half-life of DMSA. Some people will choose to do a 24 hour toxic metal measurement, but I think eight hours is plenty because the half-life of DMSA is just under that. The DMSA is going to be cleared out of the body quickly and that’s what you are trying to look at. You want to see what the DMSA, what metals it’s pulling out. So for that reason, you can do an eight hour measurement. You start the collection, take 500mg or there abouts of DMSA and then four hours into the collection, you take a 500mg or there abouts a second dose of DMSA. Then, you collect for another four hours. You take a portion. You mix the urine, take a portion of that specimen and send it into the lab. I think that’s a decent way to assess. Some of my individuals, who are too sensitive, for whom I think the DMSA is not going to be tolerated well, we can use antecedal cystine, glycine. There’s a number of natural compounds that we can use. There are data on antecedal cystine as an effective alpolic acid. Having chelative properties will help pull it out, so we can do that if I deem it necessary.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Alright. Thank you very much for bringing up the, you were talking about the importance of doing your nutrient stage first. It’s safety. Because if you are going to use a chelator and pull toxins out. Heavy metals, then, it can be a bit hard on the kidneys and the other detox organs.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Incidentally, if you start drawing it out, and they don’t have adequate nutrients. If their detox systems aren’t up and running, and they are very dependent on nutrients. Selenium, and zinc, and glutathione and metholdone, (and) many amino acids. If those aren’t there, ready to do their job, you will make the person sicker. Even basic kidney function has to be intact. Beyond that, they need to have their detox ability really up and running. The other thing is, Damien, this is so fundamental. It’s so fundamental, and that is one of the major roots of entry into the body is orally. We eat toxins. We’re eating these metals in our food or whatever. If you’re deficient in minerals, if you’re deficient in your essential minerals, those transport proteins. The ways that their minerals are taken in to the body. If there are no minerals, or low minerals present, those transport proteins will be high jacked by toxins. This data has been demonstrated. One of the easiest ways you can reduce your exposure source of metals is making sure you have adequate essential minerals in your body. It’s so foundational. Those transport proteins, this has been shown actually very strongly in iron deficient anemia. Padmium, manganese, which can be toxic in high amounts, mercury and so forth. They can, they hitch a ride into those transport proteins that would otherwise be used for iron or magnesium, and actually, they are relatively non-specific. A lot of the essential minerals move into the body using these transport proteins, and if you are deficient in your minerals, which most of us are. Eating a standard western diet, those metals get a ride in. The other huge piece of this, is that these same transport proteins are at the blood brain barrier. Not only are they entering into circulation through the gut, they’re going to have readier or easier access to the brain and the central nervous system. One of the most fundamental things is to make sure you have adequate nutrients and especially adequate essential minerals. Isn’t that, it’s profound.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea, it’s amazing. That’s part of your foundation, right.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Part of my very fundamental, foundation.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : And amazingly simple. Which nutrients do you focus on?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Well, I focus on all of them, but I’m looking at, as you mentioned earlier, selenium. Selenium can actually bind and render inert mercury. Bind it and pull it out of circulation. In the body. So, mercury is highly toxic and selenium can bind it and just allow us to eliminate it. It’s potent. So, if you’ve got a mercury burden, chances are, you’re burning through your selenium. Selenium is used elsewhere in the body as well. So, selenium is a big player. All of them are. Magnesium is a huge, huge player. Zinc is a huge player. I would say that those are the biggest three. You also want to, of course, make sure you have adequate calcium. Lead is stored in bone, it’s going to displace calcium and other nutrients. You want to have adequate calcium in your diet, or take some degree of supplement. Chromium can be useful. Secondarily, zanadium. But really, the major minerals, magnesium, selenium, zinc and so forth are what we want to have in abundant supply.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : How do you bring those levels up. I guess, because I’ve come across this before. The way I thought about it was that it’s kind of like, because you’ve deficiencies. You’ve got these molecules that have holes. Waiting to pick up something. So, you’re leaving all these holes in your body, basically, waiting to pick something which is a similar molecule. You have the toxic molecule come along. That’s what you were talking about, the bones and calcium and lead seems to basically have a similar molecule. It will just bind there because you’ve left the gap open by having that deficiency.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea, yea, yea.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. I think it’s really great how straight forward it is really.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It’s elegant

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It’s elegant the way it works.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You just eat a great diet. Then supplement with extra minerals as see fit. I assess mineral status in my patients. I’ll look at red blood cell status of minerals. Along with my whole blood toxin. Incidentally, Damien, on most of my patients you’ll see generally speaking, higher amounts of toxins relative to their essential minerals. It’s all of the time I see this. The toxins are a little bit higher. Even if they’re not frankly elevated, they’re higher normal or something like that. Minerals are so often in all of us, low or very low normal. Very low. Low normal to very low. You always see this skewed ration. Almost all the time I see this. Unless somebody is really intentionally addressing it. This is the most fundamental thing that we turn around. We’ll get your essential minerals nice and robust and that alone will help drive down your toxins. Then, we’ll do all of the other things. Look for exposures and so forth.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: For the essential minerals, I don’t know if you use this or not. The thing I’ve used in the past is the Greens powders because they have a broad spectrum of nutrients. Other than just trying to eat a better diet with a greater variety of vegetables is really where you have to start with this. What are your main recommendations? The ways you try to get your patients up to speed with that?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Ok, since I’m testing, I’m going to see the degree of the deficiency. If it is high enough, I’m going to supplement them with individual nutrients. I very often use magnesium as a standalone nutrient. I very often use zinc as a standalone nutrient. Selenium, since we don’t need as much or maledium or some of the others, we can use in a complex mineral supplement. I think the Greens powder is great. Whatever company you’re using, obviously you know that they’re ensuring their quality. They’ve tested for metal quantities and so on and so forth. It’s a super clean product. It’s rich in metals, so that’s a nice thing. Baseline. While I’m first starting to work with an individual, and they are really depleted, I’m probably going to use individual supplements relatively high doses to get them up to good levels. Then, after that, we can do a complex mineral formula and obviously, we are working with their diet. For a period of time, we are using individual nutrients.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Thus the importance of, even if someone’s not chronically ill, would you recommend they go to a practitioner such as yourself? If they feel this could be an issue for them. It is athletic performance or whatever it is, it’s still worthwhile going for this process with a practitioner to get it done right, right?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Oh, yea. I think so. Absolutely. It’s really a lot of fun. It is! It’s very interesting to look at your biochemistry.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It’s a lot of fun when you get energy and performance back. You start thinking clearer. All these thing are really exciting.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Not only that, Damien, but think about disease prevention. Now, we’re moving into the world of ethnogenetics, which I’m sure you’ve talked to your people about. Not only are you preventing disease in yourself, but if you are going on to have children, you are preventing disease in them and their offspring. On, and on, and on. If you think about ethnogenetics. It’s amazing what wellness will do to us. Not only us as an individual but really globally shifting. The planet and the generations to come, it’s so incredible. I would say that it’s a continuum of wellness. Optimizing athletic performance is not that different from treating the complex chronic disease. You’re still seeing underlying nutrient deficiencies. You might be seeing in the athlete increased oxidative stress. In fact, that’s common because they’ve got tons of mitochondria that are incredibly active. You’re going to be seeing some of those same imbalances. I used to, when I was in medical school, I was a road racer. I did a lot of, in fact, I liked criterium. I was working really hard at building up tons of mitochondria in my legs, in my quads and stuff. I enjoyed doing that at the lab. We had a lot of physicians focusing on wellness in the lab. Looking at data of athletes is so interesting and cool. Working on optimizing mitochondrial status. Making sure their nutrients are extremely dialed in so that you can shave a second or a few seconds off their time. After your season, often time, athletes notoriously get sick. Most students, they finish their intense period of training and then all of their event schedule, they often get sick. How do you prevent that as well? That’s something that we could do. So, sure. I’m more than happy to work on wellness. I think it’s a lot of fun.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. Great, great. Would you say that the patients who get chronically ill, stick with it and work on this afterwards? I’m just interested from the standpoint, once they’ve learned about these tools, basically they see the benefits themselves. Just in daily life and being proactive.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. It’s like throwing the stone in the pond. There’s this remarkable ripple effect. Then their friends and their family say, “Oh, my gosh. Look at you. You look so much better. You have so much energy. Your skin is gorgeous. You’ve lost all this weight. What did you do?” They have this influence on those around them, just by being representatives of what wellness can be.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : I’d like to point out, you said the way wellness can be. I do feel that a lot of us are walking around and we feel like we’re normal today, but if we went through these kinds of processes, we’d feel this level of being well. Which we haven’t actually felt before. Certainly the way I’ve felt on my journey. I feel like I’m thinking clearer than I ever have. Things like this. I think it’s a real shame. That we don’t realize that we could be better and that we could feel better. Because we’ve accepted some kind of norm. Maybe because it’s been going on so long.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : That’s right. We all acclimatize to whatever is in front of us. There’s that analogy where the frog. If you put a frog in a pot of water, you can slowly turn the heat up until its dead. Until you boil it. It will never, it won’t hop out. We get used to the disease process. We get used to feeling lousy. Just like the frog in the water. That’s actually an analogy that I learned from a patient. Who, incidentally, just became so wildly healthy. It just really changed his experience. He was writing to me and he said it’s like the frog in the pot analogy. The other thing is, this whole idea that lean on that we’re aging. Oh, I’m forty I’m supposed to be tired. I’m forty-five now, my bones are supposed to ache. My skin is supposed to look all saggy and gray. There’s this whole notion that we’ve built into the culture. Into the medical system. Because, really, the larger conventional medical model hasn’t had, does not have still, good tools around wellness. Therefore, all of these various signs and symptoms that we’ve been talking about, that are the early disease processes that we can change. They’re always attributed to aging.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. Which is a real shame.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It’s a real shame.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It’s a scape goat. We had Aubrey de Gray on the podcast previously and he talks about how a lot of these damaging processes, basically that are going on. It’s not aging.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : We’ve given the name to all of this stuff, aging. But it seems like we’re aging faster because of today’s environment and the things going on today. It’s a shame that we just said “Ah, its aging. It’s normal.” Instead of trying to seize the day. So I just wanted to go back to a couple of things that we missed on your intest. You said you were using different chelators in some patients. Right, because if they are sensitive to the DMSA, which I’m guessing is because maybe they’re more mineral deficiencies. Or their detox system is having a harder time. Does it matter which chelator you’re using, in terms of what shows up in the tests? Are they standardized for DMSA or like so? For instance would anecetalsistine, which you said is a bit softer. Would that only chelate some of the metals. You would get a footprint or a pattern just for some of the metals and not some of the others?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : DMSA, so there are these, what they call binding affinities. Binding affinities vary depending on the agent that you use. Binding affinities simply means how tightly does that chelating compound bind the metals you want to look at. You can look up tables of binding affinity and see what’s going to hang on to the metals you want to look at most avidly. With the highest affinity. DMSA is really great and very well known for its ability to bind mercury. Less so lead, and less so some of the other metals, but it will bind them. It just doesn’t have as high of a binding affinity. Acetylcysteine is actually a little bit less. Now, it’s not going to bind as tightly as DMSA. Because, DMSA has structurally, if you look at it. It’s got a lot of sites for the metals to bind on. A lot of these Sulphur groups that the metals will bind on. If you look at it structurally, you can see why it’s so good at pulling out metals. Acetylcysteine is different. Structurally, it’s got only a single cell per group, instead of I think four on DMSA. It’s still going to. Acetylcysteine is just used in our body. We evolved using acetylcysteine and glutathione which is made from acetylcysteine to bind many different types of metals. Acetylcysteine is good, it’s just not going to have the same kind of affinity. It’s not going to bind them as strongly as a chemical. Now, DMSA is great for mercury. EDTA is going to be better for lead. Depending on what you do clinically. There are different cocktails or compounds that you can use. I don’t use EDTA in my practice because I don’t do IV. Really, ideally, if you’re going to use EDTA, you need to deliver it IV, intravenously. In order to really have it work. People use oral EDTA sometimes, but the data around using oral EDTA isn’t as good. Whereas the data on DMSA is very strong. It’s been used forever.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : That’s good to know. I’m guessing the labs, because they ask you to write down which chelator kit you use, they standardize against the different chelators?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Well, no. Generally, it’s so challenging. The lab, because they’ll have lab ranges for if you used any kind of a chelating agent. Ranges based on chelating used versus no chelating used. Because when you try to get specific. Like, for DMSA or for a specific ranges for EDTA, then you have to control how the protocol is administered. So everybody needs to use the same amount of DMSA and so forth. There are some laboratories that focus exclusively on occupational exposure. Toxicity in the workplace or something like that. Some of those places will have a very tight protocol that you can follow. Followed by ranges based on that. But, it’s a whole different arena. When you just had a massive cadmium dump in a battery factory or something like that. But for most of us, working with the less than occupational exposures. We’re doing the best we can. That’s what we have. Chelated ranges versus non-chelated ranges.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It sounds like its diagnostic enough for you to get your job done and identify the problems, right?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right. So, we haven’t really talked about the other stuff. We talked a lot about the metals and the whole chemical side. Which we were taking about earlier where the pesticides. How do you approach the chemical side of detecting that? Does that come after the metals? If you’ve gone through the whole blood metals and before you thought there might be some metals you went for the urine, when would the chemicals? When would you start looking at them? Be suspicious that that might be an issue?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea. Well, again, I’m going to assume that all of my patients have a burden. We really do. It’s been demonstrated. You can go to CDC and you’ll see. The people inside the area, in the farthest reaches of the globe, have some sort of organo- toxins, sadly. So, we all have that, so I always come in with that. Go through the clean living and get the nutrients and do all of those foundational things, and then from there. If what they’re presenting to me with clinically and if their history is compelling, then we move into to looking specifically at the organo-toxins. Genova, Metamatrixs, really developed awesome panels and you can get them now through Genova. You can look at the volatile organic solvents. You can look at PCBs, you can look at coroneted pesticides. You can look at many different toxins, organ toxins and I think that can be incredibly useful.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Are those broad spectrum panels or are would you have to decide where you’re going to focus?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You can get a broad spectrum panel from them now, that has a good price point on it. I would go there. I would go there because unless somebody gives you a really clear exposure history. For instance, my patient with ALS, who grew up in an orange grove. Unless you can really nail down what likely they’ve been exposed to, given their exposure history. Starting with a broad pattern, a panel is the best way to go. That’s what I recommend and do.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : What percentage of your patients are you looking at these kinds of panels with?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Not as big as I do with the metals. I would say, maybe at this point, maybe 20% of my patients I’m looking at these. It’s not that it isn’t a very useful tool, because it really is. Especially when I’ve got neurodegenitive conditions presenting to me. Where toxins are really. Thinking about toxins with those folks. Like with that early onset Parkinson disease. For her, she had this very obvious lead history. But for people coming out of Florida, or they worked on a farm. Some of these odd neuro-conditions really scream the need to have these kind of evaluations done. It’s another point that I wanted to bring up. This folds into our earlier discussion. That is, sometimes, when you do these foundational interventions and you really get the body functioning. You’re removing the toxins from the get go. Sometimes the body does it. If the body’s detox ability is intact, even in complex chronic disease, you can turn it around. People get on with their lives, and naturally remove them. You don’t have to go toward the more aggressive evaluations and detox processes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : So, it’s kind of like you are getting at a lot of things just with your foundation work we were talking about earlier. When you were saying you test for 20% of the patients. I guess these are the tricky patients. Where you are still sorting through it and you’re like, well we haven’t got it yet so we are going to have to keep on looking for the sources. What are you seeing comes up with these panels? Is it very, very different depend on where they come from? Where they’ve lived, like you were talking about. The specific examples there. Or do we all have a bit of these things in ours and how do you treat it? Do you have to be very targeted? How do you get pesticides out of the body, if it’s not doing it itself?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : For me, exposure history, you are going to get a lot of information. It can give you an idea. Gosh, a patient of mine, who really had some of the worse allergies I’ve ever encountered. Remember, allergies are a potent clue that there’s a toxic burden present. Grew up, literally, with a super fund river flowing through his back yard. Phenomenally. There was so many different toxins in this river. There were tanneries, leather tanneries around. Just all sorts of stuff in Montana. We needed to do a wide sweep. Incidentally, he had massive amounts of triclosan in his urine. Actually, it was by far, the highest amount I’ve seen. Which came from, not this super fund site. We saw evidence of body burden of PCVs and other chemicals in him for sure. But the triclosan came from those hand sanitizers. I’m just thinking of it now. This guy is a physical therapist by training. He sanitizes his hand after every single solitary patient, and he was using it as a toothpaste. They throw triclosan in toothpaste. It’s horrible. He had off the charts levels just from using a hand sanitizer and toothpaste. Just as an inside folks. Look and see if you’ve got triclosan around. If you do, remove it. Not only is it, will it increase allergies. All sorts of new data are emerging around it with regard to it being an endocrine disrupter. So, messing with out hormones and so forth. We can get triclosan out pretty readily. Anyway, Damien, organ toxins. I would recommend a broad sweep investigation to identify it unless there is a clear cut direction in their history.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : How would you target these things and remove them. A lot of these things you’re talking about are fat soluble. Is that correct?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Let me give you a really neat story. When we were, back at the lab when we started to put together our toxins panels, and we were really flooded in the research. So much data are coming out, every hour of every day, around diseases associated with toxin exposures. You can imagine, as we were developing these panels and we were in the research around them, we became really morose. Very, very, very, very depressed. What do you do? Everybody has PCVs and the half-life is decades and decades. What do we do? The research around detoxification is not yet as strong. It will become, because we have no choice but to face this. We got pretty depressed in the lab, just looking at these day in and day out and day in. Just really how up a creek we all were. How screwed we all were. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. So these PCVs that are in our bodies that we can’t move out. The fact of the matter is, in fact, we are able to move them somewhat. One of the interesting stories was one of the guys in our lab had developed this farm raised salmon on a bagel habit. Every morning for breakfast, he would have a salmon, lox on a bagel. Every single morning. Its farm raised. Taste delicious. Man is it loaded with PCVs. It really is. So, all of us were experimenting on these panels ourselves because we were developing the assays.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Tastes great. I used to love that too.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : He gave his specimen, and his PCVs were really off the chart. They were so elevated in him. Again, it’s depressing, knowing the half-life. Oh my God, he’s stuck with these. What we did with him, was just put him on a good standard detox protocol. A good detox powder, good greens drink, nice super potent high fidonutrient green drink. A handful of various minerals and some brassica. Lots of those good brassica veggies and so forth. Measured a follow-up, and we absolutely saw reduction in his PVC burden.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. How long afterwards was the follow-up?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It was a month. One month. He was moving it. The other thing, this is also sweating, exercise. Mobilizing fat will liberate PCVs into circulation. That is, if you are losing weight rapidly, and you’re not somehow doing a concurrent detox with that, that will become a problem. That’s why some people can feel awful when they lose weight. It’s also an opportunity for us to detox. In the weight loss process, you want to have care to make sure you are able to detox and that you’re moving those toxins that you’re going liberate from fat into the blood, that you’re moving them out. There are ways that we can do this. There is a small bit, emerging pool of research that suggests that we can move these guys out. There’s a group out of the University of Kentucky here, who have shown in animal studies, primarily, that just this. Combating the effects of PCVs which are very oxidative with essential fatty acids and with different fidonutrients, plant based nutrients. Will reduce the toxicity of the compound. Not only can we help remove them from our bodies but we also, reduce the damage that they cause. Those two ways of approaching it, is effective and it’s powerful, and it puts us back into the driver’s seat. We don’t have to be victims of this inevitable toxic burden that we have.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. That’s a great point to finish with. We don’t want to think. It’s not a great story to say you can take all these toxins in your body and there’s nothing you can do about them. Thank you so much for giving us that point of hope. Actually, that just that our bodies are naturally able to do this, if we work on the foundations we were talking about earlier. Providing what the body needs. So I just wanted to give you one last, quick fire question that we give everyone. What data metrics do you track for your own body on a routine basis? Is there anything that you follow up with monthly or six monthly, or once a year? That you like to keep an eye on for yourself?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : This is a whole other topic, and we’ll have to schedule me again. I love the nutrition physical exam. A really easy data metric. I should actually not laugh, but in the winter, I tend to get a little bit of eczema and I can track both how clean my diet is as well as how my nutrient status is. My essential fatty acids and in particular I find gamolenic acid to be well. Some of the physical changes that I can see in the winter, in myself, give me a nice picture of what I need to be doing differently. With regard to my own health, I like using, annually, this battery of testing that I do on my patients. You were talking to be about people coming to me for wellness. You absolutely can do it. I recommend it to my family as well as doing it myself. Let me look at all my nutrients, let me look at my toxins. Let me see how my mitochondria are functioning. Let me look at my amino acids, and so forth. You can cast this wide net, take a look at it, and correct it with dietary changes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Kara, thank you. I can see you are really enthusiastic about this, and it’s been a great conversation and thanks for bringing up so much new information and advice for the audience. Thank you very much for your time.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You are welcome, Damien. My pleasure.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Thank you.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s a real pleasure to have you here. I’ve been following your work for a long time indeed. Can we start off with, is lead a toxin, and if it is, why, and how does it damage us?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well the answer is, yes. If you look at the periodic table, lead is able to fool the body into thinking it is supplying good things, like zinc, and the net result is lead does not support the key metabolic steps that things like zinc do support.
With the end result that lead, even in extremely minute quantities, is absolutely a negative effect on our health, and we are all loaded with a minimum of one to two thousand times the level of lead in our bone, that was present just 700 year ago.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. Have there been biopsies or things like studies that have quantified the amount of lead in tissues, or in bone?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: We have studies telling you every tissue, from the back of your eye to your toenails to your hair, there’s a part, everything has been tested, and the level is known. And it’s different from tissue to tissue, and of course it will be different in people who have impaired ability to push toxins out, or people who have increased exposure because of a life where they work with lead paint, or they’re a welder, or many other occupations that give people lead as part of their job.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great. So you just described a mechanism for how lead is a toxin. You were describing how the body believes that lead is zinc, or one of the other metabolites, one of the other minerals that it uses in its functions and its cells. And when it does so, it’s putting it into enzymes, and different areas of the body, and those parts of our body stop functioning. Is that a correct way of looking at it?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That’s a very clear and succinct way, yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Oh, great, great. Are there other ways in which it does that? So besides basically stopping at parts of our bodies from working which I think we can all understand that we don’t want parts of our body to stop working, or to start working in the wrong way does it create oxidative stress, or does it do anything else while it’s in the body?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: It has many mechanisms by which it is doing the poisoning of our ability to use oxygen. It increases free radical related damage. It’s a toxin on many levels.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, thank you very much. So, what are the typical health conditions that you have linked through your work, or you’ve seen in your experience, that particular lead toxicity tends to lead to?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well, initially we always thought of it as it related to damaging nerve function, with neuropathy and numbness, tingling, impaired judgment, depression. But as time has gone on, we now can relate to its adverse effects on every tissue in our body, so that we know that it’s causing stress on the heart, stress on the kidney. And across the board, there is no tissue in your body that is exempt from the adverse effects of lead.
And it’s hard for people to understand that you, in your body, store lead primarily in bones. So therefore, if I do on you a blood test, a urine test, or a hair mineral test, and I come back and say, “Gee, it doesn’t look any worse than anybody else.” Because we all have some lead. You cannot find a human being that is free of lead.

But if I say you don’t look like you’re particularly lead poisoned, I am giving you very misleading advice. Because only Harvard has done these studies, because it takes a very special instrument to non-invasively, instead of doing calcium in your bones, which is bone density, instead to do lead density, using specialized equipment that I think we only have about six setters in the United States, who can do this test.

But, when they do it, they are able to confirm that what you see in the lead in the bone is not accurately reflected in urine, hair, or blood, with a net result that people are being erroneously mislead into thinking that lead toxicity is not one of the reasons for their chronic fatigue, their impaired judgment, their depression, their weakened heart. And across the board, it’s really sad that the average doctor still thinks that lead in the hair, or blood, or urine is enough of a test. And it’s not.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. So there you’re referring to, in functional medicine we often use the urinary metals test. So what we’re looking at, the metals that are coming out your urine. And sometimes then we’ll do the post chelation test.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So using something like DMSA, or DMPS, and then taking urine sample to see that. So, do you see any purpose in that test? Do you think it’s relevant, in terms of just lead? If we’re talking about right now, is this something that you use with your patients? Is there any way that you approach quantifying? Is it with that test, or do you use something else?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I was the co-developer of the laboratory called Mineral Lab, which we sold many years ago to Doctor’s Data, and I had offices in Europe and Asia and across America, from the east to the west coast. So, I loved tests, because without tests, the patient has no way of knowing what’s going on, nor does the doctor. My only problem is that there’s always a limitation into how accurate tests are.

So, a provoked urine test by chelation has served in a fantastic way to help millions of people, because a provoked specimen wakes you up to the mobilizable lead in the patient’s body. And that number will help motivate the patient and, when necessary, the patient’s employer, into doing the needed health care.

I’m looking now at a different dimension, since I will be 80 years of age very shortly. I’m looking more at the effect on longevity, and the subtle effects that are not readily appreciable unless you take the time to read the published data, which is published in journals like the Journal of the AMA, but that doesn’t mean anybody reads it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, right. So, in terms of, I mean we’re very interested in longevity on the Quantified Body, so I’d be interested in your own, I don’t know if you do this, if you do your own post chelation urine, is yours very low levels of lead, for example? Or do you still have some of that? And I understand that, obviously, you’re looking at body reserves as well, when you’re talking about in the bone, for instance, for your longevity.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: So, an answer to that, first of all on my own tests, because I was born sick. I just happened to have reviewed my medical records from many years ago from the Mayo Clinic, because I have spent many years being extremely ill. And so, in medical school, I, because I could not go up a flight of steps without going into early heart failure, in my earlier training in school I was forbidden from being in active sports because my heart was quite obviously not up to any and significant activity.

So my level of lead, mercury, and cadmium has been a life-time challenge, because I understand that it takes 15 years for bones to remodel. And therefore, I tell everybody that since you can do the data, before the industrialized age, which roughly starts 700 years ago, the level of lead widely published in skeletal remains is extremely low, until we start doing the mining and disturbing the earth’s crust. And that’s when we bring the lead into our food and air.

Now, in terms of what’s optimal treatment for a patient, if you look at the published data that shows that, right out of Harvard, that the level of lead in your bone accurately predicts when you’ll go blind with your cataracts. And that the higher the level of lead in your bone leads to six times increased heart attack rate.

So, the problem is, we can’t suddenly have a large number of these expensive instruments available, and it wouldn’t change things very much, because there aren’t any people that aren’t born with lead, mercury, etc. because it’s widely documented that your body, as a baby, is rapidly growing, and, in a sense, serves as a waste basket for the mother’s body. So it’s now widely known.

If you look at the 10 American Study, where they took 10 Americans at random and looked at DDT, and PCB, and dioxane, polybrominated diphenyl ethers. When you look at published data, in general you can be certain that whatever level you found of a heavy metal in the mother will be at least twice that in the child. And so therefore, it becomes interesting to know what was the mother’s occupation?

And when we realize how much lead paint we were using at one point, the causes of where we get all these heavy metals are sometimes obscure. And in addition to that you have quite different capabilities on a genetic level for some people to clear the heavy metals they may be born with, or work with, much more effectively. Their diet, of course, has tremendous influence.

I, as a researcher in the field of heavy metals, I’ve uncovered many amazing stories with patients whose life has been virtually wasted because nobody ever thought to look for heavy metals.

And I can take an example of a young girl, about 15 years of age that happened to be in a study that I was doing on behalf of the University in Canada. They wanted to determine to what extent Shell Oil was poisoning people downwind when they were taking the sour gas and turning it into sweet gas with tremendous levels of the toxic metals being released into the air.

As a result of our laboratory being given the contract to do that study, this young lady had a cadmium level in her hair that was off the scale. She was not my patient, but it became my ethical obligation to chase her down. She turned out to be in McGill, and they were about ready to treat her for some rare form of malignancy that they couldn’t identify, and they were sure they were going to start chemo. And I told them if they start chemo she would be dead instantly, and that her death would be on their head. And so they backed off.
And I was able to, in her case, find the buried nickel-cadmium batteries that some bad people had deposited near the water intake to the facility that she was living in. And I have stories, like a whole household of people poisoned with mercury because the grandmother was storing mercury in an open container in the kitchen where all the kitchen towels were.

But the stories go on, and on.

We find what you look for, and since my interest at age 80 is how long should we be physically still active and healthy, and I really like the idea that that should be 100 years. And I would therefore like to help people understand that since you cannot suck all the lead out of your bone, the bone is going to take 15 years to remodel.

And so during that 15 years as your bones are remodeling, should you be lucky enough to meet a doctor who tells you that oral chelation works extremely well. I have published the book, and it’s in all the bookstores, Detox with Oral Chelation. And yet, doctors hardly tell people about it.

Just a high dose of vitamin C alone is a chelator. And if you’re taking 4, 8, or 10, or 12 grams, Linus Pauling was my close friend, so I liked 12 to 16 grams. But whatever you’re taking, if you’re urinating C out in good quantities in your urine, which is a 20 cent test on a piece of paper called VitaChek, if you’re urinating a lot of C out, that C will be chelating heavy metals and other toxins with it. So my obligation, if I’m going to help mankind enjoy a higher level of health when we get older, is to make us aware that this is a ubiquitous problem.

And obviously in some people it is the main problem. The man comes to me, he’s been welding for 30, 40 years, and his lead levels are off the scale. Those are pretty open and shut, but it’s really amazing how in one case I uncovered a smelting function in Sacramento.

They had about 30 or 40 employees, many had been in the hospital repeatedly, many times, at Kaiser and other hospitals in Sacramento. And they would be sick for two, three weeks. They’d be treated and sent home. No one ever made the diagnosis.
And when I did, by coincidence, my nurse, her husband was one of those employees and I said, well bring his hair in. And then I got it, and it was off the scale. I did a few other people, but what was interesting is that Barney Kolata, who was the guy doing the most work with the molten lead, was Japanese, and he never gave up his early Japanese diet. And he had one of the lowest levels of lead out of the entire employees. Whereas one of the secretaries working at the computer in the distant office living on sugar and Sweet’N Lows and coffee had one of the highest levels.

So it’s really interesting the influence of diet and genetics on how well you handle these heavy metals. But it’s an important part of, I think, of anti-aging, or any kind of medicine, to make people aware that yes, it may be the main problem that you’ve come to me with.

And when we look at the amount of mercury in many people’s mouths, when you just open their mouth, it’s pretty clear that they have a toxic time bomb in their mouth. And yet at the same time, some people handle it better than other people. But across the board, no one is escaping without a negative effect on their body.

But we have to settle for the fact that all tests have their limitations, and it makes it easy because people have to spend their own money doing this detoxification. And therefore, they’re entitled to have the best data we can give them. How full was your tank when you came to me, and how effective was I at getting your tank empty of lead, or mercury, or something.

And what’s so sad about all of that is that, very simply put, we can show you that if I take that welder, and I have him get 100 chelations, and at the end of 100 IV chelations he’s excreting almost no lead. What is amazing is, I knew that I didn’t want to put him back to welding, and so he was with a big company so we put him in an air-conditioned office to do paper-shuffling.

But at the end of six months, I brought him back and did another provoked chelation test. And this time after receiving over 100 chelations and telling me how fantastically good he felt, he was a brand new man. But at the end of six months with that provoked specimen, it was 90% as bad as it was before I gave him 100 chelations.

And this is what’s so sad. I am having trouble getting people to understand that just because you’ve chelated somebody, and they feel fantastic and the lead levels being treated are low, you have not solved the problem.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, this is because, as I understand it, as the bones remodel, the lead is coming out into the blood again, and then you see the visible levels and it comes out of the urine as it’s getting chelated again. So, as you were saying, it takes 15 years for that to happen so, basically as I understand it, you’re saying that we have to be chelating every day or like with IV once a week, or whatever the regime is constantly because it’s going to constantly be refilling your blood stream as time goes on.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Exactly. And the thing that we have to make clear is that I took the time to put 507 published references from doctors in industrial medicine, who work with lead workers, who had actually published the data that all EDTA will bring lead levels down, even if you’re working with lead daily, to safe levels for most workers. Again, my website, 507 published papers.

Oral works, and yet 99% of doctors tell patients that it will not work. And it’s misleading. If you tell people there’s something they can do orally, and if technically vitamin C and EDTA are almost the same price range.

So why make a big deal out of it if EDTA was shown by Johan Bjorksten, back in Madison, Wisconsin, where I am born and raised and he’s a world expert on cross-linkages. He showed that multicultural organisms, called rotifers, dipped in EDTA every day lived a minimum of 50% longer than any rotifers not so treated.

So the message is loud and clear. In my mind, no one today is achieving the health span they might have achieved because we are ignoring this obvious problem.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, for listeners at home, what is EDTA, and what does it do?
[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. I kind of make a joke out of it, because acetic acid is another way of saying vinegar, so I tell people I’m you’re handy dandy grocer. But the facts are that EDTA has been used by companies like Chick-fil-A to keep the coleslaw fresh. It’s part of our diet; they buy it by the railroad carload.
And so people are hearing that it’s a synthetic molecule. You could call it a synthetic man-made amino acid. Some people are going to run away from it, and that’s their prerogative. We can do good chelation with garlic, and vitamin C, and there are many natural chelators out there.

It’s only that EDTA happens to have a really high affinity and is so specific in lead it is not that specific with mercury but at the same time, it has these documented studies, because I have pulled every published paper that involved EDTA with a professional researcher for over 20 years, and I pulled over 7,000 papers. So I know a great deal about EDTA, and I really wish that we could have people look at is as being not any different than taking vitamin C.

Ascorbic acid, acetic acid, the point is that EDTA is doing things that can help forgive what we have done to our planet when, out of necessity, we started mining. And when we started mining, we put things in the air, and it winds up in our bodies. And it is not allowing us to live to, what I think, is my intended useful lifespan, which is why, for over 30 years I haven’t gone a day without oral chelation.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. So, when you’re talking about EDTA, is this something you’re taking like twice a day? What kind of dose of EDTA are you taking daily, and can you explain what it’s actually doing? Is it binding specifically to lead, or is it binding to other things? And is there any safety concerns in terms of it binding to other things, say minerals that we do need?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Thank you for a great question. Because I took on this obligation, I have researched that EDTA is a non-specific chelator. It’s not going to deal with just lead. When it is bored and there’s not much lead around to work with, it will grab mercury too.

And across the board, when we look at what it is doing in the body, it seems to be a wonderful anti-oxidant. So it seems to prevent cross-linkages that may be free radical related. And on children, babies particularly, I love putting EDTA into the bathtub.

We’ve had some people like to put it in rectal suppositories, which I have nothing against other than I want that to be done on a factual basis. I see nothing to support that it’s better absorbed at the rectum than it is at the mouth. And if you’re going to be doing it every day for 15 years, I think it gets tiresome to put it in the rectum every day.

But bottom line, we can use zeolite as a chelator. We use vitamin C. There are many things that we use. But EDTA, because there’s so many published papers about it, and it’s what we wound up using in the study, which was called the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy, where we did spend 31 million dollars of NIH funds.

And it’s really important to understand that most people who read NJAMA, the TACT trial, the Trial to Assess Chelation was supposed to put all the chelation doctors out of business for once and for all. And it was a pretty shocking thing when it came back that it was in fact safe, and effective. But, they have done everything they can to keep how safe it was from the general public.

And we have now taken the time to get the raw data, and find that in fact there’s a 51% reduction in death, in diabetics. And the data is so persuasive that we have had another visit. Gervasio Lamas, the head of the Miami Heart Institute, is taking on the burden of raising another 30 or 40 million to do another study, because the data is that substantial that even the FDA says if you do one more study, we will approve this as a treatment for diabetics.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. This study was specifically done on EDTA, or is it on other chelators?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That was, and let’s make it very clear. The Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy was based on the protocol that I wrote. It was I, Garry Gordon that took it on myself to write the protocol that over 10 million people have followed safely without a single reported fatality ever, using my protocol.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And, besides the diabetes benefit you just remarked, were there other benefits that were discovered?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Every possible benefit from lowering hypertension to getting feet warmer, to stopping intermittent claudication to improving blood flow to the brain, memory. I mean, anything that’s tied to blood flow, because think of it, the cheapest test you might do would be a calicium measurement of the patient’s coronary arteries.

And if we can just realize that age 60 we have 140 times more calcium in our vascular tissues than we did at age 20. And so we gradually turn to stone, so there’s good reason to tie the entire aging process. In fact, I tell people that as an anti-aging doctor, I focus first on a simple motto. I want you to have strong bones and soft arteries when you’re 80.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That makes a lot of sense. And you certainly sound very energetic. You say you’re 80 years old right now. Are you 80 years old?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Not until January 3rd. I have another two weeks reprieve there.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, that’s pretty much the same thing. I would just like to ask you, personally, how do you feel these days, how active are you? You mentioned that at one time it was difficult to walk up stairs. How does that compare to the situation today?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well, I just yesterday was jogging on the golf course with my two dogs at 5:30 at night, trying to find out how can I tell the rest of the world how great it is at age 80 to be healthier than I have been in my entire life. And so just coincidentally I was looking for some papers today, and there it was, my old medical files. And there fell out because I’ve had so much heart problems, so much bone, I have had advanced osteopenia. The list of problems I had is so long, that I got bored reading my medical history.
But, the point is, that I was a basket case, and it was interesting that I would up seeing all these doctors at Mayo Clinic. Which, it’s always good to see the best mainstream doctors you can, because although they didn’t help me one iota, it at least documents where you were. And it’s really interesting because I really wound up seeing them because of a minor accident. Riding my horse I got bucked off, got a fracture of the ankle. Turns out, I had osteopenia.

And I have very advanced, an underdeveloped testicle, and other problems. I have a lot of health issues. But it was amazing that age 80, I feel today better than I have in my lifetime. I just want to share with others that it’s more important in my mind because I still drive the same car after 10 or 11 years I’d rather drive the same car and spend whatever I save on my body.

Because it’s not free to take care of yourself. I spend a lot of money taking care of me. And a lot of people would rather think that it’s nonsense. And so all that’s going to change as the tests for how old we are become much more widely available and increasing sensitive. We’ve been dealing with rather insensitive monitors to tell you exactly how old you are.
But I can motivate people today to take care of themselves because many people are either worried about losing their memory, or dying of a heart attack, or dying of cancer. So it’s not that hard to go online and do some pretty good memory tests today.

It’s very easy today to do calcium scoring and other tests of your heart to know what’s going on. And in terms of cancer, I’ve been lucky enough to find a Caprofile.net that has been, fortunately, finding cancer three or four years before the lump or bumps, so I can motivate people to keep their tests in really a good safe range.

But the ideal test is going to come very soon. Because we are getting into the day and age that the price of tests continues to drop, and the number of potential tests you do on people continues to expand, and pretty well. I’m confident within two years we’ll have tests that will tell you, within a month of introducing a new modality into your diet change and exercise.

I’m now having fun teaching people about exercising while breathing oxygen. I mean, there’s many different things we can do. We now have people drinking a water product that has in it all, what we call, redox signaling molecules. That includes molecules like ozone, hydrogen peroxide, etc. And so, an amazing thing is going on with me.

I am today sitting remarkably sad that we all bought into the wrong theory and we thought anti-oxidants was the best way to help people. And now it turns out that I’m devoting much of my daily effort to teaching people the power of oxidative therapies.

And ozone, of course, is kind of expensive at the high end, but drinking ASEA water and taking things like silver that is catalyst to oxidation, and breathing oxygen while exercising would all obviously be oxidative. And if I happen to add some time in the far infrared sauna, you begin to get the feeling that I’m really teaching people today that although anti-oxidants have their definite place, we must have balance in what we teach.

So I’m really on a vendetta to change the over-emphasis today that everybody thinks the whole answer is anti-oxidants, because without oxidation you will not get the signal for your intracellular switch to turn on the production of glutathione. Let’s make that simple.
ASEA water is available, proven safe the FDA says it’s totally non-toxic yet it increases intracellular glutathione production by 500%. Which is a cheap way of my helping people have something, because glutathione is another nice way to help deal with the heavy metals and other challenges that our body’s doing.

And it’s so documented that the Olympic Committee had to meet to decide that it’s not illegal doping, because this water so enhances oxygen utilization that athletes are beating their own record. But it’s all, totally legal.

It’s nothing but salt water that’s gone through a process so that what we call redox signaling molecules like ozone, which most people aren’t very familiar with. But they’re going to have to become familiar with, because it’s only with things like silver, and ozone, and using high dose C that I can deal with Ebola, and hepatitis C, and other threats that people are beginning to recognize.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. Could you, that reference was Sea-o water?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: A-S-E-A. It’s really astonishing. I thought that this was nonsense, and I was a hard one to convert over, but when I finally met Garry Samuelson, who’s a medical nuclear physicist from BYU, and understood what he did with the salt water. Because I’ve been with Robert Rowen, he and I brought International Oxidative Medicine Association to the world.

After I formed ACAM some 40 years ago the American College for Advancement in Medicine to teach chelation. Now I’m teaching oxidative medicine, but we have this problem that people don’t know anything about ozone.

Yet, if you take anybody that’s got hep C or terminal cancer we’re getting dramatic results on these patients because we help the body overcome challenges by having available safe redox signaling molecules, like ozone, that cause the body to turn on amazing switches, so all of the sudden you’re making 500% more intracellular glutathione.

So, glutathione is [something] everybody appreciates. We’ve seen Dr. David Perlmutter if you go on the internet he has an advanced patient with Parkinson’s who’s been with a walker for six, seven years. He cannot say anything understandable and he can’t walk. He puts the glutathione in the patient’s vein, 10 minutes later he walks perfectly up and down without the walker, and he speaks perfectly clear. So glutathione is a pretty good thing.

So I’m just teaching people that we have it all wrong. That only when the body sees a safe signal, like a controlled stable ozone, or a stable peroxide, is the body able to say, oh, I think I better turn on my own intracellular production of things like SOD, catalase, and glutathione. So it’s pretty exciting.

With the field of medicine, I’m quite confident that we will be doing a lot of [in] my life adding things like pulse electromagnetic field, and the use of far infrared saunas. And the whole idea of breathing in oxygen while you’re exercising. I mean, I am having so much fun.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I can hear that, I was just about to say it sounds like you’re having a lot of fun with all these new therapies.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: If you told me 10 years ago that when I reached 80 I was going to be in the peak of my health, I would have said that you must really have been nuts.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, you mentioned so many different things, I want to clarify a few things. First of all, you mentioned infrared sauna. And this is one modality people use to detoxify by sweating the toxins out through their skin. Is this the reason you’re using it for? Are you using it for a specific toxins? Why are you using infrared specifically?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: The answer to that is that your skin is a great, huge organ. Perhaps the largest organ, unless you want to argue the endothelium is slightly larger. The skin is the major way your body handles certain toxins.

We have documented that we’ve had people that were disabled by chemical exposures, to the point that their brain had been fried; they didn’t know their family’s name. They were on total lifetime disability. We brought them back totally, taking sometimes 8 to 10 hours a day for one, two, or three months of sweating in a far infrared sauna with them coming in and going out and using certain nutritional things.

I can do it far faster today when I had the rest of my knowledge about oxidative medicine. But the principle is there. The Attorney General state of Utah had so many officers that were poisoned when they raided angel dust operations and lost their memory were on permanent disability. So that he’s so happy because he doesn’t have to pay disability the rest of their lifetime because they’re back to full functioning.

But in one case, it took 90 days of supervised far infrared sauna and a total treatment program. I, of course, with a homeopathic background and nutritional background, with a pulse electromagnetic field and the other things I’m telling you about, could get that same result in certainly less than 30 days.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, okay. So, will infrared sauna chelate, or, it’s not chelation, but detoxify across the board of toxins, or is it specific?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Yes. The guy who really wrote the book about it is the founder of the Church of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. And so some people call it the Hubbard Tank therapy. And we used it after the 9/11 disaster. And we were able to get some of those workers that had not protected themselves, that were so filled with chemicals they were facing death.

We have a lot of experience with this, but I reluctantly give the knowledge to him. But since he was the founder of a sudo-religion, there’s a lot of people who have not thought to improve his initial protocol. But it was involving constant use of some niacins so your skin as always getting a lot of extra circulation, so you had more blood getting to the skin and other nutrient ideas.

And there’s a lot of refinements in this whole concept available today. I have 4,300 doctors I talk to daily in my forum on anti-aging and chelation therapy. And I’ve spelled out a lot more detail in that, which is free of charge to any health professional, and we’re in 68 countries.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, and I certainly want to put links to a lot of the things you’ve mentioned. Like, the chelation study you mentioned, your protocol, this email list, would be interesting to many people.

Now just to go through some of the other things you mentioned. I think going back, first of all, to the lead, and you mentioned that there’s only one way to establish if you have a high level of lead in your bones. Is that through some x-ray mechanism? I’m guessing this is only used in studies, and it’s not really available for the general population or patients.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That’s the unfortunate fact, it’s only available at research level, but, the papers are so solid. You just go to any computer and you put in bone, lead, and health. John Hopkins also has one of these devices.

And so there’s nothing to argue about. It is so clearly well established, and there is the simple fact. You have to understand that National Geographic first did the first issue on Chemicals Within Us. They said open and shut, the way the mother gets rid of lead is just have more babies. Because that’s where the lead is leaving her body and going into the babies.

And so, when we realized that the babies they’re talking about, when you go to Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Philip Landrigan, he’s the head of the department of pediatrics, he runs the research laboratory for measuring all the toxins in your blood. They charge, when you send him 20 tubes of blood, $4,900.

But he says, why keep sending me blood? No one has ever been able to pass the test. The human population is loaded with polybrominated diphenyl ether. That’s the flame retardant that HBO pointed out in this past year, was complete fraud. It actually makes the house burn faster, it does not protect.

But we’ve sprayed it on every mattress, on every pajama, and on every airplane seat cover. So every human is filled with PBDE. And there is an interesting correlate. Since we’ve been doing the PBDE, I got out of medical school only some 56 years ago, and at that time the average sperm count was 140 million. Today the average sperm count is around if you’re lucky 40 million.

We’ve lost 100 million sperm because everyone is walking around loaded with toxins. That’s one of the reasons we have so many fathers now have twins, because they can’t have babies the old fashioned way, they have to have a fertility specialist.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, for the people listening at home, this is going to sound really frightening, all of this, if they haven’t come across the area of toxins before. So, in what ways could they quantify any of these?

What would you suggest for someone who’s maybe concerned with a few symptoms, maybe not serious symptoms, but a few symptoms here and there perhaps you could outline symptoms that should be more of concern? They should think more about these types of things? Lead and these other toxins. Or, the types of tests.

Would you recommend they go, for example, for the urine, the post urine chelation test to establish these kind of markers? Or how would you suggest that they kind of gather some evidence to convince themselves that this is something that they should be working on continuously, as you recommend. So like a daily chelation, or an approach to detoxifying.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I think the answer is this: everybody, if they get a really careful health history given to them we’re going to have more and more of these questionnaires available online. When people are honest and admit how many days they have trouble getting running, how often this isn’t working, their memory isn’t up, they have abnormal appetites.

If we look at everything from depression to fingers that have lost feeling, the list is very long, and the cheapest test, of course, was the mineral test on your hair. Because hair didn’t require a doctor, it could be sent to a laboratory. But some laboratories got in that weren’t really up to our speed. So I’m a proponent that they use a laboratory that other doctors use.

Doctor’s Data is the one that purchased Mineral Lab. When I had Mineral Lab we had offices, as I said, in Asia and Europe. So this has been my life’s passion. But any test.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So at the lowest cost end, you would recommend the hair metals test from Doctor’s Data?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: The hair test. And here’s the rest of the story. If the hair test shows no mercury, no cadmium, no lead, then that means, essentially, that you cannot get rid of them. Because you can’t be living in this planet without being loaded with these metals. So if there’s none in your hair at all, then it means that you have a block in your ability to get rid of them.

And that is really very common in autistic children. It’s so sad, because we have tremendous success in dealing with autistic children, but if the poor doctor doesn’t know that the hair test will not reveal the lead and mercury if there’s a blockage in the body’s ability to excrete heavy metals because hair is nothing other than excretion, just like urine is an excretion. And so if they don’t see it, then they think that they said, Oh, well it must be something else in the way you feed your child.

It’s got to be something else, because always, you cannot escape the heavy metals. And I repeat, if you’re the director of the most advanced toxicology lab available to doctors, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Philip Landrigan, his question is, why would you keep sending me anybody’s blood specimen, because it’s not paid for by your insurance, it’s going to cost you $4,900 for us to do it.

And there’s never been anybody he’s ever tested that doesn’t come out with at least 160 chemicals that will induce cancer, or neurotoxin, or endocrine disruption when he measures them. And there is no safe levels, because when you have a little of the polybrominated diphenyl ether and a little DDT, and a little dioxane, all of this is on top of having the lead.

So nobody should think, oh well it’s just a small level. A small level is on top of a small level of something else, on top of a small level of something else. So if the goal is to realize that in our complex society today, I think that it’s terribly important to keep you as sharp as a tack after 65, because I think many people, their first job may not be their ultimate career that they’re meant to be on Earth to do, and many of us don’t know enough until we’re 65 to be a tremendous service to our fellow men.

So I’m a real proponent of course, I have a vested interest in this, as I’m 80. I’m a proponent of life extension.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s great. So one of the other topics you have spoken about during this is taking EDTA via oral chelation versus IV chelation. For many people, when, if they go to local doctors who are specialized in detoxification, often IV chelation is the method they’re probably first going to come across.

I think you recommend more strongly oral chelation with EDTA. Could you talk a little bit about that, and what your thinking is there?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well, it is a little complicated. As the founder of this chelation movement, I came up with a name, the American Academy of Medical Preventics, and I wrote the first protocol. And I told every doctor, you can tell me how you’re doing it, but I’m going to take input in. So I wrote the first protocol.

And when I was doing that, I was just thinking today because I had a 16 year old young lady in a hospital in Sacramento out of control, facing death, with juvenile diabetes. And her family had seen the dramatic things that I was doing with IV chelation. And we took her out of the hospital for a few hours each day for me to do IV chelation. And we completely saved her life, and her diabetes went under control.

But we’re not allowed to talk about things like that, because there’s not enough research. Although I just told you that I didn’t know that, some 40 years ago, that that was going to be that effective. Now that we have a 31 million dollar study, we have a lot more knowledge.
So, the sad thing is this. We don’t know until we test the question. Will chelation stop, in this case, the person’s schizophrenia? Will chelation stop this person’s depression? Will chelation stop this person’s cancer?

Obviously, it’s not that simple, because everything that I teach is built around my FIGHT for your health program, where the FIGHT, F-I-G-H-T. F stands for food and positive focus, I stands for infection, G for genetics, H for heavy metals and hormones, and T for toxins. So, with my FIGHT program, the more of the modalities I add to my program, the greater the chance that I’m going to have somebody very happily restored to full health that they’ve never enjoyed.

So most people can’t deal with that multifactorial. They want to assume that if I get all the lead out, that’s all I need to know. But unfortunately they now report that well over 5% of us have some kind of a lesion in our pituitary that is making our endocrine picture more complex.

And so the more you study medicine, the more you’ll find that you can become a super specialist at any aspects of the FIGHT program. You can do like Dr. Servan did as an MD after his brain cancer. He came back shortly after they gave him the chemo, surgery, and radiation that didn’t do him any good. He decided to become knowledgeable about which foods will help cancer not come back. And he was able to make it stay away for 10 years.

So some people do all their thinking about food, but they never ever realize that Harvard publishes the paper that proves that 96% of people, with a simple blood test, actively have cytomegalovirus in your body right now. And all doctors say, gee we think inflammation is bad for you. But not one doctor out of 50 is aware that they, and their patients, are walking around with active CMV.

Why am I making a big deal? Well, because we don’t have a drug for it, the doctor chooses to ignore it. Whereas I live in the world of ozone, and silver, and high dose vitamin C, and other tricks for infection. So I can bring that infection down to a dull roar so that the inflammation is lowered, so that nobody is aging as rapidly in their disease.

So, the more you look, the more you find. And now that we have the ability to do with 23andMe you can do a genetic test for less than 200 dollars. And you can now find out that yes, our genetic pool has changed because some of these toxins have changed the way our body handles methylation. So now you can see the big word epigenetic, which means above genetic.
So, as you get into the medicine that I study, it is fascinating to realize how many doctors go through life and all they learn is hormones. They never learn the heavy metals. They’ve never tested for toxins.

If you told them PBDE is in every one of your patients at astronomical levels, they would ask you, what is PBDE? Polybrominated diphenyl ether is the flame retardant that is in every human being, every mammal, from the Antarctic to the Arctic, in frighteningly high levels.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So it really comes across that you see today health is a multifactorial battle. Basically a battle ground on many levels, where it’s us versus infections, heavy metals, toxins. And it’s through a protocol like yours, which tries to address each of those, which we’re going to be able to protect our health, improve it, resolve chronic conditions, and promote longevity. Is that a good summation?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That’s an extremely good summation, yes. Bottom line, everything is multifactorial and if you just attack any one of my FIGHT issues, you’re going to help every patient. But that doesn’t mean you’ve done all you could do, because some of us need to go from the infection control on over to the hormone support.

We have an ability now to stop menopause in all women safely, with the pueraria mirifica plant that grows in Northern Thailand. We have 14 years of research. And a dear friend of my, Christiane Northrup who wrote the book Women’s Wisdom, Women’s Body, is coming out with a new book in February.

And I have been working diligently with the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and we actually have proof that you will not get broken bones if you take this herb. You will never see dementia in your patient if you give them this herb.

And the reason Dr. Christiane Northrup, who’s head of OBGYN at University of Vermont, the reason she’s so enthusiastic is because during her OBGYN she looks at the vaginal tissues on 74 and 80 year old women, and find they become 15 years younger in less than six months.

So we have so much exciting good things to do for people. That’s why I wanted to get the basics out of the way, and have everybody realize that we are in for some exciting times, where you’re going to live longer and be more productive than you ever dreamed possible. But its part of my job is to start with the basics. And today we’ve really focused more on the kindergarten and first grade level.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: We’re screwed, we have to get in somewhere. So, you’ve spoken a little bit about inflammation there. I’m wondering if there are any markers you look at? There’s the HS-CRP, that’s the reactive protein that people often look at. But do you look at that?

Because for some people like me, mine is very low but I know I in fact have every high inflammation in other areas. So I don’t know how you look at the whole inflammation area, and if you look at that as a kind of marker of general health, or how progress is being made.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: It is extremely useful. It is only one of many markers. My friend Dr Vishdani is an MDPHD in molecular medicine, and we have at least 10 other tests that often will show inflammation that’s not reveled with C-reactive. So C-reactive is never a waste of time, but if it comes back and it doesn’t look like a big problem, it may have missed a lot of other forms of inflammation that it’s not sensitive enough to reveal.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, okay. So the other thing you have promoted, you feel very strongly about, is oxidative therapies here. On a previous episode we talked to Christine Burdette of Dunwoody Labs I don’t know if you know her, or of her work.
[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Yes, I have heard, yes indeed.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, great. Well so she has a certain set of stress markers [51:21 – 51:59 inaudible due to theme song] markers across our body.

Is adding an oxidative therapy, like ozone therapy or some of the others you mentioned earlier, potentially going to push them over the edge? And so is there potentially a balance that has to be made between oxidative versus anti-oxidative?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Great question. Well the bottom line is this. If you learn fungal bacteria and viral infections are epidemic in men, and only with my oxidative therapies will you keep them at a dull roar because nobody’s immune system is working as effectively as it could or would if you got the lead out. So let’s look at the big picture.

Everybody needs an anti-oxidant and an oxidant, and one doesn’t preclude the other. We have stabilized our ability to offer a product we call one Zeolite Enhanced. And in that product I have a -450 ORP, which means it is a stronger reductant than any anti-oxidant you could buy, but it is stable. And I can give it to you five minutes after I give you the oxidant, which is ASEA water, which is a +850, because it too is stabilized.

So we’re going into an exciting time when you could look at those two things, as we used to say oil and water won’t mix. Now, that turns out, we’re in a sophisticated age that these are merely ammunition, these are energies that your body needs, and they’re fuels. And so my biggest sad thing is that most people are going to take a long time to really get enough oxidative therapies.

I felt so fantastic yesterday because I was using my pulse electromagnetic field, and I was using my silver, and I was drinking a lot of ASEA water, and I was breathing the oxygen while I was exercising on a bicycle. I was doing everything oxidative. And everybody else would sit there and say, well you’ve embellished, you’ve gone too far. No, that was the best day of my life.

So, we have to kind of move it over to say oxidation is good, because we all have been using anti-oxidants, because we get them from many sources.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, great. You mentioned ORP. What does that stand for?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Oxidative Reduction Potential. And so the ORP meters that you can buy online for $110. The day will come that I hope to have it, we haven’t worked it out yet, but wouldn’t it be nice if one day I find that I can have a meter and everybody can measure their urine and find out, ooh, boy do I need an oxidant. I mean, I haven’t gotten there yet, but that’s where I’m hoping all this goes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. So it’s about balance, it sounds like. And so there you were talking about taking two things one oxidative, one non-oxidative and getting that balance by combining Zeolite and the other one.

Then it also seems like you put a lot of emphasis on how you feel, and how people feel in general. Do you believe if someone feels good, or if they’re taking some kind of treatment, or they introduce something new into their life and they’re feeling better, do you think that’s always a good thing?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I would say it’s just a pretty good guide, but I am, of course, in energy medicine, so I have used Voll, V-O-L-L, electroacupuncture diagnosis by Voll, and they have many companies that sell that kind of equipment. They have simplified it, they call it Zito, and they have different tests.

But bottom line, I have changed lives for 40 years because I knew how to read the energy in your kidney, and I could tell you instantly if the medicine you bought that you’re taking is going to kill you or not. When I first got into this, I didn’t believe that testing could work. I was very skeptical. But my friend was Harvard trained MD in San Francisco was helping my patient and brought the device.

So I finally went ahead and got the device. They brought a child to me that age 18 month was having at least three to four seizures per hour, and had been to UCLA, Stanford, and had been to UCSF. Seen every top pediatric neurologist; nobody could stop the seizures. I stopped the seizures 90% in the first visit.

How did I do that? I took a simple history. Having heard me today, I said to the mom, well you’ve seen all these super specialists, did anybody ask you where did you live when you were pregnant? And nobody ever asked her. She said I lived at home with my folks. I said well what do they do? They’re almond farmers.

I said go home and get the spray they use on the almonds. She bought the spray in, in just a small tiny container. I checked it energetically on the child’s nerve point. It immediately made the nerve point go crazy.

When I balanced it out by thinning it out to one to a million, which we do homeopathically, instantly, the brain was able to start. Just like you can take a person after they get stung by bee, you can give them a very weak bee sting and they find they aren’t sensitive. But I had a home run in the first visit.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. That’s an incredible story. Well, Dr. Garry Gordon, thank you so much for all this information. It’s pretty overwhelming, I have to say. Because you’ve obviously had a long career, and you’ve added a lot of different practices over time.
I would love to hear a little bit about you, just in terms of how you manage. Since you are nearly 80 and have been doing this for a long time. Are there any biomarkers that you track on a routine basis to monitor health, or longevity, or performance?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I have tried all of them, because I have tried to formulize the entire process of anti-aging. And so a good friend of mine wrote a book called Biological Aging Measurements 20 years ago, Ward Dean, and the game is going to change dramatically.

So I don’t want to burden your listeners because the costs of tests is dropping rapidly, and we’re getting better biomarkers. The ones we’ve been using have all been useful. But it’s going to change overnight. And so, I’m not going to go down so that they… It’s been a kind of expensive labor of love to do the tests we’ve been doing.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, right. And what do you think is going to change it? I mean, I know there’s new companies coming in with things like blood spot test. And is there anything specifically you see that’s going to change the future of testing, like are there specific companies coming to market? What do you see that’s going to change all of this so rapidly?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: One woman alone says she will be able to devise a machine that with one drop of blood will give you 1,000 tests. So, I’m pretty confident this lady is telling the truth. And then doctors won’t be able to look at 1,000 tests, but computers will weed through it, and help doctors see the pattern that is there.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, thank you very much for that. Just one last question or you. What would be your one biggest recommendation for listeners? If they were to do one thing to improve their health, longevity, and performance, what would it be?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I have to go along with James Watson. He was the co-discoverer of the double helix. And he’s telling people, exercise. And of course exercise is the poor man’s oxidative therapy.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, I knew you were going to say that. That’s a great answer. Thank you very much. And, thank you so much for your time today.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: My pleasure.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. If you’re concerned about lead and other heavy metals, here’s my experience so far as an example. To make this a little bit more practical. You can download my latest heavy metal test from the show notes for today’s episode.

There are two reports. The first is that I did a six hour post-provocation urine test with Doctor’s Data in November of 2014. I used DMSA, dimercaptosuccinic acid, as the chelating provoker agent for that. Lead was one of the three metals to come up higher on my test.
My levels were at 4 micrograms per gram of creatine, with their reference range being to target less than two micrograms per gram of creatine. So, for the more visual of you guys, it’s in the yellow zone. There’s a red zone, a green zone. Do you kind of get the picture?
My other two metals in the yellow zone are arsenic and thallium. Now arsenic most likely came primarily from my high consumption of chicken and rice for many years while living in China and Asia in general.

The thallium, based on the studies I’ve read, it’s a bit more unusual. But it very likely came from food contamination I was exposed to while living in Chengdu, West China, where the pollution has been documented. So, specifically thallium problems have been documented there.

The second test I did was Quicksilver Scientific’s Mercury Speciation test, which requires whole blood, hair, and urine samples. We looked at that test in Episode 13 with Chris Shade, so you can go check that out, if you want more details on it. He’s the guy behind Quicksilver Scientific.

My mercury came back slightly elevated compared to the Quicksilver Average. So, I was between the 50% and 75 percentile. It also shows my natural excretion ability, so my body’s ability to detoxify from the mercury, was slightly depressed. It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t really bad, but it was just slightly more depressed than usual, so it’s something I can work on.

The test did come back pretty much as I expected though, as I’ve been working on mercury for a while. And so I didn’t expect it to be super high. As you heard in Episode 13, I’ve been doing biological dentistry and other things to lower my mercury levels.

The Quicksilver test provides a lot more detail than the Doctor’s Data test. A couple of other things I learned about these tests along the road is I’ve run the Doctor’s Data urine toxic metal tests while living in different places around the world over the years, as far off as Thailand. So it’s a test that is easily accessible if you’re outside the US. Which can’t be said for all tests; you know, some tests are really complicated to get done if you’re not in the US or maybe Canada.

Due to the blood, Quicksilver is a little more tricky, but most of the time you can just fine a phlebotomy service, or a local lab, that will help you with that part of it. And then you just ship it off to the States.

If you plan to do your own tests, avoid obvious heavy metal contamination the week or so before it so you don’t bias your results. You don’t want to think that you have more metals than you actually do because you’ve just taken in some. So, cutting out things like rice and chicken, for that period, because these generally have some level of arsenic contamination. And then of course, for mercury fish, in particular big fish like tuna and swordfish, which have high mercury levels.

So what have I been doing to lower these heavy metals? Well I’ve been working off and on on detoxifying these for about, just over two years now, with different chelators. Currently I’m taking modified citrus pectin with alginate, in a product called PectaClear. So this is the main chelator.

The reason I’m taking this one is because it doesn’t interfere with other minerals as much as some of the other chelators. So, the idea is that it provokes less detoxification symptoms because it’s a more specific binder, or chelator, to the target heavy metals; in this case, lead, for example. So it avoids creating mineral deficiencies by binding to, say, calcium, zinc or copper.

A comment I want to make on this particular product, PectaClear, and modified citrus pectin in general is that there aren’t a lot of studies on it. And the studies that have been done are mostly from the owner of the PectaClear products. There’s a little bit of conflict there.

However, the functional medicine physician I’m working with recommended this to minimize my symptoms. So I’m trying it out as an experiment. I have gone through some symptoms, such as fatigue and headaches in the past, so I wanted to avoid those.

I’m also using some of Chris Shades products, which we discussed in Episode 13. So I am using Quicksilver Scientific’s IMD intestinal cleanse, which binds specifically to mercury, and the Clear Way Cofactors. They provide detoxification support, basically. To help your natural detoxification system. That also includes his glutathione and vitamin C and alpha Lipioc acid supports, discussed with him in the episode.

I’m looking at this as long and slow process, and not pushing it aggressively to avoid the side effect as much as possible. So, personally, from my experience, if I push it harder and take in larger doses, I get fatigue and headaches, generally. So, I want to avoid those because I like being productive during the day.

Previously, I’ve done runs of EDTA, which is the chelator Dr. Garry Gordon was talking about today in today’s interview. For which there’s a lot of past research support its use, right. So that’s got a lot of studies behind it, if you want to go with the more standard option.

On an on-going basis over the last few years, I’ve also been taking standard alpha lipoic acid. Not the liposomal form from Chris Shade. And selenium in the form of SE-methyl L-selenocysteine. Selenium binds quite well to mercury, so that’s the reason for that. Alpha lipoic acid is a chelator, and selenium has a protective effect, because it binds to the mercury. In fact, selenium is an ingredient of Quicksilver’s Clear Way Cofactors I just mentioned, in the form of selenomethionine.

The forms of selenium do make a difference, so you kind of have to watch out for those. Make sure you’re taking the right ones; some of them can be a bit toxic, especially if you’re taking the higher doses. And you don’t want to take in too high a dose. 200 micrograms per day is the standard.

I’ve also done a run of Prussian Blue recently, which specifically chelates thallium, which is my bit usual metal which I’m carrying there. And the drug name for that, because it’s FDA regulated, is Radiogardase. And it’s often used for radioactive cesium, and radioactive thallium also. Just so that’s why it has that name.

That’s where I’m at. At this point, I’ll probably get retested once every six months to confirm that the chelators I’m using are effective, and everything is going smoothly, and steadily detoxifying myself.

I’d love to hear about your efforts to lower your burden, if you’ve been working on it also. Whether it be mercury, lead, or any of the others, arsenic and so on. Especially if you’ve tracked your progress, or you have some test results already. Let me know on the show comments, or just hit me up an email. I reply to everything.

Detoxification’s going to be something we come back to quite often, because it’s one of the ways we can increase our performance by lowering our burden of these toxins. Some of the ones we haven’t looked at all are like some other metals, but also there’s a wide variety of chemicals and other types of toxins like that, like pesticides and so on, that can affect us. So we’ll be looking at those in some future interviews that I’ve already pre-recorded, and are coming up soon.