How Heavy Metals Damage Immunity

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Thanks so much for having me.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

So, one of the things that I always like to start with is the personal journey that brought you to this. Like how, how did you become interested in detoxification protocols?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Well, you know, I had, at some point in my life after I had my baby, I was 37 and I was just feeling terrible. And I had my child this was about a year after and I was having trouble losing weight. I was having brain fog. I was having bouts of anger. I wasn’t sleeping well. I just didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. So I went to the doctor, check me, check everything that’s going on with me. And I found out I had the hormone levels of a menopausal woman. I had thyroid issues. I had low stress hormones and the doctor wanted to put me on the hormone replacement therapy for all of these things. And I just thought, that’s just not how I’d really envision things of my life. So I decided to go on Dr. Google and kind of figure out what was going on with me, like what causes, all the things that cause low hormones, what causes adrenal fatigue and things of that nature. And I kept hitting upon heavy metals and chemicals. 

And so I just started researching that further and cause I really wanna get to that underlying root cause. Like why weren’t my hormones being produced by my body? You know, like what caused that and how can I reverse that versus just hormone replacement. So, to me that just seemed kind of a logical place to, you know, begin, but come to find out all these heavy metals also interfere in your immune system functioning and interfere in every different aspect of your body. And I just became fascinated by this. And for me, I just lit this fire under me and I started my website myersdetox.com to teach others about how heavy metals and chemicals are harming their health.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

A lot of people that develop autoimmune disease have heavy metals as one of the underlying causes. I call it like one of the four corner pieces of the puzzle. There’s toxic load and burden. And then the other three pieces of that puzzle, the corner pieces are genetics, your gut health, and trauma. And so how are heavy metals interfering with the body’s immune function?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Well, they do it in a couple different ways by directly impacting the immune system and the different immune system cells and negatively impacting them in various ways. And they also impact your gut bacteria and can promote leaky gut, which indirectly leads to autoimmunity. Because you need to have leaky gut as a precursor to developing autoimmunity, like according to Dr Vojdani. And so when it comes to heavy metals, so the main metals involved an immune system malfunction are mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium. And so these metals inhibit the function of macrophages. So they’re really important cells of immune system that are formed and responds to an infection and, or accumulating damaged or dead cells. And so they’re the really large specialized cells that recognize, engulf, and target cells. And then number two, neutrophils are negatively affected by metals as well. They’re kind of have the first responders when the body is invaded by bacteria and viruses. 

And guided by chemical signaling they travel to little areas of infection and attack. And neutrophils contain tiny compartments called granules, in which they store toxic chemicals that kind of act as are weapons against microorganisms. And so these are released and caused the swelling and inflammation and can cause pain when there’s an injury or there’s an infection. And also then there’s a natural killer cells that are impaired. Cadmium’s notorious for interfering in natural killer cells. And so these are specialized to kill certain types of disease cells as like when they become cancerous or infected with a virus, et cetera. And so that’s really how these metals can interfere in these cells going to an infection and engulfing that organism. But they also cause the immune system to just malfunction in a number of different ways. So it’s just, that’s kind of like maybe a lay person’s explanation of how metals interfere in the immune system.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And they also affect the gut flora, right?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yes.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

I always think about the gut flora as in the movie “Brave Heart”, when the kilts put their shields over the top of ’em like a whole group, you know, I always think about that. Like the gut bugs will use the metals to hide.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Right?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Oh yes.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yes, and you know we have to have a healthy gut to have a healthy immune system. So heavy metals basically like mercury and lead cause inhibition of hydrochloric acid. And so you need that to kill, kind of to sterilize the food and break down and digest the food. Cadmium exposure results in a reduction in pancreatic and brush border enzyme production, which need to digest food. Also metals can impair mitochondria functioning. So you need to have a lot of energy to digest food. Digestion takes up a lot of energy. So I talk a lot about how heavy metals interfere in mitochondrial functioning by poisoning enzymes that transport nutrients into the mitochondria needed to produce energy. So low energy equals poor digestion. And then there’s a mercury and copper, which are antibacterials. If you have a lot of that in your food or in your body, it can kill beneficial bacteria and that leads to increasing harmful bacteria. Copper and mercury can also fuel the overgrowth of certain yeasts, like candida, and a lot of other different ones as well. And lead cadmium and mercury can lead to the overgrowth of parasitic organisms as well, like blastocystis hominis, and other ones. And then heavy metals in general lead to the overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria. And so all of this dysbiosis can lead to leaky gut which leads to food sensitivities and autoimmunity.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

It also when we have all those metals on board it causes free radical damage and then that can impact how our genetics express themselves.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Absolutely.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Right. So if we have an already latent snip or two in our genetics, like I do, rheumatoid arthritis, my grandfather had it, its in my genes, right. I have breast cancer in my genetics. And so if I have that lying there and then the thing that comes along like heavy metals or dysbiotic microbiome, all of these things can trigger those genetics to express them as a disease state instead of a health state. So this is really an important piece of that puzzle. And then the body, I just always think about the wisdom of the body and how it doesn’t like to have those metals just sitting out there. So what does it do? Like I always call it cold storage, right? So, the body puts it into cold storage. And then as we’re aging, especially women and their bones start to lose their density as we go through perimenopause, menopause, post menopause, then all of those metals are coming out of storage, right?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Absolutely. And that’s such a good point because as our estrogen levels go down, you know, estrogen’s very bone protective, like the more estrogen that you have, the less bone cell turnover you have. So as the estrogen comes down you start releasing more and more bone cells from these little garbage cans in our bodies known as our bones.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

And so lead is stored in the bones. Aluminum is stored in bones and other metals as well. But you know when lead starts coming out, it starts interfering in energy production. It can lead to cataracts. That’s a big reason why older people can begin to get cataracts. It’s the lead coming outta their bones. It’s not just that they’re getting older.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

And there’s, cause a lot of other reproductive issues, just fatigue, just lots of different symptoms, including autoimmunity.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Brain fog, cognitive decline, memory changes, like things that people think, oh, I’m just getting old and it’s not that, right. These heavy metals that were stored to stay away from your nervous system are now out, right.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah. It’s a big problem. And it leads to people not feeling well. And in many, many, many, many different ways.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

So what’s the best way to assess for whether or not this is a problem for people?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, so I love hair mineral analysis. Hair mineral analysis is a good first start and it’s something that’s easy, you can do at home. You can do it just by clipping a little piece of your hair off the back of your head. So I know some women, that kind of freaks them out, but it’s really a very small amount of hair. So it’s really tiny amount of hair.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah, you can lift it. It comes from your scalp. and do a little patch and then put that back down.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, yeah, you can’t see it at all.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

It’ll grow in the back.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

You can’t see it at all. Yeah, and so that’s a great first start and you get your results back in a few weeks and gives a very accurate level of the tissue levels of metals that you have in your body. And it also tests your minerals as well, which is really important. And there’s a lot of indirect clues in a hair mineral analysis as to what heavy metal toxices you have that are not overtly obvious on the hair mineral analysis. So we recommend getting a consult with a detox expert to review those. And we have a team of practitioners at Myer’s Detox. But you can also do urine and stool as well because there’s no one test that is a perfect heavy metals test that will tell you all the metals that you have in your body at a given time. Because different metals have different exit routes in the body. 

Some metals excrete very well in the hair. Some metals come out in the urine, some metals show in the stool and even some come out in your sweat when you’re doing infrared saunas and what have you. So we have a lot of different detox pathways and exit routes of toxin. So there’s no one perfect test in an ideal world where you do all three of those tests, but a hammer analysis will give you a really good roadmap or show you what toxins you have and give you a good roadmap to detoxing what you have in your body. Even if you’re not aware of it, ’cause we don’t test for chemicals. You know, people have on average five to 700 chemicals in their body and there’s really no kind of economical test that will one, test all of those, and there’s no point in testing ’cause we know that people have tons of chemicals in their body. They just need to do detox protocols like infrared saunas and ionic foot baths and things like that to facilitate removal of those things.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

So what, there are so many different ways of detoxing these things. One of the things I always say is you need to make sure you know that you’re adrenals are up for the job. Your adrenals and hormones are balanced before you go in with all guns a blazing because you can really exhaust yourself doing a detox protocol for chelation. So what’s your favorite detox protocol?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, my favorite is ionic foot baths. And so these are very easy to do. You can do them while you’re doing other things like while you’re working, while you’re watching television or relaxing. And anyone can do them. So people that are very ill, people that are elderly, children, anyone can do these where with an infrared sauna, even though I love infrared saunas, not everyone can tolerate the heat. Not everyone has room for them. They’re much more expensive than an ionic foot bath. Though, I love them. I use them myself. They’re just not an option for a lot of people. It’s people that are very ill or elderly or children under the age of seven, whereas an ionic foot bath they can do that. And so when you’re doing an ionic foot bath, the toxins aren’t coming out in the water necessarily like what people think. They get really like, you know, ew and aw over the colors of the water and whatnot. But it’s really you have an increased output of metals and chemicals in your urine and stool in the two to three days following doing an infrared sauna or I’m sorry, following an ionic foot bath. And so that’s where they’re really working their magic is increasing your body’s urinary stool output of metals.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And there are so many different ways of inviting these heavy metals out. So that’s a really nice one that a lot of people don’t know about. What’s your opinion about IV Chelation?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, I mean there’s a place for IV Chelation. I mean, and you know, I think, it’s not for me like the first step. I think there’s more gentle ways to chelate or to remove metals from the body. Chelate just means they’re gonna grab onto and remove them. But for some people they can get very ill doing that. Many people need to really prepare the body for that taking minerals and you know, they need to be fairly healthy to do that. I think if people have a life threatening level of heavy metals, yes, by all means they need to do that. But if one does do it, it just needs to be done by a doctor that really knows what they’re doing. And perhaps that’s not their only method of heavy metal removal. It’s like one thing they’re doing. But if you go to a practitioner and that’s the only thing they do, I might be a little bit cautious because you know, there’s like a one trick pony or, you know, you just want someone that really knows what they’re doing because some people can get very, very ill. 

And the other problem I have with it is that you can’t just go in and rip out all the metals from your body, like using chelation. The body isn’t going to allow, the body’s using some of these metals for different purposes. And so it’s innately intelligent. The heavy metal chelation doesn’t always allow for a deep detox. Like what can happen if you eat a diet conducive to detox, if you take supplements based on your genetics, if you replete minerals in your body and you do different detox mechanisms that very slowly but surely coax the toxins out of the deeper parts of your body, like in your bones, your brain and whatnot. And that takes time. A detox isn’t a race. It takes time to slowly but surely remove these toxins out to remove them in a safe manner that doesn’t derail you and derail your health. And so my problem with IV Chelation, it can be very, very fast and just doesn’t work for some people, but it does have its place.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

That’s exactly the conversation I wanted to have. I was board certified in having metal chelation years and years ago for all these different forms, including IV. And what I witnessed in my own practice was there are much gentler ways of doing it and that by and large, the risk benefit ratio erred on the side of too hard on the side of risk in terms of the speed and the side effects that can happen. Other things are cleaned out of the body, and just the imbalance and the depletion that people are left with. So I appreciate that perspective. I think it’s an important one, yeah. Gentle, gentle.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, it’s not a race. Detox is not a race. Because we spent decades accumulating the stuff. You’re not gonna get it out in a few months. It’s just not gonna happen. Detox is a lifestyle. So you need to think of it in that way with supplements, diet, rest, detox protocols, and incorporating these on a daily basis into your health regimen. That’s the answer, not a few months of chelation.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Right, I know you’ve been branching into emotional detox too. Just something I’m very passionate about. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yes. Yeah, so I’ve worked with thousands of clients and I’ve just learned and even in my own health journey that you can do everything physically for your health, the diet and the supplements and the exercise and stress reduction and things like that and just still not get well and still not feel good mentally. And in my own journey, I started on doing emotional detoxification about seven years ago doing like a bio energetic program called NES Health, N-E-S Health. And just had profound improvements. Very, very, in a very short period of time, I was really taken aback by it, really caught my attention for focusing on emotional detoxification, working on identifying and releasing the emotional traumas that I had. Even though I’d had 10 years total of talk therapy, you know, in my research thought.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Talk therapy does not work everybody.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yes, yeah.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

You can do that with your girlfriend.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and do it for free.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And so,

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, Yeah you know, and it’s very expensive, the talk therapy, and I spent, I mean, tens of thousands of dollars. And so one of the top researchers on emotional trauma in the world, Professor Bessel van der Kolk, said that yapping doesn’t work because these emotional traumas that people have, they reside in this energy field. We have an energy field 10 feet in diameter around our body. And this is where a lot of information and communication in the body takes place. The physical body takes direction from this energy field. And when you have emotional traumas, it’s like this interference in the coherence of your energy field. It’s an interference in the function of your energy field. And so it creates a chaos and it creates physical health issues, including autoimmunity, including cancers, including heart disease. And it can affect every different organ system in the body. 

And you have to have an awareness of this if you have any kind of physical health issue or psychological issue, or you just want to feel better mentally, the research shows in the ACEs study and in the work of Professor Bessel van der Kolk, he wrote “The Body Keeps The Score.” He and this ACEs study have found and other researchers that over 65% of physical, what we think are physical health issues are caused by emotional trauma. So only 20% is caused by diet and lifestyle. The other, the rest of the 15% are genetic issues. So it’s by in a way, the number one cause of physical health issues. And so this can’t be ignored if you’re looking to address any kind of physical health issue, maybe you haven’t been successful. Maybe you know you have a lot of emotional trauma from the past. You wanna be looking at this. And I have a new emotional detox program that’s a 30 hour course that goes into everything I just talked about, the research, you know, the solutions using sound therapy and bio energetic, and many, many, many other aspects of, you know, addressing reducing stress and releasing emotional detox and releasing emotional trauma and trap negative emotions and things of that nature.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Beautiful. Yeah, this is definitely where I have found the healing, it is the most profound. Yeah, I mean healing your emotional trauma affects how your genetics express themselves, how your gut heals back up, you know, the bugs that live in your gut it affects everything, so. Yeah, and your permeability to toxins in the environment.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, doing emotional detox is a big physical detox as well. I think people might be a surprise by releasing emotional trauma can open up your detox pathways and get your body just working better and functioning better. And the toxin start coming out and you’re like, whoa. And, but it’s one of the best detoxes out there, you know, strangely enough.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah, so is there anything that we haven’t covered that you really wanna make sure our audience hears?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Well, I mean just that if you’ re looking for health answers, you’ve been dealing with a lot of health issues for many years, and you’ve just tried this and tried a bunch of different things, I implore people to look at emotional detoxification to working on their emotional trauma, because working on that level is going to relieve stress. Like stress is one of the number one killers on the planet. So you have to reduce stress. A lot of people have a very high stress set point where they just react quickly to stressors. They can’t calm themselves down. And, you know, we have what’s called, you know, our heart rate variability, which is a measure of stress. And there was a really interesting study by a guy named Hukiro, so I can’t read it. And so in his research with his team of researchers, he found that if you have a low heart rate variability, you have low stress. You have a dramatic increased, I’m sorry, that’s high stress. You have a dramatic increased risk of all causes or of mortality. So it basically increases having a low HRV or having high stress is a bigger indicator of mortality than having heart disease, smoking, taking medications, having high blood cholesterol and glucose levels, all cause mortality is increased. But if you have a low heart rate variability. So, you know, stress is a huge, huge factor in people getting ill. And so you wanna remove that underlying root, big, underlying root cause of stress, which is emotional trauma.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Beautiful. Thank you so much for taking the time to spend with us, with sharing just even a little bit of your wisdom. I know you have a free gift for our audience, How heavy metals cause brain fog and poor brain performance. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yes, yes. So it’s really interesting how I talked about how heavy metals impact your immune system, but they impact your brain as well. So they interfere in your neurotransmitter production. They interfere in nerve impulse transmission, which can slow your reaction times and your cognition and your processing of information. They can interfere. Aluminum outright kills brain cells and contributes to many different forms of dementia. So I talk about all that and more in my free guide.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

All right, thanks so much, Wendy.

Wendy Myers, FDN-P, NC, CHHC

Yeah, good night, thank you so much for having me.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

All right, everybody until next time, be well.