I often get asked about fatigue and the heavy metals behind it. So today I want to sit down with you and devote some time to discussing these energy vampires, how they affect your mitochondria, and what you can do to detox them from your body! Specifically, we will be talking about the dangers of arsenic, aluminum, tin, thallium and cesium. Let’s get started…
What I have found just in my research and in working with thousands of clients, is that the number one complaint people have is fatigue. They have low energy levels, or they have chronic fatigue, or they might have even been in bed, unable to work because they’re so tired.
It was the same for me, too. Before becoming a health practitioner and starting MyersDetox.com, I was struggling with my own health issues. At the top of the list was debilitating fatigue. Like many of you, I was very, very tired, and didn’t have the energy that I once had in the past. I didn’t have the energy to live my life the way I wanted. My path back to health and improved energy was detox – specifically, detoxing the heavy metals that were affecting my mitochondria.
For any of you that don’t know, your mitochondria are your little cells’ powerhouses. They are the little organelles inside your cells that make our energy. They’re really the gift of life. But when you are suffering from mitochondrial dysfunction, your health and energy levels suffer. We will be talking all about that (and more!) in this article, including:
- What are mitochondria – and why you should know
- Mitochondrial dysfunction
- The heavy metals that may be compromising your mitochondrial function
- Which supplements are most effective for detoxing metals from your system
- How repairing your mitochondria can improve your health
- The number one thing that you can do to restore cellular energy
What are Mitochondria?
Mitochondria are little organelles in our cells. They’re like little energy factories. Your mitochondria must be functioning properly in order to help your body recover from fatigue, as well as any kind of illness.
In order to function, your mitochondria require a number of nutrients – magnesium, zinc, boron, riboflavin (which is a B vitamin), to name a few. Your mitochondria take in all these different nutrients and use them produce ATP, which is the energy currency of our bodies in our cells.
The problem is, most people today are nutrient deficient thanks to our toxic world. And if you are nutrient deficient, there are less minerals for your mitochondria to gather up and use for creating ATP. So, if you are suffering from chronic fatigue, it may be that your body cannot make enough energy simply because it is lacking the proper nutrients and minerals it needs to function!
But there is more to it than that: you have to consider the heavy metals that are poisoning your system, making it so that the nutrients your body needs aren’t being absorbed.
How does that relate to mitochondria dysfunction? Let me explain…
Energy and Mitochondria Dysfunction
Energy is incredibly important. You even need energy to sleep!(I know, it’s a bit ironic!). Sleep is a very energy intensive process. You need energy for your body to heal and to function properly.
You also need energy to detox. In fact, you need energy for all the regenerative processes that are happening when you’re sleeping.
So if you’re not producing enough energy, your sleep suffers, and you’re not able to heal your body.
But how do you increase your energy when sleep alone isn’t doing it?
Well, many people, when they are tried they start reaching for coffee, they’re reaching for carbs, they’re reaching for sugar, they’re reaching for anything that will give them that quick hit of energy.
They are addressing the symptoms, not the actual problem.
The problem is actually heavy metals interfering in mitochondrial functioning.
That’s why I’m really passionate about this message and getting the information out there that it’s not enough to just eat a healthy diet. It’s not enough to just get 8 hours of sleep. Nor is it enough to simply take mitochondrial boosting supplements. You have to get rid of metals that are interfering in their function in the first place.
The Heavy Metals That Affect Your Mitochondria
Heavy metals impair mitochondrial functioning in many ways. One of which is that they poison the enzymes that transport nutrients into your mitochondria. Because of that, it doesn’t matter if you’re supplementing nutrients – they’re not being able to get into your mitochondria and utilize to produce ATP. So that’s why it’s very important to remove these metals from your body to restore energy production in your body.
Let’s look at the specific metals that are the biggest culprits in affecting your mitochondrial function and what you can do about them!
Aluminum. Aluminum is something that’s found in so many different products. It’s found in underarm deodorant that people are using every day. It’s an anti-caking agent in salt and sugar and flour, it is found in the air that we breathe. I personally believe it’s released in chem trails, it’s released into our environment. There’s aluminum being released from industrial factories. People are cooking with aluminum foil, drinking from aluminum cans. There’s a lot of different ways that aluminum enters our body. It’s also in water, again water as well. Read more about how you are exposed to aluminum here.
Aluminum, what that does is it poisons enzymes that transport nutrients into the mitochondria. You need to detox the aluminum affecting your mitochondria and causing dysfunction.
I say this because detox is the important step I find that many people are skipping. Instead, a lot of people jumping ahead to just taking nutrients like PQQ or NAD that are being sold on the market today in an effort to restore their mitochondrial function. But that doesn’t address the heavy metals part.
Arsenic. So arsenic is found in water. A lot of people, it’s a contaminate in their drinking water, their municipal water, the city water they have, their well water. It’s also found in conventional chickens, conventional eggs because arsenic is in the chicken feed that chickens are fed routinely around the world. Chicken farmers like this feed that contains arsenic because it makes the chickens grow 50% faster. Farmers are paid by the weights of their chickens. So when the chickens grow faster, they weigh more, and they’re making more money. The chicken meat also looks really, really healthy. The arsenic makes it look really pink.
And what arsenic does to the chickens, it’s doing to you as well! It fattens you up, because arsenic actually poisons enzymes, it transports fat out of fat cells. So if you’ve been eating a lot of this conventional chicken, or chicken that’s sold at fast food places, you end up accumulating a lot of arsenic. That will prevent weight loss in the future. That was one of the issues, the roadblocks that I had when I was trying to lose weight is I had eaten so much conventional chicken at El Pollo Loco and other types of conventional chicken and eggs, when I thought I was eating really healthy. That caused health problems for me down the road, because I had accumulated so much arsenic to the point where it was interfering in my metabolic function, which is what a lot of these metals do.
Arsenic is also going to be found in many rices. I generally avoid rice from India and from China, because those types of rices are going to have much more toxins in them because the environment there is more toxic. The soil has more metals in them. I buy rice from California, which typically is going to have a lot less toxins than rice grown in the southern United States. There’s an arsenic-based pesticide that was used in a lot of the soils in the south US, so I try to avoid rice grown in those areas. I also avoid brown rice, because brown rice – the bran – that’s where the rice stores toxins. So you want to eat white rice whenever possible! I know that goes against conventional wisdom, because brown rice is more nutritious, but it’s not really that much more nutritious. There’s not so much nutrition in rice that you want to be motivated to eat the bran at the expense of ingesting more toxins. Read more about arsenic here.
Tin is a heavy metal that can be found in water, air, even in mercury tooth fillings. So what tin does, so if you have your little mitochondria, and you envision the membrane of the mitochondria (check out the picture at the top of this article!), you have to have a certain charge on the outside of that membrane for it to function properly. Tin dispels that charge from the membrane. That’s how it handicaps the mitochondria from functioning properly.
I have a lot of clients that suffer from severe Chronic Fatigue. They almost always have high levels of tin, as tin is a big culprit in handicapping the mitochondria. Learn more about the symptoms of tin toxicity here.
Thallium. Thallium is something that many detox experts are not talking about, despite the evidence that it is severely effecting our health. Thallium is in all of the air that we breathe. It’s released into our environment from smog, from combustion engines. It’s naturally occurring in our petroleum deposits. Then when we burn the oil and the gas from our cars and thallium is released into the air.
Thallium, like these other heavy metals, also poisons enzymes that transport nutrients into mitochondria. It interferes in our digestion and absorption of nutrients. It interferes in your brain functioning, even causes brain fog. It also interferes in potassium metabolism. It’s one of the reasons people have low potassium on their hair mineral analysis. It’s another big, big culprit in Chronic Fatigue as well. You can read more about thallium toxicity here.
Cesium. Cesium is being unleashed into our environment from the Fukishima nuclear disaster in Japan. Cesium also does the same thing as thallium: it interferes in potassium channels and metabolism in the body. It, too, is also is a big factor in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, as well as low-grade fatigue.
A lot of people coming up with cesium on their urine challenge test. I did as well. Especially if you’re eating a lot of fish or you live in the Pacific, you know, Washington, Oregon, California, finding a lot of clients have cesium on their tests. So we don’t see this in a hair mineral analysis, but we see it in the urine. Learn more about cesium here.
Mercury. Mercury gets bound up in the mitochondria of cells, hindering mitochondria function. It also gets bound up in the brain cells as well, causing brain fog and it is so poisonous when it gets bound up in neural tissue. Mercury toxicity inhibits nerve cell formation. It even blocks the melatonin receptors needed to have a good night’s sleep!
The major sources of mercury exposure for most people are fish and seafood. In particular, large fish that eat smaller fish concentrate mercury up to one million times in their body fat and other tissues. Tuna fish is the most widely enjoyed contaminated fish. However, all fish, no matter what their size, are contaminated with mercury. Even shellfish, including clams, mussels, oysters, lobster and shrimp all tend to have mercury and other heavy metals such as cadmium, arsenic, lead, and even radioactive waste and other contaminants.
Another major source of mercury exposure is if you have mercury fillings. Studies demonstrate that each time one bites down on a mercury filling, some mercury vapor, the most dangerous form of mercury, enters the body. The amount that escapes is tiny, but it occurs thousands of times each day. Mercury fillings that have been in your mouth for more than 15 years degrade at a faster rate. This mercury vapor travels directly to bodily tissues and the brain, an organ easily damaged by mercury. You can read more about mercury toxicity here.
Lead. Lead will actually surround the mitochondria, completely choking it off. When that happens, the mitochondria cannot function whatsoever. Nothing’s going in or out of the mitochondria. Lead is a huge factor in fatigue.
Remember how I said getting lots of sleep isn’t enough to restoring your energy? I’ve had a number of clients who have a lot of lead in their system and are sleeping 12 hours a day…. and STILL tired. They can’t function. They can’t work, because they are very, very ill. And lead is to blame. Learn more about the dangers of lead toxicity here.
Detoxing the Heavy Metals Causing Mitochondrial Dysfunction
So how do you remove these metals from your body to restore mitochondrial functioning?
After years of working with clients and researching the root cause of mitochondrial dysfunction, I developed the Mitochondria Detox kit. It’s a duel set of supplements specifically aimed at both targeting and removing the heavy metals that cause fatigue.
The Mitochondria Detox kit includes:
1. Ageless AF. Ageless AF is a product that is a silica that is specifically formulated to bind onto arsenic, aluminum, tin, thallium and cesium. It grabs onto them and removes them from tissue storage sites. It works as a mobilizer for the heavy metals that have taken up residence in your body’s tissues.
2. CitriCleanse. CitriCleanse is a 3-in-1 detox solution that restores your mineral balance, pulls heavy metals out of your bones, cells, and nervous system, and binds those toxins so your body can flush them out. It is a binder made from citrus pectin that will absorb all the metals that the Ageless AF has mobilized and latched onto.
In addition to heavy metals, CitriCleanse also absorbs all different kinds of chemicals that may be infecting the body. It’s a well-rounded, effective, simple, and relatively inexpensive way to detox. It is also very safe and very gentle on the system.
A word on charcoal as a binder: I know many of my clients ask about activated charcoal for a a binder, but the problem is that, while it works very well, it doesn’t discriminate what it is removing from the body. In addition to metals and chemicals, charcoal absorbs all kinds of minerals and nutrients that your body needs! CitriCleanse does not absorb minerals, so you don’t need to worry about it contributing to further mineral depletion.
That is why I heavily caution everyone against taking activated charcoal or other similar binders – because they can strip your body of vital minerals and nutrients that may be hard to restore.
Restoring Mitochondrial Function
As you can see, the priority you need to have in your health is restoring healthy mitochondrial function. You do that first by detoxing metals that interfere in mitochondrial functioning and by giving yourself proper nutrients, minerals, magnesium, zinc, boron, B vitamins.
Just remember: you cannot improve your health and energy just by supplementing minerals. You need to also detox the heavy metals that are impairing your health in the first place!
Detox Your Mitochondria with The Mitochondria Detox Kit
As we have learned, there are certain heavy metals notorious for causing fatigue – arsenic, aluminum, tin, mercury, lead, cesium, and thallium – because each of these heavy metals are potent mitochondrial poisons.
They poison the enzymes that transport nutrients into your cell’s mitochondria, aka the body’s energy manufacturers.
In this way, it renders your ATP energy manufacturers unable to product energy as effectively. The result is chronic, unrelenting fatigue.
As you’ve learned here, heavy metals, literally attack your mitochondria at their core—and rob your body of its ability to make energy.
All of this means that the ONLY way to restore and maximize your energy will be to REMOVE the toxins that are attacking your mitochondria.
The more you do that, the more energy you have… and the better you feel.
