➡ The article discusses the importance of minerals for our health and longevity. It explains that deficiencies in trace minerals can lead to various health issues, including prediabetes, learning disabilities, anxiety, and arthritis. The author argues that modern agricultural practices and food distribution systems have led to a decrease in these essential minerals in our food. The article suggests that supplementing these minerals could potentially improve our health and extend our lifespan.
➡ Livestock are given specific minerals to ensure their health and the health of their offspring. This practice has led to the realization that humans could also benefit from a similar approach, as many diseases are linked to nutrient deficiencies. The carnivore diet, which includes meat rich in these minerals, has shown positive health outcomes. However, there is ongoing debate about which minerals are essential and how many diseases are actually linked to nutrient deficiencies.
➡ Our bodies need minerals to help proteins, especially enzymes, function properly. Many proteins require a metal cofactor, like iron in hemoglobin or magnesium in chlorophyll. However, research often overlooks the importance of these metal cofactors, even though they’re crucial for many cellular reactions. For example, around one third of all proteins in our bodies need a metal cofactor to work, and these metals can interact with multiple proteins in every cell, highlighting the complexity of our body’s needs for different minerals.
➡ Eating natural, healthy food can provide essential minerals like copper, which are often overlooked but crucial for our health. A study shows that minerals like magnesium, iron, zinc, and calcium are linked to adequate testosterone levels, indicating that deficiencies can lead to hormonal issues. However, food labels often ignore trace minerals like molybdenum, manganese, and copper, which are also important for our health. While some forms of heavy metals like aluminum and mercury can be toxic, others might be essential for our health, and our bodies may substitute these when deficient in other minerals. To ensure optimal health, it’s important to consume a variety of minerals, ideally from natural food sources, but this can be challenging due to modern food production methods.
➡ Eating too much of certain foods, like kale, can lead to nutrient deficiencies, such as iodine, due to the presence of anti-nutrients. The amount of nutrients our bodies absorb from food can vary, and this information is often missing from nutritional labels. Shilajit, a natural substance, is recommended as it contains a wide range of essential minerals that are highly absorbable. However, the medical and health system often overlooks the importance of these minerals, focusing more on profit-driven solutions.

Trace mineral deficiency appears metabolically as prediabetes, cognitively related to learning disabilities, attention disorders emotionally by panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and structurally noisy joints, arthritis, bone spurs, aneurysms. This is the true health report where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello, everyone. Today I’m going to introduce really the topic of minerals and health. And this is an area that I have talked about intermittently before. Many of you know that I do sell a mineral supplement, and I want to give you some perspective about this issue and how important it is. And of course, this goes with this month’s book, Dead Doctors Don’t Lie, which I’m going to discuss a little bit and read some Excerpts from.

Now, Dr. Wallach is not the first person that I heard about mineral deficiency from, but he certainly has a lot of extensive information. And while I don’t agree with all of his conclusions about health and disease, I think we can learn quite a lot from his perspective. So I thought I would start off talking a little bit about that and it relates to the causes of disease because I think Dr. Wallach and I agree on some basic principles that certainly exposure to toxic substances like pharmaceuticals, for example, and processed food, as well as environmental pollutants, contribute to a lot of disease.

Obviously, trauma can end your life early and malnutrition being the other cause. So we’re going to focus on malnutrition, of course, in today’s topic and what Dr. Wallach says or what his main thesis is, if we die, you know, young, it’s probably because of poisoning or because of trauma. But if we die at the normal expected age in the current era, that we’re actually dying of malnutrition. And this relates to the human potential of longevity, which is often quoted to be potentially between 120 and 150 years. But there are exact examples of people living into their 150s and 60s.

So what we have here is, if you look at the highlighted portion, there’s an article in this issue, and this is from January of 1973. A scientist visits some of the world’s oldest people. Search for the oldest people. Every day is a gift when you’re over 100. And this article talks about people from different cultures and different geographic locations that live with well beyond 100, 130s, 140s and beyond. And what Dr. Wallach’s contention is is that this is our actual potential in terms of our lifespan. And of course, this may play out to other animals, like our pets, lifespans as well, and that the reason we don’t live that long is because of nutrient deficiencies.

Now, he does talk about different types of nutrients, including various vitamins. And we do know about some of these have even entered into the mainstream. However, from Dr. Wallach’s perspective, that we should just use supplements to turn this problem around. And I’ll explain why. I don’t fully agree with that. But let’s focus in a little bit on just minerals. And let me address the question of why there are no minerals in us to begin with. Why do we have deficiencies? So I’m going to break minerals into two groups, okay? And this is what you’ll also see in the scientific and health liter literature, although I may use different names.

So I talk about macro minerals and micro minerals, or you could call them micronutrients and minerals. What they are is they are metallic substances. So there are other things that we may need in our body element wise, like for example, sulfur or boron, that are not metals, right. Those are metalloids. So I’m not going to be specifically discussing them. We’re really talking about just metallic elements here. So the macro minerals are ones that you need in very large quantities in your body, like sodium, magnesium, phosphorus and a few others. And then those are well studied and talked about in the medical and research literature.

And these are things that routine blood chemistry or urine chemistry labs will assess the level of sodium chloride, sometimes iron, which probably is kind of halfway between being a macro and a micronutrient and several others. But what the medical profession and, you know, current state of science in general with respect to nutrition is unaware of is with respect to the micronutrients. And these are things that we need in much smaller amounts. In fact, there’s even some discussion that some of them may be micro micronutrients that we even need in smaller amounts. And often these are referred to as trace minerals as well, that we only need trace amounts of them.

And I’m going to, of course, discuss more detail about why we need them, et cetera. But why are we talking about deficiencies? Why don’t we just simply get them from food the way nature intended? And the reason is because of the agricultural revolution and how modern food industry grows and distributes the food. So let’s talk about plants, for example, because we know that plants are said to have a lot of minerals in them. And of course plants need minerals to grow and have optimal health as well. And they, they can extract the minerals from the soil through a variety of complex mechanisms.

But they’re very good at Taking them up. Just like in our body, when we eat food, our body is very, very good at extracting the iron out of the food. Even if there are only small amounts, the body is very efficient. So plants and extracting minerals out of the soil are very similar. But what we find in modern agriculture is a couple of factors. And this is really, I think largely related to switching over to NPK type fertilizers, where they focus just on nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium as the mineral rich content of the soil. And what they find is that they can grow crops with that mineral poor fertilizer mixture and can get a larger size and yield, although the plants themselves are not optimally healthy, which is why they have to use a lot of chemicals.

And if you look at my lecture terrain theory in your backyard, you can learn more about that. So plants that would normally get all of these trace minerals from the soil can still grow in soil, depleted of these minerals by using these modern petroleum based fertilizers with certain minerals. Now what happened, you know, before agriculture in nature is that all these minerals would be in the soil. The plants that grow in that area would extract them and they would become part of the plant. And whatever happened to the plant, if it grew to its full potential and then died and was reduced back back to the soil, those minerals would then be recycled into the soil.

If an animal ate that plant, that animal lived in the local area. And so when the animal died and when it excreted waste, those minerals then went back into the soil. So there was this regenerative cycle where all these variety of minerals stayed in the food chain. And this of course was true for humans too. If they were hunter gatherers or if they raised their own food, like independent agriculture before it was done on a larger mass scale, then the same thing that all those minerals would end up recycled back into the soil and into their food supply.

But what we did with the modern food production and distribution system is that we grow food in one place and then we move it to a totally different geographical location where the minerals that are in that food now don’t return back to that local soil. And in just, I believe, about two seasons of farming this way, and then taking all the food to a different location, you end up depleting those minerals from the soil. And because of the modern agricultural practices, they don’t replete those minerals back in the soil. They just provide the minerals that they can minimally use to grow the plants and produce another crop.

But this unfortunately makes the food supply deficient in minerals, because they’re not in the soil anymore. They can’t go into those crops. And so they’re not in the food. Now also with the modern sewage systems and such, the. Even when we eat these minerals when they were still in the food, we’re not putting them back into the soil to be incorporated in future crops, like through using human ore, for example, or making compost from human waste products. Instead, they’re going into a sewage treatment system where they could be, you know, completely removed from, you know, the surrounding environment.

And perhaps they’re present in some of the composts that come out of those facilities. But those composts also have lots of toxic chemicals that have been removed from the sewage and wastewater treatment. So this is not really a good way of getting the minerals back in the soil. And now, interestingly, with respect to this, because I mostly talked about foods that are Growned like plants, Dr. Wallach himself originally went to agricultural school and then went to veterinary school and was a veterinarian. And early on he realized that when it came to animal husbandry and raising animals for food, that it’s a financial risk, right, if the animals become sick.

So you want to do everything you can to prevent that because that is your investment and you’ll lose money, you’ll go out of business, etc. So what they do is, is they add minerals to the feed and they’ve, you know, done this in a way such that it’s, it’s specific. For example, certain mineral deficiencies may cause congenital abnormalities with the offspring. So they give certain specific minerals to the animals that are going to have offspring. They do this in a way, right, that the animals can be as healthy as possible. And when he observed this, he was like, why aren’t we doing this in humans? Why aren’t human doctors even aware of these issues and the relationship between minerals and disease? Now it occurred to me with respect to the current carnivore movement and the amazing health outcomes that many people are having on the carnivore diet, because finding out that food producers of animal, you know, agricultural products give these extra nutrients in their feed to the animals, right? So the meat is going to contain a lot more of these minerals than the plants.

And one of the main reasons for many people’s improving health could be related to now getting more of the minerals from a meat based diet. So I think this is quite interesting now, Dr. Wallach, because there is a lot of debate on which of these trace minerals are essential versus not being essential. And there is no consensus. There’s no definitive science whatsoever to answer this question. But according to Dr. Wallach, he says there are 60 essential minerals. And he also says that there are 900 diseases that are known to be related to nutrient deficiencies. And we’re going to discuss a few of those.

And those deficiencies include not just trace minerals, but also macro minerals and vitamins as well. And of course many of them are related to fat soluble vitamins. If you have been following my Natural healing teaching for a while, you’ll know that I often talk about nutritional deficiencies even in people like us who live in developing countries. In fat, right? Specifically cholesterol I would say. But cholesterol, you know, represents saturated fat and also the fat soluble vitamins related to that, A, D, e and K, K1 and K2, important especially for developing children, and collagen as being the other major deficiency.

And this is of course true. But there’s a little bit more to the story with collagen that I’m going to get to in a few minutes. But I wanted to go and just read a couple of brief excerpts from Dr. Wallach’s book so that you can get a better idea of the scope of this issue and what perspective I’m coming from. So here he talks about what he learned in veterinary school, which I just summarized. The most important lesson from veterinary school was learned early on. The reason that we put the vitamins, minerals and trace minerals into animal feeds was because we don’t have health insurance policies for livestock.

If we used a human type healthcare system for them, it would be sticker shock for you when you went to the store to buy meat, dairy, poultry and eg, hamburger would cost you $275 per pound. Boneless skinless chicken breasts would be $450 a pound and a dozen eggs would be $50 just to pay for the health care. We learned that by significantly reducing or totally eliminating health care costs for animals, we could keep the price of animal products low enough for the average American to afford them. So you know, that is of course quite revealing. And we know that the health care costs in our nation are the biggest part of the gdp.

So he’s not kidding when he mentions those prices. And of course they’d be even higher. Now the next excerpt talks specifically about a mineral and I think this is interesting to note. The mineral selenium was universally thought to be toxic until 1957 when it was found to be an essential nutrient in trace amounts in laboratory animals and livestock. So that’s quite interesting that it was said to be purely toxic, and then all of a sudden it’s required for health. The complete opposite. I want you to be a little bit open that this could also be true of other metals that we might currently think of as toxic, that they may actually be essential as well.

And there are many ways to explain this that I’ll expand upon, but let me continue. Selenium deficiency causes infertility, miscarriages, cystic fibrosis of the pancreas, sudden death infant syndrome in animals, liver cirrhosis, stiff lamb disease, white muscle disease, muscular dystrop anemias, encephalomalacia, which is softening of the brain, cardiomyopathy, heart disease, and mulberry heart disease. In each case, selenium supplementation prevented the disease and in many cases reversed or cured existing diseases, which were all significant causes of animal losses to the livestock industry. So you can see when there’s a financial incentive to solve these health problems, we can actually find a solution and one that is inexpensive.

Now, Dr. Wallach goes on to talk about how we clinically manifest these deficiencies, and he breaks it down into three phases. And I’m going to read you a little bit about two of these phases. The first phase is the compensation phase, where the body changes its physiology to adapt to a deficiency of the mineral by reducing its physiologic function but maintaining health. Okay, this eventually exhausts itself. And then you go into the decompensated phase where some of the functions related to that nutrient start to break down and it’s like a transition into overt disease state and then the clinical phase.

So let me read. The decompensated phase of trace element deficiency follows with the appearance of symptoms or defects. The body can no longer make up for the shortages. Trace mineral deficiency appears metabolically as pre diabetes, cognitively related to learning disabilities, attention disorders emotionally by panic attacks, anxiety, depression and personality instability, essentially developmentally with dyslexia, cleft palate, down syndrome and structurally noisy joints, arthritis, bone spurs, aneurysms, a noticeable lack of stamina and longevity result. The clinical phase, which is the third phase and final phase of trace mineral deficiencies, is characterized by the onset of full blown disease, disease states and even death.

Cardiomyopathy, diabetes, cancer, liver, cirrhosis. Most trace mineral deficiencies in the clinical phase, though, are never diagnosed as such by the orthodox physician. The cure, however, is often simply a matter of replacing the missing trace element. Positive clinical responses using this method can occur in as little as 48 hours to 30 days. Only those very few people whose deficiencies have caused permanent biochemical, chromosomal, or gross physical damage will not return to normal health. And this is a really significant finding. And I think that Dr. Wallach tell. Told a fascinating story in a different part of the book that I just want to describe to help you better understand how the medical establishment wants to remain willfully ignorant of these issues.

And this was, I believe, at Johns Hopkins When Dr. Wallach was young in his career and he was doing research, and he also, by the way, was a pathologist. So he could look at specimens from autopsies and such and make very accurate diagnoses with respect to how valid those diagnoses actually are. He actually questioned that himself. And one of the areas he was looking at was cystic fibrosis, which is of course, said to be a genetic disease. However, the. The actual evidence that it’s a genetic disease is extremely, extremely weak. And he, as a result, didn’t really consider this.

And he was traveling around doing research in different areas. He did series of autopsies in nations where they don’t fit at all the genetic profile of getting cystic fibrosis, which is said to occur essentially in white people. And he found pathology of cystic fibrosis. So he eventually determined that it was related to a mineral deficiency, as I mentioned, of selenium. And he was able to use laboratory animals, deplete them of selenium, and they develop cystic fibrosis. Now, this is extremely valuable in research to have an animal model of the disease. And he submitted specimens to the pathology department and they agreed that the animals had cystic fibrosis.

Now, at first, everyone on the research team was very excited because having an animal model was a super important thing, so they could test different clinical interventions. Of course, when they found out from Dr. Wallach how the model was developed and how it could be reversed simply by providing a selenium supplement, they fired him the next day. Okay. Because this would invalidate all of their research and their grant funding, and there would now be a solution, and they might be a hero, but they wouldn’t be able to make any money selling selenium. So this is why many of these things are really hidden from us, and we can’t trust getting our information from the mainstream medical system.

Okay, so I want to talk now about the science of this because it, it’s widely recognized and I’m not sure how long this has been the case, but at present that metals are very important for the function of proteins in the body. Okay, so this is from a paper on what the field is called metalloproteomics, and this is the study of metalloproteins and the, the breadth and scope of them in biological organisms. And this is essentially why we need these minerals, that many of the proteins in our body require a metal co factor to make them work in their biological function, especially enzymes.

Now, many of these we, or some of these at least, we already know of, right? As I’ve mentioned before, like hemoglobin, which is said to be the oxygen binding protein in the blood, that it requires iron. We also know that even in plants this is true because chlorophyll has magnesium in it as a metal cofactor. So it turns out that there is an unknown but large amount of proteins in our body that require some type of metal cofactor to function properly. And so that’s what really the field of metalloproteomics is about. But here I’m going to read the highlighted portion from this paper.

Despite the intense amount of research into cellular mechanisms, metalloenzymes have largely been overlooked. Yet the metalloproteome, which is the entirety of all metalloproteins in the body, dictates much of the reactivity within a cell. So what he’s saying here is that you can find thousand thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of studies looking at cellular mechanisms with respect to molecular biology, right? Enzymes, chemical pathways, etc. Etc. However, almost none of them consider that many of these proteins can’t work without having the appropriate metal cofactor. And it goes on to say that it is estimated that around one third of all proteins in the human body require a metal cofactor for functionality.

Now, this 1/3 number is pretty much pulled out of the air because they could quantify this, right, with further research. So this is a wild estimate, but it acknowledges that it is hugely significant because one third is a huge fraction of our total proteins. It goes on to say metals have the ability to interact with multiple proteins, all with varying functions, located in every cell of the human body. There is the ability for one single metal to actually have multiple roles, and iron would be a great example of that. Now, I want to talk about one particular metalloprotein to show you about the complexity of this issue, because we’re talking about, right, maybe 60, maybe more, maybe a little bit less trace minerals that are required, but these we can’t just take, take each individual mineral and look at it in isolation because it interacts with many things.

Even if there is one metal and one protein or enzyme that is Usually part of a pathway of several different chemical reactions that are all required for the function to take place. And I’ll give you an example of that in a moment. But our first example that I’m going to describe here is superoxide dismutase. Now, this is a, A enzyme that I’ve mentioned before, and specifically that it requires manganese, which is not even mentioned in this description because it requires other minerals as well. Now, superoxide dismutase is important in our bodies because it can scavenge superoxide free radicals, which are big mediators of toxicity and tissue damage from various toxins in our body.

Things like, for example, seed oils that undergo lipid peroxidation, forming these oxygen reactive oxygen species. They can be scavenged and rendered harmless by superoxide dismutase. And superoxide dismutase requires copper. Okay. So we might think that if we just give copper that we would be okay in terms of our superoxide dismutase functioning. However, it’s been found that superoxide dismutase can actually do the opposite effect. It can make more super superoxides Right. Which would definitely not be good for our health. And this happens when there’s not enough zinc. So we can’t look at copper in isolation without also looking at zinc, because if we have enough copper but not enough zinc, we’re going to actually have health problems and because of not only the loss of function of superoxide dismutase, but that it’s going to actually start working against us.

And there may be a reason that this actually benefits us in such a way. But remember that we are adapted or designed, however you want to look at it, to have these minerals as part of our makeup for this functioning. All right, now on the next paper. Now, this paper is actually a metalomics paper. Now, metalomics is a related field that just looks at the metals in the body without taking into account what proteins that the metals interact with. This is a field that has some criticism. They say, well, it doesn’t make sense to try to study the metals in isolation.

But I do think, think it’s a good starting point because it can possibly just identify what minerals are actually in our body. And then other researchers can look at those things individually and in combination to see what type of function they’re associating with. So let me just read a couple of the highlighted portions here so you can get an idea of some of the metals and minerals that we’re actually talking about besides copper and zinc. And also, historically, right. There’s Been a lot of confusion about these minerals over time, and we probably still don’t really know which exactly are the right minerals.

So it says, while functions of chromium and selenium in animals, in humans were discussed since the 1950s, there have been no discussion of other trace elements until 1970, such as vanadium. Now, fluorine and silicon are actually not metals. Fluorine is a halogen. Silicon is a metalloid, but they’re lysium here, but nickel. Arsenic is also a metalloid, and tin. Now, it’s interesting, they say that arsenic actually may be important in our health, whereas we think of it as a poison. And I’m going to get to the differences a little bit later here. And then, so at that point, there was a textbook that said there were 20, there were 15 essential trace elements.

So you see that number is only a fourth of Dr. Wallach’s number. But there’s so much uncertainty around this. Right. And here, now we’ve included more metals to add molybdenum, manganese, cobalt, and then copper and zinc, which I guess weren’t known about earlier. Okay. And then, of course, selenium, iron. And they talk about iodine as well, which is also not a metal, but an essential nutrient. So molybdenum was added, and because in 1970, 53, they found that it was a constituent of an enzyme called xanthine oxidase. So you can see that this research has been slow to develop, and really, there is a lack of full knowledge and agreement on these issues.

So we’re going to look at another specific example here. And this kind of highlights, in part, the ignorance about the importance of these metals. Because if you want to think about collagen, right, which is something I talked about a lot, that there’s a lot of health issues related to collagen deficiency, for example, aneurysms. Right. Arthritis and many other conditions. So if you want to learn about how do I give my body what it needs to make collagen, you look at collagen synthesis. So if you put this search term in, you’re going to find tons of articles from various health sources.

And if you go to the images section, you’re going to find tons of images that look like this. Now, even if you put in your search terms something like the role of minerals or the role of metals and collagen synthesis, or even if you take a specific metal, like put copper and collagen synthesis, and look up the articles and images, you’re going to find that they’re Essentially the same that you’re going to get a lot of images like this slide that I’m showing you now. This slide outlines the steps, right, of collagen synthesis, and it does mention some of the needed raw materials.

Those two gold circles on the top represent two amino acids that if you have enough of, you can’t make enough collagen in your body. Proline and glycine. And certainly if you eat collagenous foods, right, like bone broth, which I often talk about, you’re getting those amino acids because that you’re eating collagen, right? And collagen is made largely of those, so you’re getting those. But notice that it doesn’t mention any other nutritional factors here yet. There are other factors required. And I did eventually find this paper which talks about copper being used in the synthesis of collagen and elastin, a related protein.

Now, if we go back to that slide, you’ll see there’s this enzyme at the second step, lyseal oxidase, right, which oxidizes the amino acid residue, lysine, and it’s required, and that’s the enzyme that requires copper. So Dr. Wallach approaches this from the point of view that these, you know, health issues like aneurysms and arthritis are actually due to copper deficiency. But he recommends that, you know, you go to the dumpster behind KFC and get the buckets of chicken bones and that you bake them and grind up the bone meal into capsules to correct the problem. And.

Right. Which says that you’re basically eating collagen. Now, that collagen is going to have copper in it because the ranchers that raise chickens know that if they don’t supplement the with copper, that they are basically going to have all of those problems with their health and they won’t make good meat. Right? So this is an example where when you take the natural food source, right, essentially the same material that your body is made of, if the source that you get it from is healthy, right. Raised in a natural way, especially, or in the case of animal husbandry, if it’s fortified with these essential minerals for its health, health, then when you eat that, you’re obviously getting all the constituents right, including the copper.

So we can see that this is going to be largely ignored or. Or not mentioned. But when you take that collagen supplement, you’re also getting the copper, and that may be, depending on the rest of your diet, the main thing that you’re deficient in. All right, So I wanted to just give one more Example, and this study essentially looks at male hormone problems, right, like people with low testosterone. And it looks at a couple of different ways of describing testosterone that are all abbreviated to help you understand this highlighted portion. So TT is total testosterone. FT is free testosterone.

SHBG is sex hormone binding globulin, which actually binds the testosterone. So the free testosterone is lower. And fai, which is the free androgen index. And that’s calculated from the levels of the hormones taken from the blood. Now, in this study, they looked at a variety of minerals, and what they found is positive correlations, okay, between some of these hormone levels and some of the minerals. And so we find that several minerals, magnesium, iron, molybdenum, tungsten, zinc and calcium, all have positive correlations with things related to having adequate testosterone. So in other words, deficiencies of those minerals can be related to having low testosterone or, you know, a problem with your androgenic output.

So, for example, here we see zinc, which is one that’s talked about about a lot because zinc deficiency is very common, whereas magnesium and iron deficiency, much less. So even though I know a lot of natural healing, people talk about magnesium, and of course it is important. But we have the free androgen index, right, is positively correlated with zinc. So if you have adequate zinc, then you have adequate free androgens. Okay? So this tells you the importance that in this system, right, to have proper endocrine functioning of the sex hormones, we need multiple of these different minerals.

It’s not just as simple as, you know, well, we take a zinc supplement, we’re good. That may help, but we also are going to need enough molybdenum. So are you getting enough of that? What about tungsten? All right, tungsten is one that probably there’d be some people that wouldn’t even consider it a trace mineral. So let me just mention a few other things about the science. One is that that of course, if you look at the food labels, right, the package labeling, you might see that there might report some minerals on there occasionally, although not always.

However, when it does list minerals, they’re always macro minerals. There’d be things like magnesium, calcium and iron. Of course, sodium is often listed, sometimes chloride, but you’re never going to see printed on there molybdenum levels, manganese levels, copper, etc. And this is because these establishments, right, that are supposed to guide us on nutrition are once again willfully ignorant of the importance of these substances for our functioning. So I want to talk about a couple of controversial aspects to this, and then I will tell you What I think is a good solution one is related to heavy metals.

And, you know, I’m talking about things here like cadmium, chromium, lead, arsenic, mercury. Now, when it comes to these substances, there are different forms, okay, that these minerals can be in as metals. We know that there are ionic metals and then there are neutral metals. So that’s one way. And there are also different oxidation states, states of the metals. And often they have very different physical and chemical properties in different oxidation states. Like, for example, one that we’re familiar with would be steel or iron. Okay. If we ever work with wrought iron, we had something made of that and.

Or steel. Like, you know, cars, for example. This often happens with cars that if you. Especially if you live in a winter climate and there’s a lot of salt exposure on the roads or a lot of moisture and drying, that the iron oxidizes. And when it oxidizes, it becomes rust. And rust. Rust doesn’t have the same strength as the iron or steel that you started with, right. And then you get holes in the bottom of your car. So we know that rust and the, you know, the wrought iron or steel, they’re the same exact element, but they’re in a different oxidation state.

And as such, they have very different properties. So there are different forms of these things. And they’re also, you know, salts of the metals. Metals are often form salts in their ionic state. Right. So, you know, we know about sodium chloride or potassium chloride being salts, but you can also have, you know, lead chloride or mercury sulfate. And these salts may also have different properties biologically and physically and chemically. So take something like aluminum, which we know in some forms, like in aluminum hydroxide, which is the adjuvant used to. In vaccines, we know that that’s toxic.

It’s well studied. Right. It’s actually added to it on purpose to be toxic, to induce a reaction of the body to produce antibodies to try and neutralize it and get rid of it. However, other forms of aluminum may actually be essential. And there is some literature to support this. And we know that there are trace amounts of aluminum. Now, it’s a different form of aluminum than that aluminum hydroxide, which I mentioned, but are present, you know, in plants and animals. So could it be a similar story to aluminum and selenium that now it’s generally considered to be toxic, but that could be related to the certain chemical form of the aluminum and the amounts of exposure and even the root of exposure.

Whereas we may in the future realize that, oh, aluminum is actually essential in a certain form in a certain amount. And some of the diseases now that we know about actually would improve if we weren’t deficient in the appropriate type of aluminum. And the same thing could be true for lead, mercury, etc. Now, I’m not saying that there’s evidence to support all these things, but there is some evidence to suggest that some forms of mercury may actually not be toxic and may be useful in certain ways. So we don’t really know the full answer to this, of course, but we do know one thing for sure, that if these minerals are required for our health and biology, that it would be the natural form, right? That would be in plants and animals and in the soil.

That would be the appropriate form for our bodies, not, not something synthetic that is distinct in some important way. Now the other thing about heavy metals, which is quite interesting, is that if our body is deficient in the mineral it needs, ideally for certain protein function, sometimes it can substitute other metals that are close to it on the periodic table. And this could even include things like lead. So in other words, during the compensatory phase of mineral deficiency, our body may substitute other metals, even ones that we normally think of as toxic, and they may actually provide us some level of function for a period of time.

Now, I’m not saying that’s an ideal type of functioning. And I think once we replenish those minerals, the substituted minerals will go away. Now, there actually is some evidence of this in the literature. It’s not purely theoretical that these enzymes can use other minerals, even toxic ones. Let me now talk about, talk a little bit more about the solution. How do you ensure that your body has adequate minerals so that you can function well, have optimal health, and maybe even live well beyond a hundred years of age. And so I always say that nature provides what we need.

Right. But I also described how we have really corrupted nature in our food system. System. So if we have circumstances where we’re able to produce our own food almost 100%, and we, we make sure through testing and through replenishing the soil that we have the adequate variety and amounts of minerals, that is probably the way nature intended it. But that would be, you know, like a very significant effort. And I don’t expect there are too many people out there, there who will do that, but there will be some. So if you want to live a modern lifestyle, how do you handle this? Well, I would say, you know, first of all, it’s important to consider the food sources in their totality with respect to these minerals.

Because if some foods, like plants, are Deficient in minerals themselves, they may try to amplify their systems to extract the minerals from the soil, soil. And one of the ways they do this is through chelating agents. So a chelating agent would grab the minerals out of the soil and bring it into the plant. And if these are upregulated, they could actually keep the minerals from being absorbed in our body when we eat these plants. Sometimes these chelating agents are referred to as anti nutrients. And one relatively famous example is from kale, that if people overeat kale, it can pull iodine out of the body.

Now, iodine isn’t a metal, right? But nevertheless, this is such a well known example, I wanted to bring it up. And then people can develop iodine deficiency and conditions like non toxic goiter as a result of that. So if the food that you’re eating has a certain mineral content, you don’t know if, if those minerals are actually going to get absorbed into your body necessarily. And this is information that’s largely missing from nutrition and nutritional labeling. They say how much of a nutrient is in the food, but they don’t say how much of it your body will absorb.

And I’ll go back to aluminum to give you an example, because if you eat aluminum, your body absorbs less than 1% of it. Now, if you inject it, like with a vaccine, 100% of it gets into your body, right? That’s why the small amounts used in vaccines scenes are so significant compared to what we might eat in our food if we store it in aluminum foil or things like that. So the same thing is true with essential minerals that we, depending on the source that we eat, we may only be able to absorb a certain amount.

Now I did mention earlier that we’re very good at extracting iron and we need a lot more iron than we need of most of these trace minerals, minerals. But we may not have the same kind of systems for other minerals. So how bioavailable is it from the food and is it actually in the food is very important. And I think for most people, even carnivores, because they don’t give 60 different minerals to their livestock, they give the most important ones at the most important times in the life cycle to get the outcome they want. Because remember, remember, they don’t want their animals to live a long life, they want them to live a healthy, short life.

So that’s a little bit different than our goal. So I think it’s more important for us to get the full complement of all these minerals. Now we can, if we get the most important ones or the ones that we need in the biggest amounts, we definitely will have improvements in health. But will this allow us to, you know, live, live our full lifespan? And this is why I, you know, found, started using myself and decided ultimately to sell shilajit because in my opinion, there is not a better source of these minerals that you can find. And there are several reasons for that.

One is because it is produced naturally right through time, heat and pressure from ancient decomposed plants that existed and lived at a time when the mineral recycling system in nature was completely intact. So they have these minerals because of the chemical processes that occur over time and because of the purification of this material to make the final product that we can ingest. Those, those other anti nutrients are really not present. And the minerals are generally chelated to fulvic acid. And fulvic acid is very compatible with our biology that the minerals in this fulvic form are highly absorbable.

Now there are preparations called fulvic minerals, which are harvested from a little bit of a different or. And those are also, you know, a reasonable way to get minerals. They are from nature, they are mine. But generally they don’t have 60 minerals. They don’t. They usually have, you know, in the teens or 20s in terms of the spectrum of minerals they contain, whereas shilajit generally has over 50, sometimes even up to the 70s and 80s in terms of the number of different trace minerals contained. So you can be sure by using shilajit that you’re getting all of the essential minerals, or as sure as you can be be without actually having definitive knowledge of exactly which trace minerals we do need and in what amounts.

And there is a good amount of clinical data showing a lot of positive benefits both from mineral repletion in veterinary and human studies and even specifically from shilajit itself. So there also are other forms of mineral supplements and they are generally speaking made into factories from, you know, artificially by human manufacturing and not mined from nature. And minimally processed like fulvic minerals and shilajit are. So. But they can still be very bioavailable and improve health like they do in animal livestock, but in my opinion maybe are not fully optimal or the best option. But I think colloidal minerals in a colloidal form are the most bioavailable or absorbable.

And so that would be an alternative for people who would like a solution like that. And those are available also as individual minerals. If you want to try to make up your own custom combination to address your specific health condition. But I have kind of highlighted a little bit of Dr. Wallach’s work, talked about the true lifespan of humans, framed the problem of why we’re even facing this issue of mineral deficiencies, went through some of the science mostly to highlight that it’s in the very early stages, there’s not a lot of definitive evidence, and how the medical and health system kind of willfully ignore this information when it comes to human health, largely because it doesn’t fit within their profit trust driven system.

And then lastly, I talked about foods, minerals, heavy metals, and what are the ways that you can optimize your health.
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See more of Andrew Kaufman, M.D. on their Public Channel and the MPN Andrew Kaufman, M.D. channel.