#552 How to Detect Lead in Your Home + Lead’s Effect on Your Health
with Eric Ritter
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox podcast. We have a fantastic show for you. We have Eric Ritter on the show talking about lead toxicity, how to avoid lead exposure, how to detox, how to test for it, where it is in your home, and more importantly, what it is doing to your health, how it’s affecting your bones, how you have more lead coming out of your bones when you hit menopause and andropause for you men out there that are listening. As we age, our bone-protective estrogen levels lower. We have tons of lead unleashed into our bodies and into our blood, causing all kinds of problems, including heart attacks and high blood pressure in young children. It’s devastating and causes permanent brain damage, hyperactivity, ADHD, and just lots and lots of problems. So this is a very important show for anyone.
Our guest today, Eric Ritter, is a self-taught scientist specializing in chemical tests for lead. He’s been developing consumer products for the past five years. Over the past couple of years, he has created a website called everythinglead.org, which is kind of a Wikipedia-type website where you can learn everything there is about lead and all the different products that contain lead in them so you can protect yourself as a consumer. Since 2019, he’s focused on producing low-cost consumer chemical tests for lead. He started making Fluoro-Spec because people deserve to know about the most widespread environmental toxin in history. You can learn more about Eric and his work and get his test kits for lead at detectlead.com. Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Eric Ritter
Thanks, Wendy. I can’t wait to talk about lead with you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. So, how did you get into lead testing? What made you so passionate about it?
Eric Ritter
Well, I’ve been in this for about five years. I initially got into it just because I wanted to sell a product. I saw that 3M was marketing a lead testing kit at 5 per test. I figured I could easily compete with these guys. They’re really overcharging everybody. So, I figured out a way to make essentially the same product or 10 times less. I started selling that on Amazon, and I did that for about five years. Then, I had the opportunity to work with somebody from Columbia University on a soil testing project for which he’d been trying to get funding for a while. He introduced me to this new concept of the glowing lead test. When I saw that, I figured, wow, this is a huge opportunity. This is groundbreaking. It will completely revolutionize the way people can identify lead in their environments. All the phone calls I’ve had with people over the years for customer service, where they told me that their child had lead poisoning, and that’s why they bought a test, to begin with, stuck right in the front of my mind because I knew that this doesn’t have to be the way it is. If people are proactively testing, they’re going to avoid contamination of their children and themselves. Then, I just jumped deep into learning everything about the topic as far as I could.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, it really is surprising to see all the different places that we have lead and I want to illustrate that and how big this is. It’s estimated that we’ve lost over 400 million IQ points just from lead and that 19 percent of all cause mortality is from lead. I think people don’t realize how big a problem this is. So, let’s illustrate that. Where do we find lead in our environment and in our homes?
Eric Ritter
It really depends on the age of your home, but there are three factors where the age of your home doesn’t matter, and that’s the soil outside, the food in your pantry and the items you brought into your house. So we can talk about those in a minute, but the other two are the pipes that bring water to your home, the fittings in your home, like that water system, and then the age of your home, depending on if you have lead paint in your house, that is, lead-based paint or lead containing paint. The big years to look out for if you have a house built before 1978, you’re at risk of having the highest type of lead-based paint. If your house was built before 2008, you might have lead-containing paint, which is nine times less potent but still could give you some exposure. The other year is 1988. That’s when they stopped putting lead in water service lines, which you can test for free. Anybody could just scratch the pipe that leads into your house.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I lived in a hundred year old home in Los Angeles and I was very concerned about the main drain. It’s so much money to replace that. Even if the house had new pipes, you still have the problem with the main drain coming into your home. It was over a hundred years old.
Eric Ritter
There’s actually a big push right now for people to get that replaced, and that’s covered by the government. They’ve pledged 15 billion to do this because that’s really like you’re drinking through a lead straw. The people in Flint, Michigan had water contamination because of these service lines coming from the main on the street to their homes. It’s just that about a hundred feet of pipe could cause a problem, but people could test for it just by using a coin or a screwdriver where it comes in before it goes into your hot water heater or before it goes into your water meter. Normally, you can just scrape it and if you see that it’s soft lead metal, you have lead water service line and you should probably get NSF 53 rated filter at least or consult the water company.
Dr. Wendy Myers
There’s a lot of work that people have to do to get lead out of their environment. We’re going to cover every potential source. Even if you’re filtering your water, which a lot of people do, I have a water filter, you’re still showering, so you can’t discount that water as well. And then, even when it comes to the paint, if you’re restoring your home or your neighbor is repainting the outside of their home, you can have a very large exposure, including your children that are playing outside. That can be devastating to a young child under the age of five. Home Depot was caught recently selling paint that still has lead in it. I mean, it’s still an ongoing issue.
Eric Ritter
Certainly, the restoration and remodeling of homes is the biggest cause of catastrophic levels of lead poisoning because that wet paint dust is what gets all over the place, and it’s really hard to clean up and it’s hard to even know if you have it because the dust particles can be so small that they’re invisible to the naked eye. So that’s my number one concern. On Instagram, I’m always making videos about plates and stuff from the thrift store, that low green with the new lead tested kit that I make, but it’s really paint that causes the most strife, probably that and the water and then suddenly the food too. But yeah, the pre-1978 homes are the ones that contain that lead based paint.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And that’s like over 70 percent of the homes that people live in. What are the numbers there?
Eric Ritter
They estimate that there’s like 34 million homes with lead-based paint in them right now. But that’s not to say that all of those homes are poisoning the people who live there right now. That just means that the lead is in the homes. So if the lead is overpainted, or even if it’s on the surface, but let’s say it’s on your ceiling and the ceiling paint isn’t chipping or peeling, nothing’s going to be hitting the surface. So the lead really isn’t going to be coming off. It’s when that lead paint is on, and this is the most important thing, on a friction surface. So if it’s on your deck, if it’s on stairs, if it’s on a handrail, especially if it’s on a window, especially the part where the window sash rubs against the window frame, that’s what generates dust, a door frame, when the door hits into the door jamb, those are the places that generate dust and that’s where you get a lead hazard. So that’s where people would be best to look at. People could also screen their vacuum cleaner dust with the fluorescent test kit.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, or if you have peeling paints and young children in the home, you’ve got to figure that out for sure. Also, I would never stay in a home that I was remodeling or doing any kind of refinishing the walls or knocking down a wall, or changing anything in a room or kitchen. I would never live in a home where you’re doing remodeling.
Eric Ritter
I guess there’s not an option for everybody at all times. Sometimes, the remodeling seems like it’s small time, but that’s why there’s actually a law called the RRP rule, that is renovate, replace, and paint. Any contractor doing work on a home that’s built before 1978 has to test it for lead or get it tested for lead before they’re able to legally do the work. This rule is largely ignored because the EPA doesn’t really enforce it. But, it is a great rule because it would prevent a lot of dangerous situations from arising, especially when people are actually staying in the homes.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think licensed contractors are going to be perhaps doing that, but those costs a lot more money. So people use unlicensed contractors that don’t test or use these protections or use protective tarps that are required when you’re sanding and painting the outside of a home. If your neighbor is doing that, you’ve got to be aware of that.
Eric Ritter
There’s nothing preventing anybody from remodeling their house themselves. But, it is always a good idea to test for lead because it is such a pain to clean up. Unfortunately, most times, people won’t even know that they’re being exposed, and the exposure can last for years afterwards. So if you do get dust inside the home, over time, the dust will get removed because we have collected it. But if it’s in a carpet or something, like a lot of times people will collect it onto their own bodies over a period of time and lead is most dangerous when people are exposed over time. One-time exposure isn’t good, but it’s much worse to be exposed for six or eight months or a year rather than one time.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about the dishes, the cups, the bowls, the vintage corning, grandma’s dishes, stuff you’re buying at garage sales and thrift stores. My mom is just like a cuckoo for buying vintage dishes and lead and crystal and collecting all that stuff. What is the hazard there?
Eric Ritter
It definitely depends on how much lead there is in the dish and what the surface finish is like, and that’s going to depend if it actually comes off or not. And so you could have a relatively high lead dish, but if it’s over glazed with something that doesn’t have lead or has very low lead, it’s going to come off a lot less. And the type of use is really important too. So if you have a glass, let’s say, and you’re pouring hot coffee in the air, you’re pouring orange juice in there, that’s going to be a lot worse than if you’re using water or milk in the same class, for example. And if you’re storing stuff in liquids in vessels for long periods of time, more will leach out if you’re heating them up and more will leach out. So it kind of depends on the exact circumstance. And that’s why I kind of like the fluorescent test that I make on those because if it glows, you know that there’s a significant amount of light on the surface, and sometimes you can even see little fragments of the glowing lead come off and then it’s really obvious that it’s really dangerous.
There are some dishes that are just so dangerous and some are much less. If the decoration is on the outside of a bowl, it is much less dangerous than if it’s on the inside where the food actually touches. That doesn’t mean that it’s totally safe because you may touch it if it gets on your hands, but the fraction that gets in your hands is going to be a lot less than you’re directly ingesting. Let’s say you have lasagna on a decorated plate with a design that the lead comes off, and you’re going to be eating that directly versus some getting on your hands. Then maybe some get in your mouth if you’re eating a sandwich.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I have a lot of concerns. I would say when I’m traveling that any kind of pottery could have a leaded glaze on it. Sometimes people or restaurants are cooking in these clay pots that can have leaded glazes or people buy them as collector’s items and can be lead poisoned by these and you just people are just totally unaware.
Eric Ritter
For sure, and you had mentioned that you lived in Mexico for a time. Mexico is actually a huge place for these lead-glazed pottery pieces. It’s somehow known that this is a big place where this comes from. So stuff, especially like foreign dishes, older dishes are the ones that are most likely to have lead. I was in Target two days ago and I scanned all the Target brands. It’s called Threshold. That’s the brand that they’re selling in this target that I live by. A lot of them had gray colors. They all had a lot of lead, like over a thousand parts per million lead, and that’s pretty high. That’s ten times more than the CSPC would allow for a target. It can be used by a kid, but I haven’t tested how much of it actually comes off. So, we’ll have to figure that out later. I do have plans to do that with this new machine that I bought, which I can identify really low levels of lead in food. So I’m looking forward to that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, it is shocking how much cookware and utensils, the plates, dishes and everything that comes out of China. Certainly, here people buy a lot of stuff from Mexico, especially decorative stuff. I personally believe in Mexico. There is a rash. Lead poisoning is a huge problem. There are just so many people I encounter there that just have this blank stare on their face that I just feel like that whole country has been lead-poisoned. It’s a problem everywhere in the world. I think it’s much larger than people think. I love the work that you’re doing to bring awareness to it because it’s so important. This is probably the number one most problematic exposure that people get is lead and it’s just coming at us from every possible direction.
Eric Ritter
That’s definitely true. I think it’s important to understand that in the 50s, 60s, 70s, virtually everybody was exposed to high levels of lead because it was actually in the gasoline. That’s why we have an ongoing risk for lead in food today because all that gas lead was burned up and then it settled on the entire planet. They found it in the polar ice caps. It’s in all the fields and stuff. Part of the reason why lead is so toxic was it was never on the surface of the planet. We never evolved a way to deal with it in our daily lives. Once we dug it up and then we put it everywhere, that’s when we started being exposed to it. We actually have a thousand times more lead in our bones today than our ancestors before the bronze age, before the industrial revolution, when the wind was all underground and hadn’t been smelted and made into these various products. So, yeah, it has been a huge issue throughout human history. We’re only really just now acknowledging its dangers and that’s partially because of the lead industry, just like they sell lead, obviously they’re going to lobby for lead’s continued use. That was a really powerful lobby for a long time because it’s a really profitable element to refine and sell.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and when it comes to our exposures and where our body puts it, you mentioned it’s in our bones. I don’t think people realize how much lead is in our bones and that you can take calcium to help displace that lead out of your bones. That’s one thing. It’s kind of a swap your body will do if you get out at the levels of calcium. Lead can even make your bones denser when you do a DEXA scan, interestingly enough, but it definitely not contributing to strong bones. I think there are a lot of different places that we store lead. Can you talk about some of the symptoms that people have when they have lead toxicity?
Eric Ritter
Just as a preface to that, I think it’s really easy to understand how lead affects us negatively by understanding what it does in the body. And like you had mentioned, in the bones, lead mimics calcium, so our bodies can’t tell the difference. So wherever calcium goes, the lead will go. Calcium isn’t only used in our bones. It’s actually used in our nervous system and this is a critical portion of the negative effects. In the nervous system, there’s this thing called a calcium gated ion channel, which is like an on off switch for the nerve. It uses calcium to trigger the nerve to act appropriately, but the lead will fit right into that same spot that calcium fits, and it’ll just flip the switch on and lead it on, which makes the nerves hyper excited. So they’ll always be firing, and this contributes to the ADHD symptoms in children, the inattentivity, and the impulsivity. The overuse of the neurons actually may cause neuron death if the neuron is so excited for so long that it’s just like working overtime, and if there’s enough lead that it actually gets inside of the nerve cell into the mitochondria, which we know is the powerhouse of the cell, making the electrochemical energy for the cell to function, that could also be compromised and then the cell may die of oxidative stress. So that’s how you get the IQ loss in addition to all those ADHD symptoms and the hyperactivity and the behavioral problems.
In adults, lead exerts the same negative effect on the nervous system outside of the brain and that raises blood pressure. All the blood vessels the arteries and the heart are all controlled by nerves and if those are overexcited, those will also be triggered to act differently and in this case it will raise blood pressure. Lead affects other bodily systems too, but typically those are only affected in really super severe poisoning cases where the person is being exposed occupationally or through some kind of like really unfortunate series of events, but probably like 90 percent of the negative effects of lead are from low level exposure. The heightened blood pressure is the real cause of the problem and that’s paired with lead’s effects on the inside of the veins and arteries through making plaque.
Atherosclerosis comes from the contribution of cholesterol and calcium normally. When you have the lead substituting for calcium, you get even more inflammatory plaques and that gets even more buildup more quickly. So those two things contribute to actually 400,000 deaths a year in America alone. Nearly 6 million globally per year, which is an astonishing figure for adults. Nobody would notice that lead isn’t killing 400,000 Americans a year. That sounds catastrophic, but it’s not immediately obvious that it’s lead. If the person’s had a heart attack.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, there’s no connection made at all. I just interviewed Dr. Joe Pizzorno for my heavy docuseries and he said that one third of all fetal heart attacks in the U. S. are due to lead toxicity. It makes perfect sense because that’s the hardening of the arteries, that material used to repair the arteries from all the damage from the grains that we eat and sugar and whatnot. It’s made from calcium and fibrin. It makes sense that the calcine would be replaced with lead and make it even more problematic and contributing to lead is one of the biggest factors contributing to high blood pressure as well. And people, doctors are just not aware of it. They’re not aware that you get this garbage out of your body, and you start seeing dramatic improvements in these major chronic health conditions that are affecting so many millions of people.
Eric Ritter
I definitely agree with that. I think a large portion of that is because of the years of lobbying in the medical industry. The medical doctors and teachers in the schools were like, Oh, what is this huge threat? It wasn’t seen to be that big of a threat. When people like Claire Patterson or Herbert NeedlemanMsome of the big pioneers in identifying the widespread contamination of the earth and the dangers to human health were bringing this stuff up, there was a lot of pushback. A lot of times those people were actually being paid by the oil and gas industry who were using it in the gasoline or the lead industry directly. And so there was a lot of skepticism that lead was actually dangerous. I think that was also paired with the acknowledgement that everybody had significant amounts of lead in their bodies at the time. So, maybe it was a little bit like burying their heads in the sand combined with this malignant industrial influence. But yeah, typically doctors are very slow to suggest chelation therapy. They’re very slow to even suggest that it’s dangerous.
Today, when people find out they have lead poisoning or their child has lead poisoning, it’s typically only people who are tested are children between the ages of one and three, and not every locality has universal screening. But when the parents do find out, they typically get a number, and then that number kind of sticks in their mind. I think that that may actually contribute to the distress that their family feels because it’s associated with these very bad effects on children. It can be very scary for parents to find out that way. So I think that primary prevention is an amazing tool to just sidestep that finding out in that scary way to find out that you have wet on your wall, you have wet in your vacuum cleaner dust, you’ve wet on your dishes, not that big of a deal. It’s easy to fix. It’s like finding out you have a poison Ivy. From looking at it versus getting itchy and you’re like, all right, now I got poison knives all over my body. This is way worse than just seeing it and saying, okay, I have something I have to deal with that I can protect myself.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You can get a blood test with your doctor. It’s usually covered by insurance, but I think there’s a problem with false negatives because the amount of lead that should be in your body is zero. Absolutely zero. There’s no safe level of lead, and they used to be at a higher number. They’ve lowered it over the years, but I think there’s still an issue with false negatives where people get a false sense of security like there isn’t a problem. And there’s also the issue of the body not letting this stuff just run around in your blood. It’s not just letting the lead float around. It sequesters it in your bones and your tissue. So you could have a low level on a blood test, but still be incredibly lead toxic that you still need to address.
Eric Ritter
Yeah, and those numbers are actually based on statistics of the average amount of lead in people’s blood and children’s blood. So right now the reference level is 3. 5 micrograms per deciliter, and that’s the highest 2. 5 percent of children. So it doesn’t have anything to do with the negative effects. If it were, the number would really be like one, but that’s the average blood lead of an American right now, of a child bearing age American woman is about 0. 75 micrograms a deciliter. So achieving zero is realistically impossible because parental lead transfer to fetus exposure and then food exposure, which is ongoing, butI think that we can all do it. Minimize it as much as possible and just also to your point of making it seem like it’s not so dangerous. When it is the adults, nobody’s getting time off from work unless you have a blood level of 40, but we know from big research studies that say that if you have a blood level of only 2.5 as an adult, you’re at a massively increased risk for heart attack and ischemic heart injury. So, these numbers are really outdated, but they’re all tied into the necessity of the government to keep things moving and not just completely seize up the system with these really strong regulations that would cost everybody a lot of money.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I agree because there’s a lot of lead in the soils from the leaded gasoline that was used for decades. Developing countries are still using leaded gasoline that gets into the environment. Even if you’re eating organic food, there can still be lead in the soil that gets taken up by that plant. There’s lead in supplements because they can be in food based supplements. It is impossible to avoid it. You can’t do that. You want to take obvious measures like we’re going to talk about in a minute, but realistically, you can’t avoid it. Even when your baby’s developing inside you, its bones are made from your bones. Hey, guess what? Your bones are full of lead. You’re passing that down to each generation. And so you really have to take measures to like I say on the show all the time to do daily detox, do things on a daily basis that is going to purge this stuff from your body that you inherited, have ingested over the last few decades and will continue to be exposed to on a daily basis.
Eric Ritter
Yeah, and I don’t want to freak anybody out if you’re thinking about having a child, if you have an average life. I want to freak people out. I want to light a fire under them to do something about this because people don’t realize how big of a problem it is. My whole thing is I don’t want to freak people out because it’s kind of debilitating. If people are aware that this is a problem, they can take accurate steps to prevent the bad effects. I think that too much fear may prevent people and give them a kind of paralysis around them. So understanding that we do have lead in our bones, people who are pregnant, people who are aging and have decalcification of the bones, that increases blood lead, but that can be offset by taking adequate amounts of calcium and just exercising. Stuff that prevents the demineralization will offset that. So there’s definitely something we can do in virtually all cases. We can’t do anything about the lead that we ingested a long time ago, but we can definitely decrease our blood lead by following a diet that doesn’t involve consuming a lot. We can avoid getting it off of our dishes, and we can definitely avoid that paint lead consumption if we locate it,
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Dr. Wendy Myers
We’re not talking about taking cheap calcium from the drugstore. That’s not what we’re talking about. I like calcium lactate, but I’m definitely not into calcium carbonate. ‘m not into oyster shell calcium or coral calcium or anything like that. Our body doesn’t know what to do with that. You have to take it with magnesium or it’ll get deposited. It can be deposited into your soft tissue. Calcium is an amazing substance. I think a lot of people need it, especially menopausal women or older men, but it has to be taking the right forms of the right cofactors. So I just wanted to say that. Let’s talk about testing. So you have a testing kit. That’s amazing. So tell us what that is exactly and how do we use it?
Eric Ritter
This new testing kit is totally different from the one I developed in 2019. Instead of just rubbing a swab on a surface and then looking at the swab and seeing what color it is, this tests you spray on or you drip onto a surface and then you shine an ultraviolet light on it. That ultraviolet light will actually reflect back as bright green light if there is light on the surface. This is totally revolutionary. Previously, the reason why 3M was getting away with those 5 tests was because the chemical that they used couldn’t be kept wet. So you had to crush these two little vials and then mix the stuff right on the spot. With this one, it can be kept wet. It can’t be actually wet with water, but it can be in a liquid form.
The test is mostly rubbing alcohol. There’s a little bit of something called methyl ammonium bromide, and then a little bit of mandelic acid, which is an organic acid. The methyl ammonium bromide acts to convert that lead from whatever form it’s in into a form that will fluoresce or will glow when that UV light hits it. It’s really incredible because right where the lead is, is where it’ll be glowing. So if you see a crack in the paint, if you see paint chips on the floor, even if you see small amounts of dust on the floor, you can visualize that. Typically, you’d only be able to find dust using a dust wipe sample, sending it to a lab, they break it down, they run it through one of these fancy machines. It’s quite costly and it really doesn’t give that much information. They just take one square foot of floor, for example, and wipe that, but if you spray around, you can spray near your windows, spray your vacuum cleaner dust, like I saw you move out, or spray wherever, and you can really get an understanding of, is there lead dust here, yes or no.
The best thing about the test is probably, in addition to the really low cost per test, you can do hundreds of sprays per bottle or thousands of rips with a drip tip bottle, is the fact that there’s no false positives. There’s no other chemicals. There’s no other elements that react to the spray other than lead. So without lead it won’t glow.
This was actually taken from the solar manufacturing industry. The solar cells would collect the sunlight with this chemical, with this lead. It’s called a lead halide perovskite, and it would take the electrical energy into it and then transform it into electron potential. So we’re kind of like taking that here and hijacking it to test for lead.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I think it’s so smart to just do an inventory, take stock of your home, like the dishes that you have, even vintage toys and books. I think people don’t realize that those can contain lead. Also, my mom loves vintage toys. So I’m in our family home right now in Houston, Texas and everywhere I look, I’m like, I know that they have lead. I have had to take all these vintage metal toys with gloves on and store them away in the garages. I know that they’re full of lead. I know that already just from studying this stuff. I think people don’t realize how many exposures they have. It’s so smart to do an inventory with your testing tools that you have.
Eric Ritter
Yeah, and that’s just the first part of it. If you know the age of your house. If it’s built before 1978, I should check the paint. If it’s built before 1980, I should check that water service line. If I live in an area that was near a big city, near a big highway, near an industrial zone, where they were burning a lot of lead containing fuels, I probably have a decent amount of lead in the soil. Any bare patches of soil should be covered with grass or covered with hardscaping outside. Don’t track in a lot of dirt. This is a great one too. If you like to garden, don’t garden in your just regular ground. Bring in some raised bed and put some soil in there and grow out of that because the plants will take that lead. If you have soil that’s never been grown in before, and this speaks to something that’s really interesting and unfortunate because organic food is of course better for us with a lack of glyphosate and all these toxic pesticides, but it does contain significantly more lead than food that’s raised with chemical fertilizers, because if you take organic fertilizer, you’re taking plant material. That plant material took lead into it and then we’re bringing that and putting it on the fields. We’re kind of fortifying that field with some lead. It depends on where they get the organic fertilizer material from is going to be how much lead it has in it.
It is important to understand that the ground that we live on typically has a lot of lead. They actually found that people who are eating eggs or get eggs from a home farm where the chickens are walking around in the dirt, have significantly more lead in them than commercially raised chicken eggs because in those commercial farms, how many chickens have run through that soil and have taken up that lead in the past or like a commercial farm. That’s not adding more organic material to the soil. The plants over the last 25, 30 years have been removing lead with every cycle and then it goes out into the world. So lead only really moves around when it gets taken into living things. It doesn’t migrate through the soil very much. It’s pretty stable.
And that sucks because if you have a deck, let’s say it’s been sanded 30 years ago, all the soil around it is still going to be seriously contaminated.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s a really good point. That’s something I think a lot of people perhaps are thinking about, but it’s really important. And even with fertilizer, even if you’re using the chemical fertilizer, a lot of that comes from Morocco and it’s bull cadmium. It’s like you can’t win. Again, it just reiterates the point. You can mitigate some things, control some things in your diet, in your home, with the products you use, et cetera, but you’re still going to have exposure to different heavy metals and chemicals, no matter what you do, not to mention the air that we breathe. So you’ve got to really pay attention to adopting a detox practice. So what do you recommend? Everyone has lead. Everybody has lead. It doesn’t matter what tests that you do. Some people are just more toxic than others. Some people have emergency levels where they need to do IV chelation. What are your suggestions beyond IV chelation for lead toxicity?
Eric Ritter
My number one suggestion is always. Get those big sources out of your life. Get the dust exposure down. Get the water exposure down. Get the food exposure down. And the things to avoid on a food basis are really things that are grown in the ground, especially refined products from those things. Let’s say you have those cassava puff products, like the cassava. I don’t know how to say it particularly, but those have a lot of lead. The reason is because that plant sequesters a lot of lead in that root and anything grown in the ground, like a carrot, is going to have a lot more lead than an apple. So, that’s the one thing, stuff in the ground, grown close to the ground like spinach. These things are healthy. These things are important to eat, but maybe don’t eat insane amounts of them. Another thing to avoid is spices like cinnamon, turmeric, anything that is yellowish. Those aren’t even contaminated. Those are actually adulterated with lead chromate, which is yellow.
I have a friend in Texas, too, actually, and he’s done some isotope analysis of tracing where the lead came from. Is it contaminated from the area, or is it intentionally put into the products? He found that it was actually intentionally put in those Juana banana apple pouches. That was intentional contamination of the cinnamon in the applesauce packages. That’s where the lead came from. It wasn’t an accident. It was like, this is just what they do in other countries, and a lot of our spices are imported.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. The farmers are paid for the weight of their products. So they put lead in it to make marmalade.
Eric Ritter
Yeah, exactly. The stuff that’s grown on the ground, the refined stuff because the lead typically stays in it when you start taking out the fiber, the lead will stay behind. That stuff is something to watch out for also dark chocolate contains a decent amount of lead and it depends on the brand. I’m waiting for this atomic absorption spectrometer. I ordered it like three months ago from Thermo Fisher Scientific and it’s a fancy machine. It’s like 50, 000 and it will allow me to identify down to half a part per billion of lead in a sample. My plan is to get everybody to start sending me their food samples from local sources. I’ll have stuff from the grocery store. Then we can have a full indexing of what food has the most lead and what should we avoid the most because there is a daily maximum allowance of lead in both adults and children. For children, it’s 2. 2 micrograms and for adults, it’s about 7. 5 micrograms. So, if you can imagine, you’re trying to get your blood level down. If you’re hitting that 2. 2 micrograms, you’re taking in 2, 2. 2 extra micrograms of lead that would be removed from your body on the daily. But since we all need to eat food, it’s like, what foods do we eat if we’re trying to cut down on our blood lead level. I think that’s something that’s largely lost on people because it’s like the people freak out when they find that there’s lead in Lunchables. And there’s not even that much in Lunchables, but the fact is that there’s no testing of whole foods at all because the numbers would just be scary. There’s not a whole lot anybody can do about anything. I think the revelation to everybody that lead is actually everywhere. It’s still one that’s coming because it’s true that everybody had lead poisoning that has robbed our civilization of a lot of intelligence and probably caused a significant amount of trouble for people just on that basis.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is really sad how many IQ points we have lost and it’s largely due to lead exposure when children under five years old. It causes permanent brain damage, and like you mentioned, ADHD, ADD, hyperactivity, etc. It’s just devastating, really. I wanted to talk a little bit about substances you can take to remove lead. I’ve done extensive research on this and there are certain supplements that I just want as long as we’re on this topic. E. D. T. A. is fantastic for lead removal. You can do E. D. T. A. suppositories. We recommend Keletox. You can take a product called intestinal metal detox as well. I have a product called Citra Cleanse that has citrus pectin in it. That’s really decent at getting rid of lead. Cilantro extract, which my citra cleanse also has in it. You can take zeolites as well. Those are fantastic. You can take garlic, which is actually great at getting rid of lead and curcumin extracts. You can also take NAC n-Acetylcysteine, which is great at getting rid of blood as well as vitamin C. You can do like 000 milligrams every other day. You want to pulse that not every single day. Alpha lipoic acid is also great. Vitamin E, I only recommend a natto based ease, not the synthetic based ease. And then, of course, we mentioned calcium. So I just want to give people something to go on to start removing this stuff. I always recommend ionic foot baths and infrared saunas. The brands I recommend are on myersdetox.com. That’s a fantastic starting point if you want some tips on lead removal.
Eric Ritter
Yeah, and out of those, my favorite is definitely the modified citrus pectin that has been shown to be even better than The EDTA, which is like a prescription grade, chelating agent because the EDTA will also remove other essential nutrients from the body versus the modified citrus pectin has been shown after only a few days to increase urine lead by like 500%, which is phenomenal. So that’s like really going to increase the excretion rate and it doesn’t mess with the normal levels of calcium. or zinc in the body, which sometimes happens with the chelating drugs.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I think when you go to a doctor, that is any good doctor, that is, they’re thinking about heavy metals and how they’re affecting the body. Usually they’ve only been trained in IV chelation and I think that’s warranted. I have had clients that have such high lead levels. I’m like, you need to go to do chelation therapy like right now. It’s warranted for some people, but it’s very harsh. It’s not appropriate for some people. It’s not practical from a financial standpoint and it’s very harsh. I’m not a big fan. I think for a lot of people, it’s like dropping a nuclear bomb. It’s like DEFCON 5, you have to start at DEFCON 1. It’s how I like to say it. You need to start at gently coaxing this stuff out of the body with minerals, displacing it rather than thinking in terms of like, Oh, I got to go and take something, just rip this out of my body. It doesn’t always work like that. It takes a long time to get rid of lead. We have so much lead. It takes years. It’s not something that’s just going to go. You’re going to take something for a couple of months and one and done. I think people have to have some very realistic expectations when you go to your doctors. IV chelation is not necessarily going to be the answer and be aware that’s usually what you’re going to be recommended if you are approaching this with a conventional doctor.
Eric Ritter
There’s also a big factor in this is how much lead is in your bones. If I’ve never got lead in my bones or I’m a young child born today, I have no lead in my body relative to somebody who’s older. So if I get exposed and there’s a lot in my blood, there’s a lot of room in my bones to store that lead. And B, there’s a lot of lead in my blood that could get excreted quickly if I were to take chelation therapy or modify a citrus pectin or something like that. It’s going to be a lot easier to get that blood level down versus somebody who has a lot in their body. This is especially a concern, like the biggest concern really is the older people who start osteopenia and people who are in their 50s and 60s. Their blood lead is going to go up, but it’s going to be a constant source. So on top of the diet, if they have lead in their water, if they have lead in their plates or their home, they’re going to be constantly exposed just from their bone lead. I think that we’re going to see that as a big risk factor. I don’t know too much about this statistically speaking, but a lot of the heart attack deaths of the past, they’re always blamed on high fat food, stuff like that. Was it the lead?
There was so much lead involved back then that I think that was a significant factor because even today, there is relatively little lead in our bodies versus the past. The average blood level of an American in the 70s was 17 micrograms per deciliter, which is like five times higher. So what happened? What is the deal? They all say, oh, let’s take statins. Your cholesterol is too high. I’m not sure. It may have had a lot to do with the lead over time.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I 100 percent agree with you. I love that you brought up that once women hit menopause, estrogen levels come down, which is a bone protective men hit andropause. Same thing. Estrogen levels can come down and that protects your bone cells. When you don’t have that protection anymore, you start releasing that lead and it causes cataracts, not to mention low energy levels. It’s not that you’re just getting old. Your mitochondria are being decimated by this lead. You can actually see in a microscope. The lead will completely surround a mitochondria and completely choke it off. So your capacity to produce energy is drastically reduced, not to mention dementia and Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, the heart attacks, it’s just there’s. I just feel like the lead is contributing to so many health issues that are being just signed off as getting older and it’s just not the case.
Eric Ritter:
No, but it’s too much to bring this up directly. From a top level perspective, if it’s everywhere and everybody’s being affected, why panic people? Why make them freak out? But that’s exactly why I’m so passionate about this because there is no built in protection from people. When you buy a home, it’s not guaranteed that there’s no lead. You just signed something saying that you’re not going to hold the seller liable because they said there might be lead. If your pipes have lead, how are you going to know? The federal water drinking standard is 15 parts per billion and that equates to something that’s catastrophically high. The Flint water crisis was only half that. If you drink one liter of water with 15 parts per billion, you’re going to be consuming 15 micrograms of lead, which is twice the allocation for an adult, just off of one liter of drinking water. So there’s really no protection in the bottled water standard of five parts per billion from the FDA. That’s way too high.
All these limits are really super high. So there’s no built-in protection and that’s why I’m like a huge advocate for identifying lead. This new tool, the floor spec lead testing kit is incredibly powerful for finding dust by wet on stuff. It really gives the lead vision. You can identify where it’s at, and just have a lot of confidence on what to do next, especially cleaning up. I’ve seen pictures or videos of people in their garage and they’re like, their husband or one person’s father had sanded a bunch of stuff and she’s like, dad, look at this. She’s spraying the countertop and it’s just glowing everywhere. He made a huge mess and it’s on the floor. You can see where it’s being tracked in the house. That’s such a powerful tool. You would never be able to do that. Even if you had 300 visits from a lead risk assessor, he’ll take one dust wipe sample. That’s going to give you one square foot and you’ll get a number and you’ll say, Oh, it’s 15 micrograms per square foot. What does that even mean? It’s a meaningless figure. When you can see it, you can really know where it’s at. So this is what transformed my perspective on this because previously, it’s good to know, it’s a swab turns red, but that’s not that effective versus actually seeing everything for what it is.
There’s information about the food, what your pipe is about, what kinds of, like you were mentioning, older plates from other countries could definitely be dangerous and even a lot of aluminum cookware. I would not use aluminum cookware, not just for the aluminum, but because it’s typically contaminated with lead. I spoke with somebody recently from Washington state who was a big proponent in testing all the cookware. She did a research study on this. She actually got Washington State to ban, by 2030, all cookware with lead levels over 5 parts per million, which is really low. That is such a low number, but she found significant amounts of leaching from even very low containing cookware. I was just on the same target. I was scanning all the parts, all the Teflon, all that kind of stuff.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, I’m sure they love you.
Eric Ritter
Well, I left before anybody asked me any questions, but I haven’t really posted that stuff. I’m building a repository on everythingled.org. It’s kind of a Wikipedia-style page. It’s built on Wikimedia software. I’m just putting all this stuff on there just for everybody’s reference.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay. Fantastic. So what’s that website again?
Eric Ritter
It’s called everythinglead.org, which is under construction, but the website for the test kit is detectlead.com. There’ll be some more guides on what I just did on hoses. Apparently hoses still have lead in them and some of them are pretty high. I have a list over there at detectlead.com/hose.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. So everyone go to detectlead.com and get your test kits and just arm yourself with knowledge so that you can make some changes in your home and your environment. If you’re doing any restoration projects, you might want to maybe take some precautions. Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so good. And definitely, this is such a huge problem and I am just kicking myself. I haven’t done a show about this before, but I’m so glad you’re so knowledgeable on this amazing test kit. I have those 3m lead test kits as well. I had the same thought, like, why are these so expensive? Why is this kit 80 and it’s just going to be prohibitive for the majority of people. So thank you so much for creating this kit and thanks for coming on the show.
Eric Ritter
My pleasure, Wendy. I hope everybody stays safe. It’s easy to be safe from lead. Just learn a little bit more about it.
Dr Wendy Myers:
Yes. Well, everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning into the Myers detox podcast. I’m just so thrilled that I’ve been doing this for 11 years now and just really happy that more and more people are tuning in. More and more people are educating themselves about how many of their health issues and symptoms are being caused by heavy metals and chemicals and doing something about it. So thanks for tuning in every week.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of the information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests’ qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
