Could Hidden Heavy Metals Be Fuelling Anxiety? | With Maria Allerton

Could something you're exposed to every day be contributing to the way you feel?

When we think of heavy metals, most of us imagine industrial exposure, contaminated workplaces or something that surely couldn't apply to us.

But metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium and arsenic can potentially enter our environment in ways we might not expect.

In this episode of The Anxiety Compass, Sammy and Nat head North-West on the Compass into Environmental Roots with Clinical Nutritionist and Functional Medicine Practitioner Maria Allerton, founder of True Foods Nutrition.

We explore heavy metals, the ways we're exposed to them, and their potential relationship with the brain, nervous system and symptoms that can overlap with anxiety.

But one of the most fascinating parts of this conversation is not just about what gets IN.

It's about what gets OUT!

Maria explains why two people with similar exposures may not necessarily handle them the same way, and why testing for heavy metals isn't always as straightforward as seeing a low number and assuming everything is fine.

We unpack:

• Which heavy metals Maria commonly investigates and where exposure can come from 
• How heavy metals may affect the brain, nervous system and mitochondrial function 
• Symptoms that can potentially overlap with anxiety 
• Why your ability to eliminate toxins matters 
• What an HTMA (Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis) can (and can't) tell us 
• Why Maria also uses urine challenge and stool testing
• Why there may not be one test that tells the whole story 
• The dangers of jumping into an aggressive “heavy metal detox” without understanding what's happening 
• Practical ways to support the body's normal elimination processes 
• And our Heavy Metal Rapid Fire round

Most importantly, this episode isn't about giving you one more thing to be anxious about. Heavy metals aren't the explanation for anxiety.

But for some people, environmental exposures may be one more clue on the Compass worth exploring with an appropriately qualified practitioner.

Because sometimes anxiety is the thing that gets our attention, and curiosity helps us work out what's underneath it.

CONNECT WITH MARIA ALLERTON

Maria Allerton is a Clinical Nutritionist and Functional Medicine Practitioner and founder of True Foods Nutrition. Connect with her online and on her website. 

 🧪 Learn more about Functional Medicine Testing: Functional Medicine Tests

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, it's Amy and Natalie here, and welcome to the Anxiety Compass. Where anxiety isn't the enemy, it's our tour guide. We'll swap stories, share tools, and have a laugh while we find our way back to true north. Come along.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Hi everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the anxiety compass. How are you, Sammy? I'm really good.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

It just feels weird. We're doing this. I know, I know we've swapped rolls today. I'm really good. I'm very excited because we have someone on today. I know, right?

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Um, yes. So today we're heading northwest on our compass to the environment, including toxins. Yes. Could something you're being exposed to every day be contributing to anxious feelings, which in turn is then t taking us further away from our true north. Yes. Heavy metals, I know, right? Heavy metals sound sounds very dramatic. I know. And most people probably think I don't work in a mine, surely this doesn't actually apply to me. But exposure can come from everyday and environmental sources. What actually counts as a heavy metal? And at what point does exposure become a problem? And could this one piece of somebody, could this be one piece of somebody's anxiety puzzle?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Ooh, very exciting. And today we've actually got someone joining us who I often think of in our industry when I think heavy metals and detox. How funny is that? Um, but we have Maria Allaton. Uh is that how I say your last name, Alton? Uh, she's a clinical nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner, and she's also the founder of True Foods Nutrition. And today we're going to be picking your brain about something we haven't explored before here on the anxiety compass, heavy metals and their potential connection to anxiety. Welcome to our podcast, Maria. Welcome.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Thank you. Great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. Um this is a topic that I speak about a lot in practitioner's circles and on podcasts as well. So, and it's a topic very close to my heart because this is actually one of the paths that led me to being a nutritionist, detoxing myself and my son from heavy metals. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

We all have a story as to how we ended up as nutritionists, don't we? We really do.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

And I just have to say, I'm fangirling a bit. I have um admired your work for many years, Maria. So yeah, I'm even curious. Bit gooey-eyed while we're doing this guy. So funny. Just excuse me.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Just being honest.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

It's nice to be admired. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Yes. So quick, um, simple question. Uh, it's not really a simple question, but what is like the anxiety heavy metals connection? Like, how do they sort of link? Like, just in simple terms. I mean, we'll we'll break it up as we go along in the podcast, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

So look, it's it's actually something that people don't really realize. So when you think about anxiety, traditionally, you know, and probably more medically, people think about serotonin, right? And low serotonin, and that's the the traditional pathway that we address when we want to help someone with their anxiety. So, what actually makes serotonin? How do we make serotonin in the brain? Well, we need things like zinc and magnesium and iron as well as a lot of B vitamins, so all of these nutrients have to be there for us to actually manufacture serotonin and all other neurotransmitters in the brain. So, what happens when you have mercury or cadmium, which are heavy metals, coming in and blocking your zinc in the body? This is what happens, right? So, because those metals actually have a very similar molecular property to zinc. So, the simple way to think about it is if you go back to your high school periodic table, which you know many probably have been happy not to remember. Um, but in the periodic table, we have columns of minerals with similar properties. So we have like zinc and then we have mercury underneath that, uh, it's zinc, cadmium, and then mercury, and they're all in the same column in that periodic table. So when they come in, they can actually block zinc from doing its job, and they can block magnesium from doing its job, and they can block iron from doing its job. So when those minerals are blocked, we're not going to be able to produce our serotonin. Right. So that's one very simple. Yeah, yeah. So they block our good minerals in their enzyme sites and stop them from doing their job, essentially. So a lot of the time I've seen, um, and I know we're going to talk about hair analysis at some stage, you know, when you do someone's hair analysis and you can see that little pile of mercury and that little pile of lead, you know, all those little heavy metal piles, and they don't have any zinc or magnesium or the other good minerals, you know it's going to be impacting their mental health.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Yeah, it's all connected. Just on the zinc thing, because I and I know in some anxiety groups they talk quite a bit about copper. Can you talk to us, Maria, about the zinc and copper ratios and how that can affect anxiety?

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Yeah, so that's a huge one, and particularly within the female population. So children and women tend to get a lot more affected by copper. So zinc and copper have this kind of see saw relationship where when one of them is low, the other one can go high, and that's when things fall apart. So copper is a very um, if we had to give a mineral personality characteristics, I love that. Yeah, yeah, always try and think of them as you know, people with um traits. So copper is very anxious, angry, inattentive, um, from zero to a hundred, overly emotional, you know, copper is very um dysregulated and very volatile as a mineral. And zinc is very calming, stable, uh thinking with your prefrontal cortex, which is like a rational part of the brain thinking, uh, reducing impulsivity. So all those things that we want more of, usually, that's zinc. So when you have this imbalance and copper dominates, and you know, we can talk about lots of reasons why that might happen, you know, whether it's uh copper from copper pipes from water, right? Uh your uh oral contraceptive pills, predisposed people to low zinc and high copper, um, as well as just having zinc depletion. So, you know, just not getting enough zinc in the soil or the food or you know, our nutrient intake can create that imbalance. And when you have that imbalance, the anxiety will definitely be worse. And people often talk about free-floating anxiety, like they're not thinking about anything in particular, they're not stressed about a subject, it's just they wake up and they have this underlying anxiety. Um, and it's actually quite simple to address, you know. As clinicians, we have lots of protocols to address that, but yeah, it's one of those things that is not really talked about out there in the space world.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Yeah, well, we haven't spoken to spoken, I can't talk today. We haven't spoken about metals at all on the podcast. Um but it's definitely something I have looked into, and it's funny as you mentioned I use it a lot, yeah. Well, you would in clinic, but when I used to do um blood pathology analysis, I'd always get them to do the zinc copper test to to see the ratios because it is an eye-opener, isn't it? But it's like there's so many different metals that we're actually talking about. What are some of them? I mean, you mentioned mercury. Um, every time I hear mercury, I always think of like the mad hatter, what they used to put in in hats that would make them go crazy. Um things like I mean, some of the ket the things I hear a lot about are like aluminium, because we use foil and all sorts with cooking. Yeah. And um, when I was really anxious, at one point I had orthorexia, I would avoid anything that would add sort of metals to my food. Um which yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Well, look, the the sad and disturbing part is that they're actually really, really difficult to avoid in today's environment. So, you know, that we can talk about there's um obvious exposures that people can influence and minimize, and then there's environmental exposures which are more difficult uh to eliminate. So, you know, in terms of which metals we're talking about mercury, cadmium, lead, arsenic, aluminium, um, and there's us other ones that are not as famous, like uranium, beryllium, you know, stuff like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

So in terms of science, uh science class with the periodic table.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Yeah, we need the periodic table in the background. Yeah, so I mean, look, we just need to remember that they have no physiological function in the body. So when people say things like, oh, it's just a little bit of an exposure, oh, it's just a small amount, oh, your body can detox it. Um, we're talking about cumulative exposures that people have. And the other disturbing part is they can transfer intergenerationally. So if your great-grandmother had mercury amalgams in her mouth, and your grandmother did, and so did your mum, you will collect the load of all of those generations and have high levels of mercury. Um, which is mom and dad. Yeah, exactly. And dad as well, yeah, it does transfer through the sperm. There's research on that. So, you know, when you look at today's kids and all of their symptoms and spectrum disorders and anxiety and all of that, um, it's no wonder that they they've collected multiple generations of mercury and we're all anxious now, no one's absorbing all these wonderful things properly.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Oh gosh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

So, we have the body do with it. So, you know, we're we're getting all of these heavy metals accumulated in our body from so many different sources. Yeah. What does the body do with it?

SPEAKER_00 11:31

So the interesting thing is a lot of the time people go and they want to do a blood test to test their mercury and lead and things like that, and they do a blood test and it comes back normal. So the the thing that happens is the body is not going to let heavy metals circulate around our blood because they are extremely toxic. So it does that maybe for the first 24 to 48 hours of exposure, and then it stores it away. So the body is very smart and it's always trying to protect us. It will store it away in places like your brain tissue or your liver or your fat mass or you know, those places that are not easily uh accessible to circulation of blood. So it kind of stores them away, and that's the the tricky part for us as practitioners is to find ways to help someone detoxify and without you know creating symptoms and getting all that stuff out of their storage sites, which can take actually quite a long time.

SPEAKER_02 12:32

How long roughly does it take?

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Like um, it's super individual. So if someone has dodgy genetics around their detox pathways, like uh methylation, glucurinidation.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

I'm all those things.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Yeah. Yeah, me too. So all those people who are challenged with proper detox, it takes a much longer time. So years. So for myself, for example, it's taken me about 10 years to detox all the mercury out of my system. A lot of the time it doesn't take as long as that.

unknown 13:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

So it depends on like the level of exposure. Yeah. Like if you had acute poisoning or you were just eating tuna for a while, right? Um, or if you've got that multi-generational amalgam fillings, um, or you know, your both your parents have been exposed, or you live in an area where there is industry and mining and stuff like that. But I think, yeah, the other the other part to what we were talking about before is that incidental exposure, just having metals in your water, in your air, in the soil, the places where you don't really have much control over having them in when I first became a practitioner, that was sort of one of the questions we were sort of encouraged to ask.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

But in my head, it was always I always thought, oh, that would be more people working as cleaners or people, you know, who worked with sprays on in in farms. I never really thought that it would be so much in our food, um, even just like people like painting old paint and stripping back. Let's it's in workplaces, it's even in our cosmetics. Like I actually did a detox, like all the the chemicals were in things, and the chart was so overwhelming. I'd be handing it out to my patients, and they'd be looking at me with a worried face, going, I'm gonna have to throw everything out. It's literally in everything, yeah. Literally, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah, and unfortunately, it's a lot of it is unavoidable. So I think we need to have just you know a lot of awareness about the obvious sources, like you mentioned, cosmetics, you know, in my poison, yeah, exactly. In my previous life before I became a nutritionist, I was a marketing manager for Revlon and I worked on lipstick.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Interesting, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

So lipstick is full of lead, um, and it still is, and it's not because it's an additive, you know, or a preservative, it's the colours, the actual pigment colours contain lead, just like your oil paints if you paint contain lead. So yeah, lipstick is problematic. So you have to be super careful with what you're choosing to wear and the brands. Um, that's usually not a huge exposure. I'd say for lead, the biggest exposures are the water, right? Water pipes that are made of copper and they have these lead parts on them, uh, as well as, like you said, stripping paint. Um, but it's it's incredible like how we get exposed to that stuff without actually knowing about it. So yeah, even like leaded petrol. We used to have leaded petrol, and if you grew up in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, it's still all in the soil. So we were all exposed to it as children. Um, so unless you've done something active to detox yourself, you probably are still carrying lead.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

I see. I often would say to my clients further down, once I'd had a bit of knowledge as a clinical nutritionist, I would often just say to them, look, you get to choose what you do every day. And if you choose to drink alcohol and you're aware of what's doing, that's your choice. Like you shouldn't feel guilty for using certain lipsticks that you love. Maybe you go out once a week and you have a favorite lipstick. Like if you know it's in there and you particularly like that lipstick, I mean, we're all getting exposed just sitting here right now to something. Let's be honest.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Yeah, pick pick a poison, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:30

And also, um, you know, where we live, you know, like a lot of us live in cities, but they weren't always cities, you know. Like I um I have a clinic in Canberra, and I see a lot of heavy metals in Canberra because there was such wide, you know, sheep stations and everything in the area before it became um urbanized. So, you know, just you know, just even playing around in your garden, in your soil, you're being exposed.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Exactly. Yeah, soil and more disturbingly, playground materials. So they just find arsenic and playground.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

I don't like um really perfect grass um on the ovals, that's a bit triggered me. I'm like, that's too perfect. There's something in that that I don't want to roll around in. Um, so it's gonna steer clear from it. It's a huge issue.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not just you know, because we know that they're bad, like they they actually stop our mitochondria from working properly. So if we're talking about you know anxiety and mental health in general, yeah, we want our little batteries in the cells, which is what mitochondria are, to produce energy. And a lot of anxiety is actually a loss of energy in the brain. That's whether it happens because of low blood sugar or heavy metals or candida, you know, or gut bacteria, all of those things stop us from producing ATP in the cell.

SPEAKER_03 18:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

So then you're gonna end up with a whole host of mental health issues because the brain needs to have that energy supply. So, you know, if you have a mercury or a cadmium molecule, it will literally stop the little stations in our mitochondrial citric acid cycle from working and producing energy for us.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Ah, the citric acid cycle. Yeah, the good old citric. Gosh. But I've you mentioned something really interesting before we came on that sometimes you'll you were talking about it just before with genetics, but um like trying to clear and detox it out. There are other ways that we get rid of these things, like you know, with bowel, regular bowel movements, making sure your kidneys are working, like water. I'm assuming like if you're drinking nutritious water, not water from a copper pipe, um, that's going to help with getting those minerals in and flushing it out of your system. I mean, it's not just stuck in there, there are ways. Definitely, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

So we need to have all our detox pathways open. So, like you mentioned, urine, bowels. So, how many people are constipated or they think they think they're not constipated, but they're going to the toilet like every other day? Um I don't think I could cope with that.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

I have to go every day. Too much information, but that's just how I oh absolutely fundamental. Yeah. Yeah, it's like I'm taking the trash out. I don't like it.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Yeah, sweat is another one. So, you know, the body does have these pathways to clear things out, uh, but they need to be supported. So we need to be pooping, peeing, sweating a lot every single day, cleaning out the trash, as you said. But um, yeah, it's a lot of people need help. So it's not necessarily enough for some people to just be doing that. They actually need, you know, some supplements and some detox procedures and um a whole host of tools, you know, that we use in clinic to help move things out.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I wanted to talk more on the you didn't say that you use HTMA that often in your clinic, but I know Nat does. Um used to you use the HTMA, don't you, Nat?

SPEAKER_00 20:17

I used to use it more than I do now, so it's still a good tool to start with. Yeah, I just yeah, it's a first line tool. First line, yeah. But I just find that uh what is HTMA for our listeners?

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Because they're probably like, what's HTML?

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Yeah, so it's um hair tissue mineral analysis is what it stands for. So it's looking at hair. So we take a hair sample from a client, we send it to a lab, and uh the labs are in the in the US, they've been around for many, many decades, so they're very um good at what they do. Um, hair analysis is also used in forensics a lot uh with the police, you know, which people don't really realize uh to determine you know patterns. But yeah, we use it to look at minerals, um, our organ patterns like our thyroid function, our adrenal function, energy production, immune system. These are all things that we can gain from a H.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

I did one on myself ages ago when I was like just done a fitness comp, burnt out, and my adrenals were completely stuffed just from looking at this. Yeah. Um, it actually showed that my magnesium was through the roof because I was taking, I was oversupplementing and it wasn't like yeah, which was causing.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

Not absorbing. Yeah, it's usually not absorbing when it's yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah, there's so many things you can learn from uh, you know, having a knowledgeable person look at a HTMA. Um, but metals I find so some people who are fairly okay detoxers, they will show up on the hair analysis. Um, and you know that's nice and easy when that happens, but I find That maybe it's just the clients that I see. About 80% of my clients don't show up with any heavy metals on their at least their first hair analysis. So there's usually ways to look much deeper at that. And it doesn't mean that they're not full of toxins and metals, it just means that they're not very good at actually excreting them out for us to see. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 22:21

I found that where I do a second test, I will start, you know, and if they haven't had any. And I yeah. And then I do it again three months later, and all of a sudden they've got all these heavy metals. And they're saying to me, Oh my god, how where am I being how am I getting this exposure? I was like, No, it was always there. It's coming out. We're just revealing it now because your body is starting to, you know, work a little bit better. So now it's just showing up.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

And they're like, Well, they even like use they're losing body fat, and it's like, well, you'll you're allowing those toxins to be pushed out into your bloodstream now and and reg like pushed out, they're not sitting in your fat cells anymore. Yeah, because that's generally why people carry extra body fat because of the toxins they're holding on to.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

The body needs to store things somewhere, so keep you safe. It's a protecting mechanism, yeah. 100%. The body will always try and protect us from this stuff because you know every cell in our body knows that these things don't belong there, like lead and mercury and cadmium and arsenic, they have absolutely no function or place in the body. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

So what other testing do you do then, Maria?

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Yeah, so with heavy metals, I like doing a deeper test. So there are stool tests and urine tests, and sometimes we need to have an agent that the person can take before they do the test to improve their excretion. So we give them a bit of a push the night before and then collect the urine. So there is look, no, there's no perfect test for metals, unfortunately. I'm not sure there ever will be, short of you know, taking a biopsy of someone's liver or brain, which is never gonna happen.

SPEAKER_03 24:05

Probably not a bit invasive.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

So in a non, yeah, non-invasive way, we need to do all of them. You know, we need to do the hair, the stool, and the urine and have a look and see what is actually happening to try and determine how toxic they are. But also the most valuable thing is to then retest. So after they've done some detox and some treatment, retest it and see. And like Natalie was saying, sometimes things go up, and that's actually good because they are eliminating. I'd be worried if things didn't go up, yeah. So it's really important to track it and work with a practitioner so that you're actually taking things that are really helpful in getting rid of metals without making your anxiety or other symptoms worse, which can happen to you.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Yeah, I was just gonna say that, like for our listeners. I've had I actually work in with kids a lot with what I do, and I get a lot of them coming up to me saying, My child's really anxious, they have ADHD, ASD, all of the things, ticking all the boxes. Like, should I be looking at heavy metals? And I know I've seen, I'm pretty sure you wrote some things about that, and I'm like, it's definitely worth looking into.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Yeah, it's one of the top things I would look at. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, after looking at the gut, it's it's heavy metals, particularly in children, you know, because their detox capacity and their liver's ability to clear them is much weaker than an adult's. So they actually like per body weight, they accumulate a lot more metals and toxins than an adult does compared to their size, right? So it's yeah, I mean, I'm sure you're seeing in your practice. I used to see a lot of kids, not so much anymore, but um, extreme levels of toxicity, particularly like lead, mercury, cadmium, all the really problematic metals. But the good thing about kids is that they bounce back fairly quickly, so they respond to treatment usually really well. Um, within you know two or three months, there's usually a huge difference in their symptoms, whether it's anxiety or ADHD.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

You notice it from the teachers, the teachers will often tell me, like this child that's no longer on dairy, for example, is actually like they'll tell their parents, um focusing and sitting still in the classroom. We've never seen it before, just from making a few changes. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's so important, you know, when you're talking about anxiety and other brain-related things. Um, when you detox someone from metals, you're also dramatically improving their gut function. So they're not going to have as many problems like leaky gut, you know, intestinal permeability or SIBO or candida or all those gut things that, you know, are really common problems with anxiety. By clearing the metals, it improves their gut function dramatically. So that's another benefit to the treatment.

SPEAKER_02 27:04

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So people, I mean, we're talking about uh you've mentioned a few times about detoxing. Now, obviously, we don't want our listeners to just rush out and start doing some sort of point Google heavy metal detoxing.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

Chat DPT, I want to do a heavy metal detox. Oh, my phone's listening to me.

SPEAKER_02 27:28

Yeah, what our listeners do, you know, like they've listened to this and they're like, oh, okay, I want to, I want to, you know, do a detox, I want to know what is going on.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Yeah. I mean, what's the problem with doing your own detox? Because I used to do that in the past and it made me sick. I mean, you've sort of touched on that already.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

It makes you sick. So unfortunately, like you can't just start detoxing without knowing what you're detoxing. So the number one thing is see a practitioner, do the testing, you know, do all the testing that's required to identify heavy metals, and then you need to have a practitioner target everything in stages. So, you know, they might want to do your copper first, for example, you know, because that's a really important one, um, depending on the symptoms, right? So, depending on what's the most critical thing to address. Um, and then you know, practitioners can use things like binders and all sorts of um supplements to minimize the discomfort of copper.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

That's the anxious, angry, over overly emotional one. But you know, that's copper. I wonder what arsenic is, because I would think arsenic's worse than copper. Yeah, it's not like a serial killer or something.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Look, it's it's really interesting. Their effects differ on different people, so and even the same two copper toxic people can present quite differently, um, because it depends on you know a whole bunch of other genetics and their levels, but it's all of those metals, they impact our neurotransmitters. So our serotonin, our dopamine, our GABA, like all the things that keep us calm, um, like serotonin and GABA, for example, they get completely scrambled with copper, mercury, and lead and arsenic and all the other stuff. So they are really, really important to eliminate. But yeah, I wouldn't encourage anyone to go chat GPT because look, as fun as it is, and it can be useful in some ways, but it doesn't know anything about you, literally. Like Chat GPT has not taken your health history, has not um questioned you about everywhere where you've lived and what you've been exposed to, it hasn't done your testing, like these are all things that humans still need to be doing. Yes. Um, and hopefully we're not gonna get replaced by AI robots and we'll still be doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean in the future. Yeah, and look, it's you down the wrong rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah, we won't go there. Um, you need a personalized detox protocol, so it's you know, a juice fast is not a detox, right? Like the way that social media presents detox is extremely basic and doesn't take any of this stuff into account. So don't go out and just start drinking spirulina or what juices or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

I reacted to spirulina, I had a and I had a few clients. It's actually I read somewhere that 30% of people actually react to it. Is that correct? Spirulina. Yeah, I'm not a fan. Look, I've never watches and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Yeah, I've never liked it. I yeah, I don't respond well to see grass vegetables. Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

You liked it.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

You liked it, I think there's like an energetic thing with that as well. You know, like some plants you just have more of an affinity to than others. Yeah, um, but yeah, basically find a practitioner, work with someone who knows what they're doing so that you don't end up with you know detoxing too fast and feeling even worse than what you started with.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

I had a heap of clients when I had my clinic open, they were taking charcoal, like lots and lots of charcoal, and they were using it on everything. They even were buying charcoal bread. Remember when we went through charcoal? We're in the protein phase at the moment with musk, but everything was charcoal at one point. Yeah, I think everything was great.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

What is the um issue with you know taking too much charcoal?

SPEAKER_00 31:32

Yeah, yeah, well, it binds everything. Look, charcoal is great, you know. If you're traveling in a developing country and you've picked up a bug, you want charcoal because it will suck everything out, bind everything, and you'll feel dramatically better. It will also constipate you, but charcoal binds everything, right? So it will bind your good minerals too, which is not what you want. So it has a really broad capacity, it's like a vacuum cleaner that just goes through your gut and vacuums anything that it can stick to. So you don't really want like charcoal can be used strategically, but it's not something you use long term, and it's definitely not something I would take every single day or take foods or supplements that contain it because of that, because you will end up being mineral deficient of the good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

When so Pete, speaking about poop, because that's what I love to talk about. How do you know, like if you're clearing out heavy metals, can you tell by what's coming in or not?

SPEAKER_00 32:36

No, you can't tell until you actually measure it. So you can do the stool heavy metals test, and that will actually measure your minerals and metals, but not visually, no. I mean, and you could be having really good bowel movements, so I think it's important to note that people can be eliminating well, you know, they can be drinking lots of water, they can have good bowel movements, and they might even be sweating or even going to a sauna, but that doesn't guarantee that they're detoxing metals because of the way that the liver functions and the way that everyone's detox capacity is very different.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

I wonder, like I would always back in the day we'll be worried about what was going in, but it's it's I guess it's more focused on making sure that your body's processing it out, like that's yeah, any test. Focus on more, yeah. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

Yeah, look, I'm a big fan of tests, um, functional medicine testing. I do probably more than other practitioners, but my approach is always test and don't guess. So there's no way that I can ask you any question that will tell me about how well you're eliminating metals without testing it. Do you know what I mean? And then a lot of things get missed, you know. So people start just throwing supplements out there, but they're not actually checking to see what was there at baseline and they're not rechecking, you know. So it has to be very systematic and not just like, oh, well, you're feeling better, therefore you're okay. They're probably feeling better, but that doesn't mean they've fully detoxed everything out, so that might take you know several years, like I was saying. Um, but people will get symptom improvements very early on, and they might be like, Oh, this is great, you know, like my anxiety is reduced, uh, my skin is better, everything's better, but they just don't know how well they can actually feel when everything is amazing, amazing, yeah. So true.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Yeah, I do, I get that. Um, yeah, so for our listeners, some of them are probably thinking, I can't afford to go and see someone, do all this. Like, are there ways that we can sort of support our body's normal elimination system so that if they're putting stuff in, their body's actually functioning properly with elimination. I mean, yeah, that's something that we do as we're all three of us are nutritionists, and this is a great topic.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so look, it depends on your symptoms, you know. So, if you're just you know having quite mild symptoms, it's not necessarily that you need to go and do all this testing. Um, you can work on, yeah, definitely fiber, prebiotics, you know, making sure that your gut is working really well so things are actually getting excreted and pulled out if your period, if you're female and your period is good and you're not getting like what we call excess estrogen symptoms, you know, things aren't moving. Yeah, that your liver is, you know, functioning uh well and you're overall well, then yeah, you can just do gut work, exercise, lots of hydration, you know, eating really well, avoiding foods that contain metals. So that's something maybe we haven't mentioned yet is things like you know, rice contains a lot of arsenic, um, tea contains a lot of fluoride, uh, chocolate has been tested multiple times to contain cadmium and lead. So you need to just have some awareness about foods that are more contaminated than others, unfortunately, because of the environment, uh, and maybe reduce consuming those.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

So I basically guess you soak the rice, like does that have any effect on levels?

SPEAKER_00 36:15

There is a proper cooking method that's actually being done in the study. So if one was to Google uh proper cooking method for rice to get rid of arsenic, you will get the exact instructions on Google or chat. Um, and there, yeah, there is a it's a rinsing and all of that. There's like a whole process. I don't eat rice anymore. But if someone was interested, there there is a way to make it safer, dramatically safer. Um, the problem is when you eat rice in takeaway places or when you eat anything in takeaway places, it's still highly competitive.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Make your poison if you really like your chin honey, chicken, and rice.

SPEAKER_00 36:51

Yeah. You know what's chicken, yeah. Chicken is incidentally also really high in arsenic.

SPEAKER_01 36:57

It's pretty much all my things I eat. I'm just eating heavy metals.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

So many people I speak to will eat chicken and rice as like a daily meal at least, you know, several times a week, which is problematic. Yeah. So chicken feed also has um arsenic in it. Um, but you know, the big things you want to avoid are like tuna, for example. Like I just I was gonna ask you about tuna. Yeah, all my female clients and child clients uh get told not to eat it at all. Like is there like a certain brand or something, or is it just an all tuna? It's just all tuna, and this is actually a government recommendation. So, again, if you were to Google fish recommendations, you know, safety recommendations for fish in Australia. Um, tuna is listed as extremely high mercury, consume no more than once a fortnight or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

I've got clients that have it for lunch every day, and you know, it's funny because I literally have on my kitchen bench right now a massive tin of the Serena tuna. I'm gonna do some tuna sushi rolls for the boys, which is rice and tuna. I'm just gonna say you go to the roll. I'm gonna poison my kids tonight.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

Yeah, look, it's a it all depends on how good detox is, right? But I would say that yeah, tuna would be top of my list of things that you know is proven to be highly contaminated. It does depend on the size of the fish, of course. So if they caught little wood fish, but look, yeah, no one catches little baby tuna, like it's just not how the industry works, they always get the really big ones.

SPEAKER_02 38:31

So yeah, swap out then. If people do eat a lot of tuna, what's yeah?

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Um, any other white fish, so small and white fish, and also little oily fish, like sardines, so seafood, I like sardines, sardines, yeah. Things that are little, basically, you want to get things that are down the food chain rather than the giant fish that's I think the tuna, the the tuna thing, and and I know my mum, she was probably listening right now.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Hi mum, uh, stop eating your tuna. Uh she has it every day for convenience because it's a tin, yeah. Yep, salad, off I go. Like she's not gonna cook a piece of white fish.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Yeah, I would swap to sardines, yeah. Tins if you want to stick with that, sardines and red salmon. So the proper like wild salmon. Yeah, yeah. Mackerel, it depends on the type as well. So mackerel probably has the closest texture, I would say, to tuna, like if you like the texture. Um and yeah, there are different species of mackerel that are safer than others, but yeah, there's lots of other tin alternatives. Tins are not amazing generally. I know they see coated with but they are coated with BPA and made from tin, which is not great.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Yeah, but look, I totally get it. You can't get away from it. I mean, the and then I often would say the stress that's causing you to try and be clean over being clean, like what's the you know, you've got to balance it out here.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Yeah, and that would like I keep saying, you know, I think it depends on the symptoms, the severity of your symptoms. You know, if you are someone who's so anxious that you're not leaving your house, that you know, you don't have the energy to do things, I would say, you know, that's pretty severe. So you want to be a lot more careful with what you're doing. But yeah, if if someone is just uh okay day to day and these are just little adjustments they can make, but they don't have to get so obsessive about it.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

Yeah, yeah. I wonder what life would be like if we all just lived in like a commune and people just cooked us, you know, the most perfect meals every day. That would be nice. We got all of our boxes picked every day, we'd all look feel and look amazing, wouldn't we?

SPEAKER_00 40:45

Of course, yeah. It would help also, you know, if our land wasn't being poisoned and our air wasn't being poisoned and our water wasn't being poisoned.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

Very limited spots in the world where it's not, isn't it? Yeah, the zones um amazing. Well, we normally do like a rapid fire at the end with some quick questions. I know it's hard to, but try and like re reply is try and answer them. Sure, got it. Um do you want to start now?

SPEAKER_02 41:14

Do you want me to? Okay, no, I'll start. All right, and go. Worst offender metal mercury.

SPEAKER_00 41:24

I won't do the next one because you already answered it.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

But um, one everyday exposure people would be surprised by.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Tap water. Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_01 41:33

We've got those things when you said that one.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

I know one thing that helps our filter. Yes, absolutely. It's the first thing I ever do with all of my patients put them on a water filter.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:45

One thing that helps our body eliminate toxins naturally water.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

Hydration, hyperhydration, tap water, filtered water, ideally with some mineral drops in it.

SPEAKER_01 41:59

Oh, we're gonna be very very specific. Yeah, uh, what's more important, reducing exposure? Oh, yeah, I already asked this one, or improving your ability to eliminate it.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

Both. Um, I think often reducing exposure where you can, where you actually have control over it. Yeah, so food, water, environment, things like that. But the broader exposures we can't control. So then detox is eliminated.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

Yes. And if you could get rid of one toxin from our modern environment forever, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 42:35

Mercury. You don't like mercury, do you? Mercury again. Yeah, it's the most damaging one. Look, if someone wants to do a fun experiment and go on YouTube and Google Death of Neurons by Mercury, there's a lot of really fun videos where um they have a human neuron, you know, like our brain cells in a petri dish and they drop mercury into it, and you can see the neuron actually like getting destroyed. Wow, like it's little tentacles, the dendrites, that it's like they actually shrink and get completely destroyed permanently.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

I wonder if all these people eating tuna all the time, if it's going to be linked to Alzheimer's and increased cases of dementia.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

Guarantee you 100%. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:24

I always think of the movie Outlander, the the series Outlander, when she went back in time and they were using things like mercury and all these things that we know are bad, um, to cure and heal people. Like the people were using it.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

She's like, No, no, they used to put it in medicines, they used to put um, I'm not sure if it was mercury, but yeah, mercury used to be put into whitening powders and put on the skin. Uh, probably still is in some countries, and arsenic used to be put into baby teething powders.

SPEAKER_03 43:56

Gosh.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

Yeah. So, you know, humans have done so many dumb things.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

things in and then we all have it in us now because they did that a few generations ago. All right. Well that was the end of our rapid fire obviously because we we've been shouting about Mercury. But is there anything else that um you wanted to ask Nat before we move? No.

SPEAKER_02 44:17

No, I think we've covered it all.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

I mean I'm sure you'd love it.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

I mean we could we could have a lunch for another two hours but get tested that's my message.

SPEAKER_00 44:28

Yeah get tested go and get yourself tested. Go and book in with Maria you see are you taking people lots of other practitioners yeah I actually have trained lots of oh yeah absolutely I've trained lots and lots of practitioners in hair analysis and heavy metals and you know there's anyone who is properly accredited and does these tests um I'm sure is a great practitioner. So there needs to be more awareness of um this area it's usually way down the list of people's questions about their hair there's practitioners or people listening where can they find you if they want to learn more yeah so my website truefoodsnutrition.com dot AU so foods with an S. And we also have a practitioner group on Facebook called um HDMA and functional medicine testing for practitioners. I like that group but if you can't find it just DM me on social media and I'll yeah and your last name spell your last name A L E R T O N.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

So Maria Alatin amazing well bringing it back to the compass this one sort of fits the compass so well because it crosses so many points we've got exposure being environment we've got the chemical nutritions being minerals metals nutrients all that sort of stuff physical being your elimination and detoxification pathways are you exercising all the things uh and the nervous system so uh potential neurological effects things that might have even come down from uh our generations who knows uh yeah anxiety can have multiple contributors but heavy metals aren't the answer but for the right person they might actually be another clue worth investigating I find every podcast we do now it's not necessarily the answer for everyone but it could definitely be a pathway to go down.

SPEAKER_02 46:19

Absolutely yeah it's another place to explore it's never yeah never one thing is just the answer but yeah it's often like a little all you can eat buffet absolutely yeah and it usually takes a number of things to get to a point where you have an anxiety disorder.

SPEAKER_01 46:35

Yeah amazing well thanks for um coming on with we've actually I've had fun that if you enjoyed loved it I've actually learned some more things today.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

Yeah it's great to talk about this stuff you know because people just don't really know and it's not something that's discussed a lot.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

So thanks it isn't and I really like the idea of giving all the medals different um personalities and characters yes I love that I'm gonna go through and create personality yeah amazing all right well we'll love you and leave it and we'll see you on the next episode thanks for joining us on the anxiety compass if you love this episode share it with a friend who needs a little laugh and low calm we'll see you in the next one keep following your true norm disclaimer time Sammy and Natalie may be clinical nutritionists but we're not your personal doctors. What you hear is for learning and laughing not diagnosing or prescribing if things feel bigger than you call your doctor or local support line or reach out to a qualified health professional and got your back to