Question: What are my thoughts on detoxing heavy metals?

My thoughts are first you need to look at how bad the heavy metal is and if it is even at a level that a conventional practitioner would say you have toxicity; for example lead.

If this is your situation then I don't feel comfortable advising anyone here, but if your levels are slightly high and you would like to reduce them, then my suggestion would be zinc supplementation on the basis that most heavy metals produce a metallothionein increase.

Metallothionein is your endogenous chelatior.

The ability of the heavy metal to provoke that protective response is completely dependent on zinc concentrations inside your cell even across the range of deficiency through normal status through more zinc than you need, and there's no evidence for a threshold or cutoff.

So I think if your zinc status is fine and you boost your zinc status a little, without causing any zinc toxicity, or copper deficiency -- I think that's a very gentle and safe way to reduce your load of heavy metals.

Unless what you're seeing is arsenic, in which case methylation would be my focus because methylation plays a specific role in addressing arsenic. For anyone who hasn't seen that I have a comprehensive methylation resource at chrismasterjohnphd.com/methylation.

This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/podcast/2019/02/24/ask-anything-nutrition-feb-17-2019/

If you would like to be part of the next live Ask Me Anything About Nutrition, sign up for the CMJ Masterpass, which includes access to these live Zoom sessions, premium features on all my content, and hundreds of dollars of exclusive discounts. You can sign up with a 10% lifetime discount here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/q&a

Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here.

Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is the Founder and Scientific Director of the mitochondria test Mitome.