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  • 03:46 About Dr. Bruce Jones
  • 08:36 Finding a Good Hair Mineral Analysis Laboratory
  • 16:15 Calcium and Calcium Deficiency
  • 23:27 Vitamin D
  • 34:19 Lithium
  • 42:58 Boron
  • 50:17 Toxicology and Nutrition
  • 55:26 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
  • 59:03 Where to Find Dr. Bruce Jones

Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me on myersdetox.com. And you can find this video podcast on my YouTube channel, Wendy Live to 110 and on the corresponding blog post.

Wendy Myers: Today, we have one of my favorite people, Dr. Bruce Jones on the podcast. He is a medical doctor and an expert in hair mineral analysis and metal toxicology. He actually wrote a textbook on metal toxicology. Today, we’re going to be talking about certain minerals and why you need them or not. Minerals are one of my favorite subjects. So we’re going to delve real deep into this subject today.

Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature. So please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on the show.

As many of you know, I fell in love with hair mineral analysis when my own health faltered many years ago. Like many of you do today I had brain fog. I was exhausted all the time. I was exercising to the point of fatigue and I wasn’t losing weight.

I finally sought medical help and the doctor found that I had adrenal fatigue and thyroid issues. And they found that I had anemia and numerous vitamin deficiencies, vitamin D, B12 and many, many others, even vitamin C deficiency of all things.

And I felt terrible. I had severe brain fog and fatigue and I was having lots of anger and I just didn’t feel like myself emotionally. I felt depressed when I really felt I didn’t have any reason to be.

I feel very thankful that I found hair mineral analysis. I was searching on the internet for natural cures for adrenal fatigue and also doing research on infrared saunas at the time and found Dr. Lawrence Wilson’s website and started my own hair mineral analysis program.

I was amazed at how quickly I felt better. I started sleeping better. It took time for the brain fog to clear, for the fatigue to improve. But today, I feel amazing and I know that I cannot have achieved that unless I had mineralized my body, balanced my minerals and removed the heavy metals and chemicals that were interfering in my body’s metabolic function.

I continue to detox and I continue to work on balancing my minerals. I’m a work in progress like all of you, but I just wanted to profess my love for hair mineral analysis as you’ll see on the podcast.

Dr. Bruce Jones is absolutely in love with hair mineral analysis because as a medical doctor for 35 years, he was very, very frustrated that his patients were not getting better and it was only when he found hair mineral analysis and balancing their minerals and detoxing them did they actually truly become better, reversed their health conditions and regained their energy and their mental clarity and were able to function. People have been sick for 20 years and no physician had been able to help and that’s because many doctors are not addressing the underlying root cause of disease, which are mineral deficiencies and heavy metal toxicities. We’re going to delve into that today on the program.

03:46 About Dr. Bruce Jones

Wendy Myers: Our guest on the podcast today is Dr. Bruce Jones. After working in general practice as a physician for many years, specializing in chronic pain management, he completed a diploma in horticulture of all things.

In late 2010, Dr. Jones was subsequently invited by Professor Avni Sali of the National Institute for Integrated Medicine in Hawthorn to develop courses in integrated medicine for both medical and natural health professionals as well as for the general public. There, he was a Senior Lecturer both in course development and post-graduate medical education. Several years ago, Dr. Jones completed an advanced diploma in nutritional medicine and subsequently set up his practice, Peninsula Clinical Nutrition in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr. Jones, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Bruce Jones: My pleasure, Wendy. It’s great to be with you.

Wendy Myers: Yes, I know we do a lot of talking on the phone or on Skype. We’re definitely becoming very, very good friends. So I’m really happy to have you on the podcast and I love having you as a mentor and colleague. I’ve really have learned a lot from you. Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your story and how you got interested in hair mineral analysis and metal toxicology?

Bruce Jones: Right! I was born and bred here in Melbourne. I did my training in medicine and surgery at the University of Melbourne and graduated in 1980.

Much of my professional career, I’ve spent as a family general medical practitioner just doing that routine sort of things. It’s very interesting that I found that there were a proportion of patients who you could never really help. You do all the standard medical tests that all come back pretty much negative. Occasionally, there’s something a bit odd here or a bit odd there. Overall, these patients were sick patients, but you could never with conventional medical testing really work out what was going on.

Some years later, for personal reasons, more out of curiosity than anything else, I decided to send some of my hair to do a hair mineral analysis. Lo and behold, there are all sorts of unusual things on it like lots of arsenic and some aluminium and all these funny things like sodium and potassium going through the roof. I couldn’t make head or tail of it.

So then, I went to a lecture or actually a seminar really ran by a laboratory here called InterClinical Laboratories who are the Australian distributors for Trace Elements Incorporated. It opened my eyes to what hair mineral analysis could really offer to someone in their life. It just uncovers an enormous amount of biochemistry, a whole lot of physiology and toxicology that it cannot simply do with blood tests or urine tests. They just don’t give you the same data.

Of course, with the hair test, you’re testing of tissue levels. Hair grows about a centimeter a month on the scalp. So when you harvest hair from the back of the head or the nape of the neck, you’re actually looking at a snapshot of what has been happening biologically in a person’s life over the preceding three to four months.

This is [unbelievable]. And I have used that extensively in my own practice now and I’m uncovering just answer after answer after answer for why people are chronically ill.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’m amazed at how it really helps you put the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out what’s wrong with someone like nothing else.

Bruce Jones: Yeah, precisely. Nothing else will do that, nothing else on this planet. I personally believe that after many, many years in general practice that hair mineral analysis properly conducted – and let’s underline those two words, ‘properly conducted’ – is the singularly best screening tool for human health.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree. And it’s inexpensive and it’s simple to do. It’s easy to sample.

08:36 Finding a Good Hair Mineral Analysis Laboratory

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about the labs. You like Trace Elements Labs, the same lab that I use. Why do you use that over ARL? Of course, we know all the other labs wash the hair so they’re useless for data for sodium and potassium.

Bruce Jones: Yes, absolutely.

Wendy Myers: Why do you use Trace Elements Labs?

Bruce Jones: Okay. In comparison with ARL for example, I have done split sample testing to various labs. I’ve taken a group sample of my hair and dissected those into many, many little pieces and sent half off to ARL and half off to Trace Elements. And on the whole, the fees are very, very similar.

In terms of accuracy, yes, they’re very accurate laboratories. They use the same methodology and they use similar equipment, so you would expect that.

However, it’s in the reports that made is the key difference. Trace Elements test I think 36 or 37 elements, something like that, whereas ARL only tests about 20 to 22.

Wendy Myers: Twenty-three.

Bruce Jones: Twenty-three?

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: So there are a lot of elements that are just missing out. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that they have far, far fewer ratios. Ratios are fundamentally important in understanding the relationship either between one mineral and another mineral or between a mineral and a metal. Trace Elements provide a lot of those ratios that we need, but ARL doesn’t, which is a drawback.

The third thing is in the presentation. The presentation of the ARL reports is easy to read. They’re color coded, they’re easily tabulated. Anyone can read them whereas the ARL ones unfortunately really haven’t progressed since Dr. Paul Eck put it together in the 1980s. And it’s still the same very, very dated format. It’s not user-friendly.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: So there are basic reasons why Trace Elements is definitely the best testing lab on the planet.

Wendy Myers: I agree. I used to use ARL for several years, but I can’t imagine using anything except for Trace Elements Labs. There are so many toxicities like uranium or tin and other ones like thallium that are fundamental to finding out if someone has these toxicities because you have to uncover those to be able to help them and it just isn’t provided with ARLs. So to me, I couldn’t consider any other labs except for Trace Elements.

Bruce Jones: I agree entirely. Now people complain of course and say, “Why don’t you use Genova? Why don’t you use Doctor’s Data?” And fundamentally, they have stumbled into a methodological error by repeatedly washing the hair samples as an initial step in de-ionized water.

Now if you have a compound or a biological material, which has got ions in it, sodium, potassium, copper, magnesium, et cetera and you soak them repeatedly in de-ionized water, what are you doing to the ions? They’re getting transferred from what you’re going to be testing into this water medium, which you then toss out. It gets worse.

It’s not just that bad, they do something forbidden. They use some stuff called Triton X-100, which is a product I believe licensed by or owned by the Dow Corporation and it’s designed for cell biology. So in a cell biology lab, you’ve got to dissolve the cell membranes to get a nuclear material so that you can extract the DNA for genetic analysis. That’s its job. That works really well for that application.

But consistently, it is not designed for other diagnostic work. In fact, it’s for research use only if you’re going to use it at all. The reason is that it acts a bit like soap and it disrupts the mineral content of a biological sample.

And the distributors stated very, very clearly on the product information that it’s only to be used for cell biology. It is not to be used for any other diagnostic testing. And yet all these other labs ignore the manufacturer’s recommendations. They continue using Triton X-100 and it simply invalidates all that single valent cations. That’s anything with 1+ such as sodium or potassium.

Wendy Myers: What are the other ones? You said magnesium, copper. Any other ones that it invalidates or reduces on a hair mineral analysis?

Bruce Jones: All your divalent cations or all your monovalent cations such as lithium, potassium are affected very, very greatly. The divalents are proportionately, but not to the same extent and the trivalent and metals hardly at all.

But that’s still no good. We don’t want false results regardless of their reference ranges. When we’re engaged in the type of looking at patients’ health, we’re looking at homeostatic mechanisms. In other words, the body has all these mechanisms designed to maintain the constancy of the chemical environment in cells and in tissues and plasma and blood. Whatever it be, it is a constant.

There are all sorts of sophisticated mechanisms all mammals have – not just humans, but all mammals have – at regulating their internal environment.

So if you’ve got a lab and because of your faulty methodology, you’re actually producing results which are wrong, then clinically that results in decisions, which have been wrong. You had given the wrong supplements. You had given the wrong advice. I say this every day.

Wendy Myers: So you feel that any protocol that’s based upon Genova or Doctor’s Data has to be fundamentally flawed?

Bruce Jones: Correct! I never use them. It’s fine for anything else. Don’t get me wrong. They’re perfectly good laboratories, but if you have the wrong methodology to start off with, you’re going to produce the wrong results. It’s simple basic stuff.

16:15 Calcium and Calcium Deficiency

Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about some of the minerals. There have been a lot of debates about whether people should supplement certain minerals. So let’s start off with calcium. What are some of the signs of a calcium deficiency?

Bruce Jones: Generally, there are a very few signs of calcium deficiency when you’re considering calcium levels in the blood stream. It’s a condition we call hypocalcaemia, which is pretty rare. I don’t see it hardly at all.

But there’s a typical symptom and it’s called carpopedal spasm and that is that both the hands and feet – I’m going to try and show your listeners what happens here. This is going to be very interesting.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: See that hand there, that gets into a very, very painful spasm and it’s really awful. And it’s due to a low level of ionized calcium in the bloodstream. It’s incredibly rare.
Otherwise, you may be depleted of 30% or 40% of your total body calcium stores before one day you trip over something unexpectedly and break your wrist or your ankle or your hip joint and end up in hospital. That might be the first sign you’ve got calcium deficiency.

And yet with proper testing through hair analysis and a couple of other tests that we run as a result of our hair analysis reports, you can diagnose that. You can pick it up years and years before you end up on the floor in a screaming mess.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s really a case in point of how you do not want to wait until you get sick or severely injured before you start thinking about your health and addressing your health. Prevention is key.

Wendy Myers: Under what circumstances does one need calcium? Let’s look from a perspective of hair mineral analysis. I know a lot of my clients are listening and other people that are very interested in hair mineral analysis.

So the most common scenario is someone with a slowed metabolism. Say they have calcium of 100 or higher on their hair mineral analysis, do those people need calcium?

Bruce Jones: Yes because to be able to get a reading like that – normally calcium is paired with magnesium, so both of them are irritated. That’s going to come from somewhere and the obvious source of both is bone.

The pH of blood normally sits at 7.40, but if you’re somewhat acidic, you might be down to 7.38 or 7.36.
What happens is that there is a relative excess of hydrogen ions within the blood stream. That’s going to be balanced by things like calcium and magnesium. So that’s going to come out of bone and that is a leaching process. If that goes on for year after year after year, your bones get thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner. Eventually, it breaks.

Anyone who has a calcium above that bluey purple zone, at the top there of the chart, you need supplementary calcium. But you also need vitamin K to go with that calcium. Now let’s just spend a minute talking about the relationship between calcium and vitamin K.

K1, we get from leafy green veggies. That’s really important for blood coagulation. But there’s another form of vitamin K called K2. We produce a little bit of it ourselves from our gut bacteria and found in fermented food such as natto, which is definitely an acquired taste.

Generally, if you’re going to have calcium, you want to tell it where to go and where to stay put. You don’t want it like a guided missile traveling throughout the body and ending up in the wrong spots.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I like how you said that calcium is really stupid and it has to be told where to go.

Bruce Jones: It’s an unguided missile.

Wendy Myers: Yes.

Bruce Jones: However, vitamin K1 and K2 basically tell it where to go, which is in bone and teeth and not into coronary arteries or carotid arteries where it causes trouble. So you must have a source of K1 and K2.

Most people’s K2 production by their gut bacteria isn’t sufficient to prevent calcium staying out of coronary arteries. That’s why you really do need supplementary K1 and K2 to ensure that it stays in bone.
Wendy Myers: Let’s say someone has a fast metabolism. That’s denoted by lower calcium, maybe calcium below 42 on a hair mineral analysis – of course, the ratio between calcium and phosphorous. So if someone has a fast metabolism, do they need calcium as well?

Bruce Jones: Yeah. That’s the opposite situation where they’re not actually absorbing sufficient calcium from their diet. Either their dietary intake of calcium-rich foods is low or they’re not absorbing the calcium due to problems with the calcium channels in the gut lining.

Although they might be getting plenty of calcium, they might get 1000 mg or even 1500 mg a day from the diet, only a relatively small proportion might be absorbed. That’s reflected in the quantity of calcium you see in a hair analysis report. These people will need supplementary calcium.

In some instances, we’ve got to go looking at [inaudible 00:22:57]. They’re not absorbing enough. And by far, the commonest cause is vitamin D deficiency. A small amount of calcium can get into the bloodstream outside of the calcium D dependent calcium channels, but it’s nowhere near enough than what your body requires each day. So vitamin D comes into the equation. The vitamin D is absolutely essential for the regulation of calcium metabolism.

23:27 Vitamin D

Wendy Myers: Yeah. You’ve actually written a course on vitamin D – a very, very extensive research that I read over. I was really blown away by the amount of research. And of course, the entire medical community is pro vitamin D obviously for good reasons. So why don’t you tell us your thoughts on why almost everyone needs vitamin D?

Bruce Jones: Okay. Very simply that we were designed to be an outdoor plant planted in a nice tropical environment where you’ve got plenty of UVB radiation converting cholesterol in the skin to vitamin D in our bodies. There have been studies of vitamin D levels in different populations in Africa and Australian surf lifesavers and they find that they have very, very substantial levels of vitamin D that occur naturally.

But of course, that’s an idealistic world. The vast majority of people on the planet live away from the tropics. Probably three quarters of the world’s population do not live in the tropics. Consequently, the further that you go away from the equator, the less available vitamin D you can manufacture from your skin in response to ultraviolet B radiation throughout the whole year.

Once you get to say the latitude where – I’m speaking from 35° south, we can’t manufacture vitamin D for at least four months of the year. It doesn’t matter if you’re stark raving naked and spent two hours in the midday sun – but there is a bit of a demand because it’s winter here in Melbourne – you’re never going to make one ounce of vitamin D.

This is reflected by study after study after study where there is a diurnal. Those changes day to day. But there’s also a seasonal variation with vitamin D levels, maximal at the end of the summer and minimal at the start of spring. That’s interesting. The flu season seems to be maximal through winter going into spring. I wonder if there could be a correlation there because there is.

The lower your vitamin D levels, the lower your ability to handle viruses, which are very prevalent through the winter months particularly if we’re indoors, we’re in offices, we’re breathing in what other people breathe out. It’s the same in shopping centers where they have wonderful air conditioning units that re-circulate bugs right through the centers just for a freebie, for their customers to take home with them. It’s these sorts of things. It’s entirely, entirely preventable.

There are also other studies. For example, the frequency of multiple sclerosis is inversely related to latitude. So the further you go away from the equator, the x potential rise in your risk for multiple sclerosis.

All the researches has been done. It’s out there. There’s no point burying your head in the sand and saying, “Oh, just hang on to this little theory that vitamin D is not necessary.” No, look at the research down to Google Scholar. You can spend days and days and days and days looking at Google Scholar, looking at the hard evidence.

The renal physicians are very, very much pro-vitamin D because they see the effects of low vitamin D in their renal failure patients. A year or two back, the American Society of Gerontological Medicine, in other words, geriatricians who look after elderly folk came out with an amazing statement, which said that every single patient in a nursing home should have 4000 units of vitamin D orally per day.

They don’t just say that. There must be a lot of hard scientific evidence for a body of physicians responsible for caring for the elderly to come out with that statement. And they’re quite right. They’re absolutely right. In fact, some patients would need a lot more than 4000, but 4000 is a very good, solid start.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, there are some people that postulate in the hair mineral analysis world that taking vitamin D will lower your potassium levels on the hair mineral analysis and keep that level suppressed. What is your thought on that theory? That’s primarily coming from David Watts from the Trace Elements Laboratory. What are your thoughts on that?

Bruce Jones: In my case, my potassium is often off the scale when I’m under a stressful period and my vitamin D levels were being regarded as very high. So certainly in my case, that does not hold. I haven’t said that to anyone else.

I’m not quite sure where Dr. Watts is coming from there. We do have some differences of opinion over the years, but that’s all right. He’s a laboratory scientist and I’m a clinician. I have to treat patients and he has to run a laboratory, which he does very, very well. But laboratory scientists should realize they’re not clinicians and what they think might happen in the real world doesn’t always work out that way.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. So what are your recommendations for vitamin D? How many IUs per kilogram or pound should people be taking per day?

Bruce Jones: Okay. Unless you’re a nudist who lives in the tropics, I recommend 1000 International Units of D3 per 10 kg, that’s 22 lbs. of body weight per day, year round.

Wendy Myers: Okay.

Bruce Jones: You see the body has a really nifty way of regulating vitamin D levels. If it’s too high, it gets rid of it. If it’s too low, it tries to increase as much as it can from dietary sources – again coming back to what’s called homeostasis. I use that as a starting point.

If you’re 70 kg., you need 7000 IUs, if you’re 80 kg, 8000 IUs, 15,000 kg, 5000 IUs. You take that for three months. Supplements are easy to get. You can get them in 5000 units, 1000, 2000 just to make up the quantity that you need per day.

Please make sure that you take it with the largest meal of the day, something that has got some fats and oils in it because it is a fat-soluble vitamin. Vitamin K is likewise a fat soluble vitamin. So please take your vitamin D and vitamin together – and vitamin E because that’s fat soluble as well.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: So those three can go together after the best meal of the day. And then check your blood levels after three months and then adjust it.

The levels that I really like to see – you might like to write this down as a record – is 120 to 180 nanomoles per liter if your lab is in metric. That correlates to 45 to 65 nanograms/mil. I think that’s pretty wide.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: Say the cutoff is 30 nanograms/mil for whether you’re deficient in vitamin D. I think that level is wrong. The Institute of Medicine hasn’t got it right here. They actually need to increase that to a deficiency certainly below 40 nanograms/mil and your ideal levels are from 45 to 65.
That then leads into a question, “Oh, what about vitamin D toxicity, this dreadful, dreadful disease that might be self-inflicted?”

Well, the thing is I’ve never seen in my lifetime because I’ve never seen a vitamin D level over about 220.

In the research literature, in fact, there are no cases of vitamin D toxicity below 375 and that was one case in the [inaudible 00:33:02]. The rest of the cases are all about 500. To get that amount, you have to be taking an enormous amount of vitamin D. You’re going nuts on the stuff.

If you take it sensibly at a thousand IU per 10 kg. or 22 lbs. of body weight each day with food, you are going to have a nice healthy vitamin D level. It will stay in a very good state for your health for the rest of your life.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I recently started my vitamin D again as well. I had stopped it for a period of time based on some research that I have read. But this research is a fish out of water. It’s like 0.001% of research that’s negative on vitamin D compared to the vast majority of literature of pro vitamin D.

So, I admit I was wrong. I don’t have an ego. I made mistakes sometimes. I do. I don’t know everything. So I am pro vitamin D now. That’s what I’m going to be recommending to all of my clients.

34:19 Lithium

Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about lithium. Lithium is a mineral that a lot of people don’t really know about, don’t really supplement. They never really heard of it. But I have found it is low in almost every single hair mineral analysis that I perform – including yours, you mentioned most of yours are low as well. Can you talk a little bit about lithium and why we need it and why we should supplement with it?

Bruce Jones: Right. That lithium is an essential trace element. It’s the third lightest in the periodic scale after hydrogen and helium. So just keep that thought in mind. It’s a very, very light element.

It occurs in the earth’s crust in relatively small amounts. It’s not abundant by any means. We got far, far more sodium floating around our planet than we have lithium. That’s a problem because sodium displaces lithium. So just keep that thought in the back of your mind as we go on.

Yes, you’re quite right there, Wendy. The vast majority of patients are lithium-depleted unless they are taking a supplement called lithium orotate. Lithium orotate is a very, very safe nutraceutical designed for replacing deficiencies in lithium to get that up to physiological levels.

We all need lithium. We need it first of all – this will not surprise you – for insulin signaling. Insulin is designed to get glucose out of our blood and into our cells where it can be used for energy. If you don’t have enough lithium – zinc is also included here as well – the insulin cannot signal to what we call a glucose transporter to shoot itself up to the cell surface, grab hold of that tasty molecule of glucose and shuttle it back to the mitochondria for them to do their job and gobble it all up and produce energy.

So what you get with low lithium levels is a condition that we call insulin resistance. We can very easily measure that through fasting glucose and fasting insulin and then just perform the calculations. It’s very simple. People with high insulin resistance invariably become diabetics – type II, by the way, not type I. It’s a totally different process.

That’s the first thing. It is needed for insulin signaling.

The second thing is that it modulates the transmission of nerve cells that carry a neurotransmitter called glutamate. What does glutamate do? Well, without glutamate, you would not – unless I had glutamate. And when you have glutamate, you would not be listening to our podcast today.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: It gets the tongue working. It gets muscles working. In fact, every muscular movement in the body is initiated with the passage of glutamate between nerve cells in the brain.

What happens if you have too much glutamate and not enough of the other [inaudible 00:38:05] GABA, which is needed to just – it’s like an accelerator and a brake in a car where glutamate is the accelerator and GABA is the brake.

Wendy Myers: Those patients cannot sleep. They’re not sleeping very well. They’re too excited all the time.

Bruce Jones: That’s right. They’re hyperactive and can wear out. So fatigue can result from an excess of glutamate. Of course people with low GABA tend to self-medicate with benzodiazepines and with alcohol because these are two things that activate GABA receptors to counteract the effect of glutamate.

But naturally occurring lithium also modulates the effects of glutamate. Again, remember that word, modulate? So that dampens down the effect of excess glutamate in the system, but it can’t if your hair analysis tells you you’re deficient.

That’s probably about 80% of my patients that are lithium deficient. That’s related to Australia’s geological history. Back in the warm period in this history, a lot of Australia was an inland lake. And being in inland lake, it touched the ocean and you had a lot of salts.

When an ice age came along, the waters evaporated and the sea levels fell and that salt was deposited in our top soils.

So we have a major issue here in our irrigated areas in particular that right throughout much of our sheep and cattle farm land where we have too much salt in the soil. And that has displaced whatever lithium was left. Australia is a very ancient continent and we don’t have any recent geological history emerged, not like a lot of other continents do. So the lithium levels in our soils are very low.

Consequently, it’s very low in food supply because sheep and cattle don’t get much lithium. And consequently, our fruit, cereal growing areas don’t get much lithium. So we all become lithium-depleted.
That’s all doom and gloom. The good news is it is very simple to use lithium orotate to get your levels back.

Now people say to me, “Oh lithium, that’s that dreadful, horrible drug that they give to these mad people in psyche hospitals.” They do, but it’s a different type of lithium and it’s called lithium carbonate and it comes in 250 mg capsules whereas here, we’re talking 5 mg and 10 mg capsules. So for heaven’s sake, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and don’t confuse the two.

Wendy Myers: There are different forms of minerals.

Bruce Jones: Absolutely! One is a pharmacological poison listed on a poison schedule. The other, you can buy from Wendy.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I prefer the Seeking Health brand I have in my store. That’s the one that I like.

I’ve heard you also need to have lithium to absorb B12. You need that to absorb B12 as well.
Bruce Jones: It’s also important in the methylation cycle and again it works with zinc. It’s involved in the function ofmethionine synthase, which converts homocysteine across to S-adenosylmethionine, which is the essential methyl donor that we all need, we all have, some people don’t have enough of and that causes long term health problems.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. Bottom line, you need the hair mineral analysis to determine if you need lithium or not. Most people do.

I know I started feeling better after I started supplementing a mere five milligrams a day because it helps to make more GABA and I’m deficient in GABA like many, many people that are over-stimulated today in our fast-paced stressful world.

Is there anything more you want to add about lithium before we begin talking about boron?

Bruce Jones: No, I think that’s probably enough information.

Wendy Myers: Okay.

Bruce Jones: It’s really an essential trace element and make sure you get enough of it.

42:58 Boron

Wendy Myers: Yeah. Let’s talk about boron. This is not a very popular mineral, but very, very important. So why do we need boron and how do we get it in our diet?

Bruce Jones: Okay. Boron is very interesting. It’s an essential trace nutrient and has quite a lot of biological functions, but most medical practitioners don’t know a thing about boron or don’t have a clue.

First of all, where do we get it from? The answer number one is fruit of all descriptions and secondly nuts and seeds. You can get it in vegetables, but in much lower concentrations.

When I see a hair result and there’s very low boron, the first question I ask is, “How much fruit are you eating each day?” And invariably the answer is virtually none. That can be because the patient has fructase deficiency or a problem with the fructose transporter. Consequently, they’re getting a lot of irritable bowel symptoms and they’re going into FODMAPs diet. And I’m all for a FODMAPs diet so long as you supplement with boron.

Wendy Myers: Yes.

Bruce Jones: Why do we need boron? The first and most important thing is bone strength. Boron is involved in ensuring – boron along with strontium, which is another trace element that you want in physiological amounts, not pharmacological form such strontium ranelate, which poisons off radical osteoclasts involved in bone remodeling.

Boron and strontium are both needed in the bone matrix to stabilize it and start forming the patch. That’s a simple statement, but it does more than that.

And fairly recent research that’s very validated because it’s coming from several sources now says that boron is also needed to modulate the activity of the prostate gland in men and for a certain extent, breast tissue in women.

What they found is that men who have high levels of boron, by however means that you analyze it, tend to have very low PSA levels, prostatic specific antigen. Now, PSA is actually an enzyme. It is produced by the prostate cells normally in small amounts, but in very high amounts in prostate cancer. And generally, the higher the PSA level, the more aggressive that tumor actually becomes.

These patients again rarely have fruits and vegetables or it’s not getting enough into their system because boron is very, very potent at inhibiting this PSA enzyme. And it’s involved in the breakdown of cellular compartments. It’s what we call serine protease, which is a fundamental amino acid which is involved in the building blocks of breast proteins that comes from your diet, meat of chicken and fish.

Boron inhibits this enzyme, which breaks down these molecules so that it facilitates cancer. Once it develops from spreading initially within the gland itself and then outside of the gland to regional lymph nodes to bone, et cetera.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: There are some research out there with regards to breast cancer. Boron is needed by women just as much as it is by men. Again, it’s an essential trace element. Hair is by far the easiest way for testing boron levels.

Wendy Myers: So how much fruit per day do you think people should be eating?

Bruce Jones: I would say an average of two to three pieces a day.

Wendy Myers: Really?

Bruce Jones: Yeah.

Wendy Myers: What about those folks that have Candida and they’re worried about feeding gut parasites and gut dysbiosis, et cetera? What do you say to them?

Bruce Jones: Find the underlying cause.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: It can be dietary, but it’s more related to glucose and starches as opposed to fructose because excessive fructose, if you’re having four or five or six pieces of fruit a day and you’re having a couple of teaspoons of sugar with every coffee, you then pig out on some donuts or some candy floss, yeah, you’re asking for trouble, self inflicted. No question about that.

The other main course of high levels of Candida persisting is mercury, mercury toxicity. Mercury kills off the beneficial bacteria particularly one called E. coli in the gut, allowing Candida (which might be there in small numbers – it’s minding its own business. Most people would never know they had it and carry it until their dying day), when it multiplies out of control because you’ve killed off some of the biological controls [inaudible 00:48:53] or with continuous flow of mercury into the gut from the liver – and usually, [inaudible 00:49:02] on mercury from eating flake or shark, swordfish, tuna. Tuna is a big one. I’ve seen patients with mercury toxicity purely from eating a can a tuna a day. So beware of that.

Or they got it from dental amalgams, which have been there for years and slowly rotting away, breaking down, releasing small, but steady amounts of mercury in the system. It gets into the gut, kills off your bacteria and lo, and behold you’ve got problems with thrush.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. So I really like that you’re pro-fruit because it never made sense to me. Dr. Lawrence Wilson advises to eliminate fruit completely. I always felt that was counterintuitive simply because of the sugar levels in it. Berries, strawberries are very, very low fructose and sugar and they’re incredibly nutritious.

There are so many studies show they protect brain health and so many other things as well as raising boron levels and potassium levels, which almost everyone is low in. So fruit helps erase both of those essential minerals.

50:17 Toxicology and Nutrition

Bruce Jones: Correct, absolutely. Don’t be fooled if you get some standard blood test back from the doctor, which shows that your serum potassium is “within the normal range.” That’s fine. Blood regulates sodium, potassium levels and calcium levels particularly, very, very carefully.

So what’s in your blood has nothing to do with what’s in your tissues. They’re totally different biological systems. They’re regulated differently. You need both. It’s not one or the other. You need them for your own health.

You’ve got to take charge of your health. [Inaudible 00:51:03] is absolutely right in that regard. You must, must take responsibility for your health and get the best advice that you can.

As a medical practitioner for many, many years, I’m telling you, medicine only has part of the answers when it comes to health. We’re not gods. We only know one component of what there is to know. I’ve learned far, far more since I’ve gone into practicing nutritional medicine than I ever knew in practicing conventional medicine. My library has grown appreciably. Only a proportion of that you could see on the background here

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I think it’s – I don’t want to say “criminal.” It’s a little bit of a strong word. But it’s mind-blowing to me that medicine doesn’t look at the two key components that underlie chronic health conditions and disease, which are mineral deficiencies and heavy metal and chemical toxicities. If your health regime does not address these two essential components underlying disease and fatigue and brain fog, et cetera, you have no hopes of reversing your diseases.

Bruce Jones: I couldn’t agree with you more, Wendy. It’s absolutely true. These are two things which should be key components of any medical school curriculum, but I just wonder apart from maybe a short course on nutrition if you’re lucky (we did, but that was back in the 1970s), most people have forgotten about it by the time they graduate and forgotten that it’s actually relevant to human health because we don’t see pellagra, we don’t recognize scurvy or some of these other dreadful deficiency diseases.

Beriberi, who has seen that since World War II? It was very common in American and Australian prisoners of war. In the Japanese prisoner of war camps, a lot of them had beriberi simply because of severe vitamin D deficiencies and just by living on a small diet of rice every day for years.

So nutrition and heavy metal toxicology is absolutely fundamental to human health, so is environmental toxicology dealing with environmental chemicals that we’re exposed to. This should be an essential component of medical school education.

And very interestingly, when you look back at the ancient Indian system of medical education, going back to the subcontinent of India, back 1500 BC, the toxicology and nutrition were two absolutely essential courses of the Ayurvedic medical system of knowledge. They recognized that people got poisoned by all sorts of things, whether eating the wrong plants or for whatever reason they had become poisoned. Maybe they have been deliberately poisoned as Medeas, the Roman emperor found to their dismay.

Wendy Myers: Yes.

Bruce Jones: Poisoning even with arsenic in the 18th to 19th centuries. Arsenic was known as inheritance pill because if you had a spouse who is particularly wealthy and you’re really quite sick of them, you can just put in a little bit of arsenic with every meal. They wouldn’t taste it and slowly, their health would decline. Eventually, they would expire. Mourn at their funeral and then go to the lawyer and say, “Can I have all the estate please?”

But finally, the British Constabulary caught on to this and they found methods of detecting arsenic in samples of hair and other body tissues. So that practice eventually stopped.

55:26 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today

Wendy Myers: Yeah. Let me ask you a question that I like to ask to all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?

Bruce Jones: My goodness! What is the most pressing health issue?

Wendy Myers: Maybe you already answered it.

Bruce Jones: I think the answer depends on which country you live in. You ask that to people in Bangladesh. Okay, there are a lot of people in Bangladesh and West Bengal, the joining state in India. And what they would tell you is getting rid of arsenic. Number one, their top priority is getting rid of arsenic.

Why? It’s because they unfortunately happened to live in other part of the earth where there’s a lot of arsenic in the underlying strata or the rock strata underneath the top soil. In Bangladesh, the majority of population had wells and they developed chronic arsenic poisoning from just drinking well water.

The [inaudible 00:56:53] Program some years ago was trying to provide wells for all the villages in Bangladesh. It was a very honorable program. It has resulted in vast reduction in gut diseases such as cholera, typhoid and that sort of thing, which has declined an enormous number of victims every year. That has reduced dramatically.

What they’ve done is substituted bacterial cause of death with a heavy metal cause of death. And what they’re trying to do now is to dig much deeper wells which get down below the arsenic strata into aquifers, which are arsenic-free. That’s going to take a lot of time. In the meantime, a lot of people are suffering. This is the sort of thing that Bill Gates should be spending his money on rather than trying to vaccinate the whole planet to death.

Wendy Myers: Than give them aluminum toxicity.

Bruce Jones: Absolutely! Give them aluminum poisoning. Yeah, good on you, Bill. There are far more important projects I think, the health of the whole nation.
It’s not just Bangladesh. Taiwan, same problem. Southern Argentina and Chile, same problem. New Hampshire, same problem.

Wendy Myers: Arsenic issue?

Bruce Jones: Yeah. We’ve got certain areas and estates where again you got a lot of arsenic in your rock strata. It’s the same problem.

Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Bruce Jones: And all the research is there. They’re all published. What you got to do is go find it. It’s there.

Wendy Myers: We’re going to do another podcast very soon on trivalent heavy metals like arsenic, tin, thallium and aluminum and all of the health issues and mitochondrial poisoning that they promote and that are causing fatigue and brain fog throughout our populations. That’s going to be a really, really interesting podcast.

59:03 Where to find Dr. Bruce Jones

Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about where they can find you and your website if they want to work with you?

Bruce Jones: Okay. My website address is www.PeninsulaNutrition.com.au. Make sure you put in that au. It’s of course an Australian website. All the details about what I do and how to get in contact with me are on that website. So please have a look at it. There’s lots of useful information there.

I do much the same work as Wendy in that I do a lot of consultations often by Skype. I’ve treated patients around the world. We basically look at the whole person. We look at what are you eating, where have you been living, what have you been exposed to. Have you been living near main roads or do you live in rural communities? Have you lived in big cities all your life that hardly get any sun? We go through a process by which we can unearth the fundamental underlying causes of human disease.

It’s a fascinating journey. It takes time. It’s like peeling an onion. There are lots of layers. We start off at the top layers. But Wendy and I have got the tools that can uncover what is wrong. And mainly, I see patients who have been ill 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years.

I’ve had a couple of patients who have literally been ill all their lives from very early childhood and these are patients in their mid 60s and mid 70 and we finally uncover the problem, which actually in both cases was lead poisoning acquired from inhalation of lead in petrol in large amounts when they were children. They don’t have the biological tools to get rid of the stuff. So it’s poisoning them all their life.

Get rid of the arsenic, get rid of the lead and get rid of the thallium, the aluminum, the mercury. It changes lives.

So have a look at my website. If I can be of assistance, please contact me via e-mail and we’ll see what we can do to help.

Wendy Myers: Dr. Jones, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I am disappearing because I’m at the mercy of the lights and now it’s dark. This always seems to happen when I interview someone from Australia because it’s your morning there and it’s my night time. So it’s time for me to go before I completely disappear to catch my pumpkin and get my glass slipper.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Bruce Jones: Very good. We’ll speak again soon.

Wendy Myers: Listeners, you can learn more about me and my website, myersdetox.com. You can learn about my healing and detox program, MineralPower.com, utilizing hair mineral analysis. Go to my online health program that teaches you all the basics of health that I learned over the years in a very affordable online program at BodyBioRehab.com.

Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.