By Dr. David Blyweiss, Advanced Natural Wellness

Heavy metal. If you’re under the age of 30, you might think I’m talking about music (although, in my book, calling it music might be a topic for debate). But if you are middle age or older, you probably know that I’m referring to those natural—yet toxic—compounds like lead, mercury and arsenic that are linked to numerous health problems.

Unfortunately, these poisons are something you are exposed to every day. The environment is laden with heavy metals, mostly as a result of industrial waste. Anyone who eats a fish sandwich, inhales secondhand smoke, drinks a glass of water or simply breathes the air can be exposed. Luckily, there are dozens of simple ways to minimize your exposure and curtail potential dangers. The key is to be proactive about what you can change and mindful about what you can’t.

Several factors determine a person’s susceptibility to heavy-metal toxicity. Three of the biggest include diet, exposure to pollution and genetic makeup. The sneaky part about chronic exposure to low levels of heavy metals is that most don’t cause health problems right away. It’s a lifetime of exposure that spells trouble to many . . . a handful of years to the unfortunately few. To confound matters even further, heavy-metal toxicity masquerades as a host of other ailments, so it can fly under the radar of conventional healthcare practitioners. Symptoms of chronic heavy-metal exposure include depression, irritability, mood swings, tremors, autoimmune diseases, chronic infections and cancer.

You can cut down on the amount of heavy metals you are exposed to by cleaning up your diet and your living space. But what about the heavy metals already in your body? The good news is that alternative medicine has long offered a way to remove at least some of the heavy metals known to be harmful from our bodies. It’s a process known as chelation. The word comes from chele, the Greek word for ‘claw.’ In chelation, a manmade amino acid called EDTA wraps itself around heavy metal molecules like a claw and carries them out of the body. During traditional chelation, patients are injected with a solution of EDTA, along with certain vitamins and minerals. But a gentler version has also been developed—one that allows people to take supplements that perform the same function, although more slowly.

First used in the 1950s to treat lead poisoning among workers using lead-based paint, EDTA has been approved by the FDA only for lead overdose. But researchers have also noticed that patients treated for lead poisoning who also had atherosclerosis showed improved circulation after chelation. Since then, the primary use of EDTA chelation has been for heart disease and circulatory problems. Many patients with peripheral artery disease have saved limbs from amputation with chelation therapy. It has numerous other uses as well. I’ve seen it benefit patients with high blood pressure, kidney disease, psoriasis, gangrene from diabetes and even autoimmune diseases.

The procedure remains highly controversial among regulators and conventional physicians. But a variety of peer-reviewed articles support using it to treat heart disease because of the observed effects on patients. A meta-analysis of 19 studies on chelation published in the Journal of Advancement in Medicine, for instance, showed improvement in 88 percent of cases. Large studies showing clear evidence of benefits for heart disease have not been conducted, but that’s about to change. The National Institute of Health has determined that enough people are using intravenous chelation for coronary artery disease that more definitive research is warranted. It recently launched a $30 million five-year study on the therapy’s efficacy and safety.

Meanwhile, it’s a proven way to reduce the amount of heavy metal in the human body. That’s critically important since studies continue to support the association of heavy metals—particularly lead—with serious disease. The average level of lead in the bones of the typical American today is 1,000 times what it was four or five hundred years ago. I find this extremely troubling since lead can cause permanent neurological and behavioral problems and affects every system in the body.

In addition to ridding the body of lead, both intravenous and oral chelation can remove iron, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other metals.
But intravenous chelation can be both time-consuming and expensive. Unless you have been diagnosed with heavy metal toxicity or atherosclerosis, I recommend a high potency oral chelation supplement that contains EDTA, as well as high levels of aspartic acid (which plays a vital role in generating cellular energy), vitamin C, magnesium, manganese, selenium and zinc.

Not only will supplemental oral chelation (www.vesselex.com) remove heavy metals from your body, it will likely help restore your arteries to a much healthier state. The result is more energy, better concentration and improved circulation from head to toe!

Want more info? Get my free report on oral chelation therapy.

References:

Corsello S. The usefulness of chelation therapy for the remission of symptoms caused by previous treatment with mercury-containing pharmaceuticals: a case report. Cases Journal. 2009;2:199.

Flora SJ. Heavy metal induced oxidative stress & its possible reversal by chelation therapy. Indian Journal of Medical Research. 2008;128:501-523.

Green DJ.  Effects of chelation with EDTA and vitamin B therapy on nitric oxide-related endothelial vasodilator function. Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology. 1999;26:853-856.