Read The UltraMind Solution Online
Authors: Mark Hyman
Slowly her mercury level started falling—from 260 to 150 to 27 (after her fillings were removed) to 10 mcg/g of creatinine. And, with each reduction, her depression, fatigue, and all her other symptoms got better and better until she was feeling alive again. She also lost forty-two pounds without trying.
I wish Joanne were a rare case of the havoc imbalances and toxicity cause. Unfortunately she’s not.
The same pattern repeats over and over with a few variations. I see thousands of patients with nutritional deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, inflammation, gut problems, toxicity, and energy problems, the roots of all illness. All of these problems are a result of environmental factors over which we have a lot of control.
More studies on the neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioral effects of mercury are being documented every day.
One study
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found that workers exposed to mercury vapor while making fluorescent lightbulbs experienced higher levels of anxiety and depression, as well as many impairments in memory and motor function.
The workers at ground zero on 9/11 were exposed to high levels of toxic metals. In another study,
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160 of those workers had eight or more chronic symptoms, including depression, anxiety, insomnia, weight gain, high blood pressure, and fatigue.
After a chelation challenge test with DMSA (an FDA-approved metal chelator), they were found to have high levels of mercury and lead in their urine. After three to four months of detoxification treatment the workers experienced an average of 60 percent reduction in symptoms.
Mercury is often at the root of so many problems. But when was the last time your psychiatrist or neurologist checked for heavy metal poisoning before prescribing Prozac?
Addressing metal and chemical toxins and all their downstream effects on our biology is essential if we are to address our chronic disease epidemic and the burden of mood, memory, attention, and behavior disorders.
A Heavy Boy
Though the effects of toxins on adults are serious and lead to fatigue, depression, sleep disorders, cognitive loss, and dementia, the toll on our children is staggering.
I believe that an overload of heavy metals in children who are genetically susceptible to their effects is one of the root causes of our epidemic of ADHD, learning disorders, and autism, not to mention depression, anxiety, and bipolar disease. Today, a doctor who takes care of kids at summer camp has to be a psychopharmacologist trained in the dispensing and monitoring of psychoactive cocktails. What is wrong with this picture?
One little boy’s story reflects the “heaviness” of the problem.
He was a wild child—uncontrollable, violent, unpredictable—in fact, mercurial. At the young age of three his “diagnoses” ranged from severe ADHD, to bipolar disease, to Asperger’s (a mild form of autism), to oppositional defiant disorder (defiance of authority).
His pupils were always dilated like someone in constant pain or danger, and like many children on the autism spectrum, he couldn’t look directly into your eyes.
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Autistic children look at you sideways, not because they don’t want to look into your
eyes, but because they can see better out of the corners of their eyes. This may have to do with the effects of vitamin A and omega-3 fat deficiencies on the retina and the way the proteins (rods and cones) that do the “seeing” are out of alignment in “sick” cell membranes.
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(Cod liver oil, which contains vitamin A and omega-3 fats, often corrects this “sideways” seeing.)
His mother had to use her fingers to remove his feces every day from his rectum, and every night he wet his bed, problems all too common in these children.
At social outings to the pool or park, the other parents would chastise his mother. “Can’t you control your kid?” He was asked to leave every type of activity he joined. At school he had to have one-to-one supervision every day, and still couldn’t be controlled. He was kicked out of a special behavioral therapy group for children who couldn’t be in groups, and was not allowed into a special camp for kids who couldn’t be in a regular camp.
Aside from starkly autistic children, I had never encountered a more difficult child
.
It turned out he was weighed down by an extraordinary amount of metals. I have performed over ten thousand tests for heavy metals in my patients. This boy had the highest level of lead I had ever seen and a load of mercury on top of that.
His mother had plenty of mercury fillings; he was born at the time of peak immunization schedules, before the thimerosal was removed from vaccines, and he grew up in an urban, industrialized area, where the mercury and lead from emissions ends up in the soil and on the floors of homes. (Perhaps we should be like the Japanese and remove our shoes before entering our homes so we don’t track in the pollution from the soil and streets.)
Because his genes made him susceptible, he accumulated these poisons instead of naturally detoxifying them.
How did he get better?
Parents, doctors, and scientists track the benefits of every type of treatment given to autistic children whose parents or doctors are connected to the Autism Research Institute (
www.autism.com
) and the DAN! group, which work closely together (see the box on page 237 to read about the exciting new discoveries DAN! is making).
By far the most beneficial treatment is the detoxification of heavy metals, which unblocks the metabolic and biochemical traffic jams that create problems. Then immune, gut, and brain function can resynchronize and rebalance.
Our little boy was “heavy” with metal poisoning. So we slowly chelated out his mercury and lead; fixed his gut; improved his diet; removed the sugar and dairy from his diet; boosted weak metabolic pathways with B
12
, folate, and B
6
; calmed his nervous system with magnesium; and used zinc
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to help him digest his food and activate enzymes (called metallothionein) that naturally eliminate mercury and lead.
Now he is twelve years old and thriving. He has no aide in school, and he can look
you straight in the eye and have a normal conversation. He doesn’t wet his bed and goes to the bathroom normally. When I asked him how he felt after all this treatment with pills and dietary changes, he said, “I feel like my brain is not short-circuiting all the time.”
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Getting Thoughts and Feelings to Stick: The Secret of Sulfur
In
chapter 6
I described how the methylation train gets off the tracks and all the collateral damage that occurs. I also briefly explained how the methylation and sulfation trains always run together, intersecting and interacting. Breaks in the tracks anywhere along the line to optimal methylation and sulfation often lead to dramatic and serious consequences, not only for our brains, but for our entire well-being.
Let’s dig a little deeper so you can understand, appreciate, and hopefully act on the information I am about to give you.
What is the most important molecule you need to stay healthy and prevent disease? Why have most of you never heard of it? Why is it the secret to prevent aging, cancer, heart disease, dementia, and more? Why is it necessary to treat everything from autism to Alzheimer’s? Why are there more than seventy-six thousand medical articles about it yet your doctor doesn’t know how to address the epidemic deficiency of this critical life-giving molecule?
What is it?
The mother of all antioxidants, the master detoxifier, and the maestro of
the immune system is
glutathione
(pronounced “gloota-thigh-own”), a sticky, smelly sulfur (like a rotten egg, or a sulfur hot springs) molecule that is the ultimate product or destination of the sulfation train. Think of it as a sponge that your body uses to soak up and get rid of toxic molecules. It is the body’s workhorse of detoxification.
Glutathione needs to be continually rebuilt and replenished from our diet with the help of specific vitamins (B
6
, B
12
, and folate), and can only be produced if
both
the methylation and sulfation cycles, or “trains,” are running on time and at full speed. Any break in that process leads to toxic build-up and more free radicals and oxidative stress and more inflammation.
Your body produces its own glutathione.
The bad news is that our poor diet, pollution, toxins, medications, stress, trauma, aging, infections, and radiation all deplete your glutathione. Thus depleted, you are susceptible to unrestrained cell disintegration from oxidative stress and free radicals, and to infections and cancer.
Your liver also gets overloaded and can’t keep up with the need to make more glutathione, making it unable to do its job of detoxification.
In treating chronically ill patients using Functional Medicine for more than ten years, I have found that glutathione deficiency is found in nearly all very ill patients—those with depression, mood disorders, chronic fatigue, heart disease, cancer, chronic infections, autoimmune disease, diabetes, autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, arthritis, asthma, kidney problems, liver disease, and more.
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At first I thought that this was just a coincidental finding, but over the years I have come to realize that our ability to produce and maintain a high level of glutathione is critical to recovery from nearly all chronic illness, to preventing disease, and for maintaining optimal health and performance. And so have the authors of the seventy-six thousand medical articles on glutathione!
So what is glutathione?
What does it do for us?
How can we get more of it?
How is it connected to the methylation and sulfation trains?
Glutathione is a very simple molecule that is produced constantly in your body. Glutathione is composed of a combination of three simple building blocks of protein or amino acids—cysteine, glycine, and glutamine.