Dietary exposure to toxic heavy metals through foods is a far greater problem than most people suppose. Even USDA-certified organic foods are not tested for heavy metals like cadmium, lead, arsenic, or mercury. Thus, there are no limits on heavy metal levels in these foods, including those sold in upscale healthy food retailers such as Whole Foods. The organic label simply describes the process through which the food was grown and that a farmer hasn’t used additional pesticides, herbicides, or other petrochemicals during that process. “Certified organic” in no way requires any heavy metals testing of soils, irrigation water, or even the final food product.
The reality is that one farmer’s “organic” food can differ widely from another farmer’s food simply because the air, water, and soil in which the food is grown is overwhelmingly contaminated with heavy metals.
Toxic heavy metals and other elemental poisons—whether they circulate around us or are absorbed into our bodies—definitively remain in the biosphere in one form or another in perpetuity. They are part of a vicious and deadly cycle that modern life has exponentially accelerated through the industrial mining, concentration, and dispersing of toxic elements that would have been far better left alone, buried in the Earth’s crust.
Some of the worst offenders, including metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic, have long since thoroughly infiltrated our lifestyles, and each poses its own significant hazards. Because the functions of the body are complex, many of the harmful effects are still being discovered and documented to this day. The scientific work on understanding the effects of toxic elements on biological systems, in fact, has only just begun.
Already, there is ample evidence of heavy metals disrupting chemical reactions throughout the body and blocking important nutrient absorptions. Toxic metals often compete with nutritional elements in metabolic processes; poisonous metals can imitate essential, or “good,” trace metals, rendering elements the body needs unavailable as chemical catalysts. Even when heavy metals don’t interfere with key metabolic functions, they still cling to cell walls, interfering with other cellular functions such as waste excretion, immune defense, healing, and adaptation.
Scientists have spent a considerable amount of time and effort researching the processes by which heavy metals undermine and destroy the body over time. Oxidation is one such process, whereby cells are disrupted and damaged, often leading to disease or weakened organ vitality. This is one reason why antioxidants are essential for good health: They protect cells from dangerous and deadly exposure to free radicals.
Emerging science reveals that toxic elements, including heavy metals, have a greater propensity than previously thought for damaging DNA and disrupting cellular processes. Not only are these metals shown to cause cancer, but there is increasing evidence now confirming their potential roles as co-carcinogens that increase mutations and disruptions when combined in the body with other types of toxins.9
Heavy metals poisoning is trans-generational
An even more important—and destructive—role may be played by toxic heavy metals in interfering with the process of DNA methylation, which transforms cytosine and adenosine nucleotide bases in the DNA sequence. This interference can cause inheritable changes in what is known as the epigenome, a genetic roadmap parallel to DNA that records changes to gene expression that are passed on to the next generation.
The process of DNA methylation plays a role in gene regulation and is a vital process during early fetal development when methylation during cell division directs specific tissue formation and other processes. Approximately 70 percent of human DNA is naturally methylated when the attachment methyl groups switch a gene on or off, but when toxic metals attach to these methyl bonds, they can interfere with vital cellular functions or even block them altogether.10
Through the still-emerging understanding of epigenetics, science has uncovered the specific process by which environmental factors, diet, stress, and exposure to toxins rewrite the intended gene expression and alter DNA. This, in turn, influences an individual’s chances of contracting disease—and of passing along those risks to their children. Despite the fact that epigenetic influences are not hard-coded into DNA, epigenetic effects influence traits that appear to be inherited by offspring.
A full understanding of this phenomenon should cause immediate alarm in the mind of anyone reading this. Epigenetic inheritance of toxic side effects from dietary exposure to heavy metals means that toxicity is trans-generational. This means that the toxic environment in which we live today will negatively impact future generations for an unknown number of generations even if we eliminate all exposure starting tomorrow.
For example, studies have shown an inverse relationship between a mother’s cumulative cord blood lead levels and the epigenome of her developing fetus, strongly suggesting that toxins interfere with “long-term epigenetic programming and disease susceptibility.”11,12 Arsenic exposure was likewise found to affect DNA methylation in fetal development, damaging DNA and disrupting gene regulation.13
In many ways, we are already too late to save future generations from the harmful effects of exposure to toxic elements. And because exposure is only getting worse, not better, trans-generational negative effects are likely to significantly worsen with each subsequent generation. This cycle may place the very sustainability of the human race in a precarious situation, with its effects only becoming more widely apparent in the coming years. Broadly speaking, we may already have doomed ourselves to global increases in infertility, devastating cancer rates, and a planet-wide decline in cognitive function due to heavy metals exposure in modern-day foods.
In other words, we may have already set out on a path by which the great-grandchildren of today’s young adults will be increasingly mentally challenged, infertile, and possibly incapable of surviving without significant medical assistance. The destruction of sustainable human life on our planet, in other words, may have already been set into motion, only to play out through several generations of suffering and bewilderment as government regulators and food companies continue to push their conspiracy of silence about the actual underlying causes.
Heavy metals interfere with your biology
There are many ways in which heavy metals interfere with and distort healthy biological functions. As just one example, heavy metals may interfere with normal cellular methylation cycles. When lead builds up in bones, it can negatively distort DNA methylation processes in white blood cells, which of course originate in bone marrow.14 White blood cells are essential to a healthy immune system as they help the body fight infection by attacking foreign invaders such as viruses, bacteria, and germs.
Many metal toxins are classified as electrophiles, meaning these molecules are driven to steal electrons and bind to chemical compounds in the body in processes similar to methylation. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium are biochemical vampires, latching onto and interfering with vital molecular groups, disrupting their immunological and metabolic contributions to healthy biology. Even after they are expelled from the body, these heavy metals can go on to cause damage in downstream biological systems such as fish, amphibians, and ocean ecosystems.
Natural chelation and the removal of heavy metals from the body
Health-conscious consumers naturally want to find ways to remove heavy metals from their bodies. The most important method for accomplishing that is to eliminate dietary exposure to toxic heavy metals. Once sources of exposure are eliminated, the body’s natural elimination processes will automatically and over time remove toxic heavy metal buildup in organs and tissues.
But even the process of removing heavy metals from your body can be toxic. One of the most common methods for this is called chelation, or the binding of metal ions. Chelation therapy involves the administration of chelating agents to bind to metals so they can be more easily excreted and removed from the body through detoxification.
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