Why Testing Negative for Toxins Might Be the Scariest Result You Can Get

Introduction and Guest Welcome 0:00

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the Future of Menopause Medicine Summit. Uncensored, unapologetic and unconventional. I am your host, Doctor Sharon Stills, and I am excited to be here with you. And I am excited for our next interview, because this lady in the house with me is someone I wanted to interview for a long time to have her on her summit, and we finally got her. So we're in for a important conversation, a topic that comes up time and time and time and time again all day long in my office about detox and hormones.

And so we're going to give you the lowdown right here, right now. Many of you probably recognize her, but Doctor Wendy Myers is in the house. She is a natural doctor and founder of Myers Detox. She's an internationally recognized expert on heavy metal detox, anti-aging, and bioenergetics. She's a sought after speaker, host of the top 50 ranking Myers Detox podcast and number one best selling author, and her mission is to educate and inspire the globe about bioenergetics and detoxing from our increasingly toxic world to combat disease and increase longevity.

So she is a sister spirit we have. We have a very similar mission. So welcome, Wendy. I'm super excited to have you here on the summit. Yes. Thanks so much for having me. Yes. I mean, and this is such a you know, I've been practicing for 25 years. And 25 years ago, the question was more like, are you toxic? Let's do some testing and find out. And now the question is not are you toxic? Because everyone's toxic. It's, you know, how toxic are you? Are you able to unload your toxins? And so how do you how do you view toxicity?

And of course, we're here today talking about menopause. So what is the effect of toxins on our hormones. Yes. Well you know we get toxins in the air, food and water and they interfere in our hormones and many different ways and our stress hormones, our hormones, our sex hormones. And they just they would just interfere in the production and the conversion of our hormones. And that's why we're seeing women, you know, earlier and earlier having low hormone issues. Like when I was 37, for instance, I wasn't really feeling well and just decided to go to my functional doctor and do some testing.

And she tested that I had adrenal fatigue, which means just low stress hormone production, and that I also had the sex hormones of a menopausal woman at 37, you know, which I was thrilled to hear, you know, and that the doctor wanted to put me on hormone replacement at that time. And I just thought, you know, that just doesn't not really how I envisioned my life at 37, though in hindsight, I probably should have done it.

How Toxins Disrupt Hormones 3:00

A lot of women heading into the 40s because of stress, heading into paramount of pause and lower hormone production, because of stress and because of toxins. You know, many women, you know, could benefit from hormone replacement earlier than I started at 51. And, you know, I wish I'd started earlier, but for for me, I wasn't prepared to go on hormone replacement at 37. So I went online and did some searching. And what causes low hormones. And I found a website that was talking about heavy metals and chemicals, and I just hit the jackpot really early on.

I just it was kind of fate. And I just went down this rabbit hole and did some heavy metals testing and was really surprised by how many heavy metals that I had. And I just thought, how did I get this? Because I leave such a lead, such a healthy lifestyle, and I always had with my diet and exercise and sleep and taking all the supplements and a huge I took a huge bag of supplements, like a lot of people are doing, and eat so healthy and organic and fresh food. And I just didn't think that heavy metals really applied to me because I'd heard about them.

You know, you hear about, you know, mercury poisoning and, you know, just Flint, Michigan and the lead poisoning. And but you just don't think that it applies to you. But it does. It absolutely does. And so we are mainly getting toxins in the air that we breathe. That's the number one point of entry. The next would be our food and our water. You know even if you're drinking filtered water, you're showering and water that has dozens if not hundreds of chemicals and heavy metals in them and medications, hormones, actually, people's hormones are in the the shower water.

Those were not tested for filtered out people flush through medications and hormones down the toilet, their U-turn, eating their birth control out into the toilet. And that just gets back into our water supply. So there's many, many different points of entry. And it's just the toxins start building up to a point if you're not able to excrete them. Some people are great doctors. Other people are not the people that tend to be chronically fatigued. Complex chronic illness, mystery, illness. Those people tend to be the ones that don't detox well.

And so they had some sort of illness or stressor or toxic exposure they maybe weren't aware of, or mold, just some straw that broke the camel's back. And they reach like a tipping point where there the toxins just keep building up and they can't get rid of them. And so they interfere in all of our different bodies, processes and enzyme production and neurotransmitter production and, you know, neurotransmission and our brain functioning and our hormones and every different organ system, our blood sugar control.

And so all of these things just compound the symptoms that women have in menopause. And that's why a lot of women suffer the symptoms, that they have a lot more severe than really needs to be. So. So it's always such a fun conversation talking about all the toxins that were exposed to. So but it's just the truth of the matter. And what do you find like in the air? Where is this coming from? Do you feel like this is being sprayed from above on us and trails? And I'm just curious to what you think the major contributors are.

Yeah, I mean, it's the main contributor is industry. You know, we like I live here in Houston, Texas. We have cement factories and oil refineries and chemical plants and all these companies that spew toxins into the air. And we also, you know, there's lots of if you look around you, every everything is made of metal. And so these metals were dredged up from the Earth's atmosphere. And just with manufacturing and production, get into our air where we breathe it in. The main metal we breathe in is aluminum.

And so aluminum is being sprayed in our skies to, you know,

Sources of Environmental Heavy Metals 7:00

for geoengineering purposes. And there's also we have a strontium as well in barium that I over the last 15 years of testing people, that's been increasing dramatically. Excuse me on people's hair tests, hair metal analyzes that I do on people. And so for sure those metals were getting in the air. But there's you know, we get it from the tires, you know, being kind of dissolved as they're being driven. And that releases a lot of lead into the air, the brake pads. And I can just keep going on and on and on.

But there's definitely car exhaust. There's so many things that we're breathing in in the air. So I also notice in testing, I'm curious what your experience is also over, like the last ten, 15 years, a lot of cesium, a lot of barium, a lot of thallium. It's like when I first started doing this 25 years ago, I didn't really see those. And then all of a sudden it was like, bam! Why does everyone have some curious what your thoughts are, if that's what you're seeing? And are these also just coming from factories or are they being sprayed on us?

Yeah, I've seen the same thing. Increase of cesium and thallium. I had that on my tests as well. The thallium that's used in a lot of different manufacturing processes. It's also naturally occurring in petroleum. So when you know, it just gets into our air from car exhaust and things like that, and but it's also just it's used in a lot of different manufacturing processes like light bulbs and things like that. But with the cesium, cesium is from nuclear testing, nuclear fallout. So in in bill, like a lot of people in 1986 that were lived in Europe, a lot of them have very high cesium thyroid problems that come along with that.

But yeah, there's there's I think there's a lot of nuclear testing or nuclear waste being released into the atmosphere that we may not be aware of. There's Fukushima in Japan that was a nuclear disaster, still releasing lots of cesium into our into our ocean. So that's that's a big ongoing problem and source of cesium. And it's not really something you can escape. I mean, even children in utero are like babies are exposed to. Do you know the I always forget the statistic, but they're exposed to what is it, 180.

How many chemicals and metals and things. Yeah. Well, they found in the umbilical cord there's like 270 toxins that they've tested. But the World Health Organization does a test every five years or so. The last one they did, they found about 500 chemicals on average in people. And so it's just it's just ubiquitous in our environment. Doesn't matter if you live out in the country. It's worse. If you live in a city, you're going to be exposed to more stuff. But all this stuff floats around the Earth.

So in China, all the industry, all the, you know, the plants there, they don't have scrubbers. They're not, you know, tending to environmental regulations. And so all that garbage is, you know, gets blown by the weather patterns over across the earth. So it's just everyone's being exposed. And I so I live here in Phoenix now, which is close to, if not as bad as LA, toxin wise. And you just don't realize it. But when we go hiking and you get up above the city and then you look down and you see this dark, thick layer of smog that you're actually breathing in every day, it's quite sobering.

So all right, so we know there's a problem. We haven't even if you could just we haven't talked about dentistry. So if you could just talk about that because that's another big area where we get exposure. Yeah. So anyone that has mercury fillings that has the mercury amalgam fillings, the silver fillings or had them in the past or had them removed, you're going to have a lot of mercury in your body and it may not show up on test either. The mercury from fish tends to show up on tests on a lot of different tests, but the mercury from the fillings doesn't always show up.

But it is there because you're biting down on that every single day. And for some of the older people listening, if you had mercury fillings placed before 1980, those don't tend to have copper in them. In the 80s, they started adding copper to the amalgams to make them softer, which also made them release more mercury. But the ones placed before 1980 are usually a lot more stable and don't cause the problems. And I don't always advise people necessarily having to have those removed because. But you don't really know. You don't know.

No, you're you're the what the is. But those are a lot more stable. The ones after 1980 have copper. And every time you're biting down, you're releasing little mercury vapor that you're breathing right into your brain. And so definitely those are not contributing to health. Absolutely not. And that mercury can also get into the thyroid and interfering thyroid functioning, thyroid hormone production, and definitely advise people to get those removed from a biological dentist. I had five mercury fillings removed, just drilled out when I was 21 without a dentist and that and my whole 20s I was depressed.

I had no libido, I had chronic gut infections, yeast infections and all these things related to that acute mercury exposure. And it took a long time for that to, you know, to kind of I didn't figure out what it was, but it was just a long standing acute exposure that I was symptoms I was dealing with.

Dental Mercury and Body Burden 12:40

And so, yeah, so when I was in my mid 30s, I definitely had had a crash of my hormones and it was a wake up call for me to start taking some action and look at my toxins. Yeah. Just to reiterate, like public service announcement, do not get your mercury removed by your well-meaning family dentist like it has to be done properly. You can go to IA, OMT, find someone who's smart certified. I can't vouch for all the ium dentists to do like thorough stuff like habitation, surgery and things, but most of them, if they're certified smart certified, you can trust them to remove your mercury properly and not harm you.

And then you have to remember, like they've turned off the faucet by removing it, but you still have that body burden. And I find a lot of patients. I don't know if you find this, but a lot of patients come in and they're like, yeah, I remove my mercury. And then no one ever went to do anything about all the mercury that had dripped into their body and was still being stored. So typically you still have to go and do cleanup. So so let's talk about there's always hope. So let's talk about first of all like for someone listening who's going, well I don't know, how do I know how much I have.

And what do you recommend for testing? Yeah, there's a lot of different ways you can test for heavy metals. I like hair mineral analysis. It's also called TMA because that's a great way not only to see your metals, but to see your minerals as well, because it's very important to do a mineral balancing type of program, because that's going to very deeply push out and displace heavy metals, where Kelly and other methods taking supplements aren't going to be able to get to you because your body won't let those go.

And you can take all the supplements and do all the key leach in the world. Your body won't let go of certain metals because it's using them for various purposes. I'll give some examples in a minute, but hair analysis is great, but there's no one test that will show you all of your heavy metals you have in your body. So urine testing will show different types of metals. So you're doing a urine push test, but someone's really ill. They may not be able to do very well with the push test, because it's pushing out a lot of heavy metals at once.

And then you can also do stool testing for cadmium. Blood testing is great for lead, but not for other metals so much. And I am also very much into bio energetic testing as well, because that's really one of the only ways you're going to see all the metals you have in your body, because many times, you know, people are not detoxing very well. They're not pushing out heavy metals very well. So an initial test may not show any metals on your test. It may not what we call the no show test. And this is really not good because it's a sign your body is not detoxing.

Well, we know they're in there. We know that you have metals. We know that you have lead. You're not escaping lead and mercury and aluminum in our environment. You're just not able to push them out. So bio energetic testing like scan is a great way to see all the toxins you have in your body. So but you know but I usually start people that hear a metal analysis. And can you talk a little bit about the minerals and how they interact with the metals. Yes. Yeah. So for instance, when you take zinc that will push out mercury and other metals, when you take a calcium that will push out lead and displace calcium or displace lead out of your bones when you take selenium, that will push out into space, mercury out of your bones.

And so when you do, when you look at a hair metal analysis, you there's, you know, decades of research about this. You can do a mineral balancing program and, you know, supplement minerals. Your deficient in balance your minerals. And that will it really goes a long way to helping your body detox basically. And so it doesn't happen overnight. You know, it's a rather, you know, slow process. But it can take a year to replete one mineral in your body. Although people are very, very mineral deficient because our soil is mineral deficient, our food is mineral deficient.

A lot of people are getting processed food, they're stressed and they're using up a lot of minerals. So for me, my main focus of my supplement program is taking minerals. That's the main thing that I'm not worried about antioxidants so much or these are the things that people are marketed. You really need to focus on minerals magnesium, calcium, selenium, zinc, potassium, trace minerals, putting salt in your water and things of that nature. Taking a quinton which is basically seawater for all the trace minerals.

And so that's really where you're going to start with detoxification.

Testing for Toxic Load 17:20

And you also need the magnesium to activate all your detox enzymes. And so it's just, you know, certain ways the body will use metals. So say take cadmium for instance. If you don't have enough zinc in your body, maybe you're not eating red meat or your doctors told you to stop eating red meat or whatever, and you don't have enough zinc in your diet, your body will retain cadmium from the environment instead and use that to repair your arteries. And it's very, very brittle. It creates hard, brittle arteries, which leads to heart disease.

That's why smokers get heart disease is in part because of the cadmium that they're getting in the tobacco and the cigarettes. And so the body doesn't have zinc. It'll use cadmium instead. And so that's kind of one of the examples. But if it has plenty of zinc, it'll use that preferred minerals that preferred mineral to repair your arteries in your skin. Yeah. We are depleted as a as a nation, as a society of minerals. And a lot of patients are surprised because, you know, you test them and they're like, but I take magnesium.

How could I be low in magnesium? And we don't we just, you know, first of all, our soil. Could you talk a little bit about the soil and how that's such a major problem. Yes. Yeah. Because, you know, the problem is that farmers aren't they're not paid to repeat the soil. So they're just paid to grow the vegetables and usually use these NPK fertilizers that have just nitrogen potassium and the nitrogen. Potassium. The other it's the NPK. And so in sodium. So they they're not they just use these Miracle-Gro type products.

And they can have a lot of heavy metals in them as well. They can have a lot of cadmium and things in phosphorus in them. And the problem is that makes the vegetables grow really, really quickly, but they have less time to pull nutrients from the soil. And because of really intensive industrial farming practices, the and they're not, you know, like regenerative farm, they're putting cow manure or ash on the soil to kind of to repeat it before they or they'll rotate crops and things like that to help re mineralized the soil.

But with most farmers are not doing that. So the soils have become so depleted, the vegetables and the fruits are depleted as well. And there's been studies done by the U.S. government where like a one page 50 years ago, now you have to eat ten pages or 15 peaches to get the same amount of nutrients as a peach, you know, 50 years ago. And so, so people today, they really have to supplement in order to get the nutrition they need. And one thing I take, I take these energy bits of spirulina. Spirulina here is amazing to repeat your minerals.

It's super, super nutrient dense. And it's one of the best ways to like stop cravings because you're once you get all the nutrients you need, you don't feel snacky, you don't have that food noise, you don't have cravings because you're actually meeting your nutritional needs. So you've got to eat super foods like this and take minerals on, you know, all day long. I'm taking minerals in order to get what you need because the food just doesn't have it. Unfortunately, we love Catherine. We love we love energy.

That's yeah, I love my energy beds. We have them splattered around our office here. So what are some tips that you can just share with the audience? Like simple, easy things like, obviously you're not going to stop breathing the air, but do you have like a couple of top like, anyone can do this. You can start doing this as soon as you stop listening to this interview. Kind of ideas for the listeners. Yeah. So for detoxification. Yeah. So the main thing is taking minerals, you know, getting your what I just mentioned taking your magnesium.

You know many different kinds as you can calcium taking some zinc every day taking some potassium. And I really like Mother Earth minerals is a really nice ionic minerals I like valence nutraceuticals. Those are amazing minerals as well. And also when you do a hair metal analysis, you if you work with a practitioner, you'll get a recommended supplements to balance your minerals. And after that you know I recommend people do infrared saunas. Those are an amazing way to sweat out all your toxins. And you're actually not. It's not in the sweat.

It's actually coming from the oil glands. So it's you know, it's coming from your the sebaceous glands. And so you're sweating out a lot of fat soluble toxins in the sauna. And I also love ionic footpaths. Those are a fantastic way to get rid of a lot of different toxins.

Minerals, Soil Depletion, and Detox Support 22:00

I really like the health and Mediacom ionic footpath. That's the one that I use personally. And and there's there's lots of other ways that you can detox as well. I do bioenergetics detox as well. I use, you know, several different types of software, but that's that's getting into working with a practitioner. I use a spooky two reef. It's a reef device that can scan your body and can also do a detox for you and optimize liver, kidney functioning, your skin functioning, pancreas functioning, and just all the all the different organs for detoxification that can optimize those and also help help your body to process the toxins.

And you're doing a lot of a lot of detox work. So that's maybe a whole other podcast. How did you talk to me? But, you know, it's just, you know, we can detox with our physical body. You know, you can take supplements and do all kinds of things. But for for people that are really, really ill, some people have to do some foundational work, you know, using different types of bioenergetics. Software is where I start with people who are very ill to kind of build up their bodies energy to help balance the energy and their chakras, clear emotional trauma, and just like get their body working better energetically and feed new information energetically to their body so they have better physical functioning, and then once they're at a certain level of foundational functioning and good energy, good energy levels, that takes energy to detox.

Then I'll start them on a detox program, because not everyone is ready to just get right out the gate to start detoxing. Because you can add insult to injury, where if you're chronically fatigued, you're just not at a point where where you can detox, you have to do some foundational work first. Amen to that. That's like very important. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Detox takes preparation of opening your drainage remedy, your drainage organs, and, you know, being prepared because you're not going to detox, you're not going to find out your full of toxins and detox in a weekend.

Detoxed on properly is a slow and safe journey. So that's super, super important. Don't let some Instagram influencer tell you here detox in five days and you know that just gets you into trouble and typically ends up moving your toxins from one part of your body to another part and not even getting them excreted. So that's that's very important. What Doctor Wendy is saying there. What about from a diet perspective? Are there any diet tips you can share? Yes. You know, I'm a big fan of just, you know, a paleo type, Diane, Mediterranean type diet.

That's a diet that most humans do best on. You know, definitely the liver needs animal protein to, you know, it needs sulfur containing amino acids in order to to work properly. I think animal proteins are really important. Red meat is important. But, you know, the top five detox foods are onions, garlic because those have a lot of sulfur in them, which you need for detoxification. Broccoli sprouts are amazing to have sulfur fein which you need for detoxification. Egg yolks. Surprisingly those are super nutritious choline in them and other things we need for detox and ginger.

So I try to put ginger and stir fry as I drink ginger kombucha, ginger shots, put it in fresh juices and things like that. But those are the top detox foods that I know I try to focus on to give my body some nutritional support to to aid detox. Yeah, I know it always. It always makes me so sad when women are like, well, I just need egg whites and they think there being no healthy. And it's like, no, you need the yolk. No, send it back. You get the yolks. So any other less you know, how do you recommend handling like the air?

Because we're all outside. We're all, you know, it's healthy. It's healthy to be outside. Right. Even though there's all these toxins raining down upon us. So is there anything you recommend to be a little protective preventative? Yeah. I mean, there's not really much you can do outside, unfortunately. It's just, you know, ideally we want to don't live near a freeway, you know, maybe don't walk near a busy road possible where you're breathing and all the exhaust. So it's better out in a park or someplace where you're near trees and you're breathing in all the essential oils of the plants and the trees and things like that.

But, you know, indoor air can be pretty toxic with, you know, off gassing of carpets and furniture and cleaners that people use. So I use a Jasper filter. So I've adjust for filter in every room in my home and also filters mold, which is a big problem for people. I love the Jasper filters. They're amazing.

Daily Detox Strategies and Diet Tips 27:00

And they give you like a little number, like a rating of your air quality. And it's really interesting. The worst toxins in the home come from cooking, and so the jasper just starts going nuts when you start cooking, because you're just releasing all kinds of volatile organic compounds. But it will clean them up when you're when you're. And mold is a whole nother rabbit hole. We. Yeah. But we'll have to do a couple of more conversations. So any last. Unfortunately we're running towards the end of our time.

Any last words of wisdom that the ladies can tuck away for themselves or share with their family? Yes. Well, you know, the main thing about detoxification is that what I try to drive the point home is that everyone has toxins. At some point in your health journey, you want to explore that, you want to explore how to detox, and you want to think about doing daily detox, incorporating that into your lifestyle every day because you know, you spent decades accumulating toxins. And every day we're exposed to hundreds of hundreds of different toxins.

And so you can spend like a few years really focused and concentrated on doing different detox protocols. But then you have to kind of have like a maintenance schedule that you would be on. But you know, when you're you're doing detox protocols, it's something that you want to incorporate into your health regime. So and it just becomes second nature just becomes habit. Like for me, I'm doing liver flushes, I'm doing sauna. I'm doing something every single day for like supporting my liver or doing some sort of bioenergetics, detox or taking supplements and being very mindful of taking lots of minerals.

And it's all thinking about and focused on detoxification. And how do I not just not just thinking about taking something to pull out and rip out all the heavy metals, it's facilitating my body's ability to excrete them on its own and help to push it, to push the toxins out on their own. It's not about heavy metal chelation. When you go to a doctor and you get an IV, that can work great for acute cases of acute poisoning and to bring people's levels down quickly, especially if it's life threatening.

But for most people that it's just not it's not going to get the job done. It doesn't go deep enough. And so you have to live a certain lifestyle. You have to take minerals in order to really get the most effective detox. But you need to think of it as like a lifestyle. It's not something you're doing for five days or for the spring or for a couple of weeks. It's just these toxins are too deeply embedded. There's too many of them, and the body needs quite a bit of assistance to get that out. Yeah, yeah.

It's you know, it's just like anything, we wash our hair frequently or however often we get our teeth cleaned and we, you know, we need to that's, you know. Exactly. I echo that, right. You need your. What are you doing daily. What are you doing weekly? What are you doing quarterly? What are you doing yearly. Because that's such a powerful tool to use to slow down the aging process, to not have chronic illness set in as you are aging. And so it's so anti-aging. It's it's 54. I'm in menopause. I've been on metabolic since I was 47.

And granted, I do take hormone replacement for the last three years, but it's very anti-aging to get rid of these metals. So they just they, they're act like rust in your body and interfere in so many different processes. Super anti-aging. Yeah. It's just can't be beat for that. So even though it's kind of depressing, there's depressing. There's solutions. So I know it sounds depressing, but it's not. You know, once you kind of learn about it and you kind of get your head around what you need to do, you just get the job done.

You know, the sounds are really enjoyable, you know, and doing liver flushes, you feel great afterwards, you feel good and you have minerals and you have minerals. You have energy and your brain works. So it's not really it's not really a life sentence. Exactly. No, no. We have saunas and footpaths and all the things here in our in our clinic. And so yeah, it just helps you feel good and you can have you can have fun while you're detoxing with your friends. So where can the ladies learn more about you?

Final Advice and Where to Find Wendy Myers 31:20

Where do you hang out? Online website. Podcast? Yeah. You can find I live on Instagram, so I'm at Myers Detox on Instagram. But all of all of the social media, TikTok, Facebook everywhere on Myers Detox on YouTube. I'm at Wendy Myers and you can find me on my website, Myers Detox. And I've been doing the Myers Detox podcast for 15 years on detox. Wow. So there we do a deep dive on all different types of topics that you can dig into. Oh well, 15 years. That's a long time. That's amazing. So she's a wealth of information.

So go follow her. Go check her out. Go, go spend a couple of years listening to all her podcasts. Because 15 years. That's a lot of podcasts. It's a lot. It's 650 now I think. Well thank you. Thank you for coming on and spending some time with us and sharing your knowledge. And you know, this is a very big topic. We gave you a little snippet. So a lot more to learn. So go check her out online. And thank you for being here. Thank you to everyone for being here and listening. I know that you have lots of options where you get your information, and so I'm very honored, and I don't take it lightly that you choose to hang out with me and listen to what we have to say in these very important conversations, that we'll be back with another one.

Until then, be well by.