As I said above, it is no option to quit eating seafood. We need DHA badly for our brains.
Instead we need to focus on how to better be able to detox the stuff - a healthy body should be able to do that. So we need to increase our overall health - not stop eating seafood. That would be a bad mistake.
I do not think chelating is clever at all. In fact, it can be pretty dangerous, as your experience shows too.
To not lead people to come up with wrong assumptions about chelation I would like to bring up and clarify a few things:
1. The progress reports from people participating in several forums on groups.yahoo.com: "Autism-Mercury", "frequent-dose-chelation", "adult-metal-chelation", "dental-chelation" speak for themself in my opinion (it's a place where people share their experiences re chelation according to dr Andrew Hall Cutler's protocol, a physical chemistry scientist who once himself sufferred from mercury toxicity)
2. After I got the brain damage I mentioned, and after making sure that I don't have amalgams placed under my composite fillings (what dentists sometimes do, unfortunately) I continued chelating for a few months with DMSA, which is a watersoluble and lipophobic chelator (what means that it does not pull mercury from inside cells or from the brain, as it cannot cross the blood–brain barrier) - and this did bring improvement for me back then.
3. The reported experiences of people participating in the above mentioned forums validate dr Cutler's warnings that infrequent dosing of chelating agents (DMPS, DMSA and ALA) is a sure way to cause a lot of damage and worsen, instead of improving, your health. And by infrequent I mean not in accordance to a chelators half-life.
4. Chelating with amalgams still present is a sure way for disaster and should never be done.
5. Alpha-lipoic acid is evaluated by dr Cutler as the most powerful and at the same time most potentially dangerous chelator, since research papers show that it reaches all regions of the brain due to its high lipophilicity (what means without following the protocol you will be dumping a lot of mercury into your brain with it - not a good idea in general).
6. In Cutler's protocol it is crucial to adjust the chelator dosage to individual tolerance (and yes, there are recommendations for minimum and maximum dosaging specified in mgs per kg of body weight)
7. More information on his protocol is available at
http://onibasu.com/wiki/Autism_Mercury and in dr Andrew Hall Cutler's books - "Amalgam Illness: diagnosis and treatment" and " Hair Test Interpretation: Finding Hidden Toxicites"
8. And as for Aajonus' Vonderplanitzes advice on "heavy metal removal" (with all regard to his valueble advice on other matters) - it's simply garbage, and very dangerous garbage to that. I'm saying this because an unknown molecule present in cilantro, which he recommends for this purpose, does seem to mobilize mercury from tissues (as is shown by cilantro brain damage reports on the above mentioned forums), but at the time there is no data on the half-life of that molecule or its typical concentration, therefore one cannot responsibly make any recommendations that would allow "dosing" according to it's half-life (which is obvious he knew nothing about). The question that remains is how many individuals with amalgams suffered following his very dangerous advice.
To close my comment re the mercury detox issue - I'm starting and at the same time wanting to believe that with high dose iodine intake the body is able to more efficiently detoxify itself from toxic substances in general, including heavy metals, which I base on seemingly credible claims of lab reports showing an multiple-fold increase in urinary heavy metal excretion in some individuals after doing so. And in general, based on my personal experiences over the years with use of different dietary recommendations, I think potentially you cannot gain much more from adding a safe chelation protocol to healthy nutrition (although I may be wrong of course, especially since this may not be the case in individuals with a very high toxic load).
As for the issue of the toxicity of mercury - I'm not a scientist with systematic knowledge in biochemistry and toxicology. If you feel shark and tuna is an irreplacable part of your diet than good for you. Personally I choose to believe you can get the same benefits as you would get from eating fish by combing supplemental high-dose iodine, raw grass-fed ruminant meat, supplemental DHA and EPA (which are available now even from algal oil), along with perhaps some raw egg yolks (for their high phospholipid content).
As for the estimations of natural mercury levels of fish (which are not a result of human activity) - I have also read on this topic... But to state things clearer - I apply my personal precautions re mercury in seafood only to species with insanely high levels - such as shark, tuna, mackerel king, marlin, etc. and if it wasn't for the enviromental-poisoning scum who polluted Earth with PCBs I would be eating wild sardines, anchovies and salmon on the regular.
Although I'll give you guys that after checking some research on PCB content of various species of seafood (motivated by your repping
)- I'll add shrimps and clams to the menu, since they turn out to be low both in PCBs and heavy metals...
regards
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