Sign up for periodic reports and bulletins
Bill Sardi
the vitamin supplement answer man
FREE access; FREE of commercials; FREE to use
Sign up for periodic reports and bulletins
FREE access; FREE of commercials; FREE to use
Posted April 28, 2019: by Bill Sardi
Continual Exposure To Ubiquitous Toxic Lead In The Environment Suggests The Public Begin Habitual Lead Removal Measures With Dietary Supplements
(Garlic, Vitamins C & B1, Rice Bran IP6)
Public health authorities and the medical profession are remiss in putting preventive measures into practice given the recognition many of the adverse health effects posed by even the lowest blood/lead levels are irreversible.
There is no safe level of lead exposure. Symptoms are often subtle and affect thinking, IQ, learning and visual function and is also associated with more serious health problems such as elevated blood pressure, heart failure, dental cavities, gout, kidney failure, peripheral neuropathy, and diabetes. (Preventing Lead Poisoning in Young Children. CDC, Aug. 2005)
Highly vulnerable children experience a decline in IQ and mental function, and this is irreversible. A presenting symptom of lead overload is anemia due to iron deficiency which results in sluggish, fatigued children, a co-incident symptom.
Mild mental retardation (decline in IQ) and cardiovascular outcomes (elevated blood pressure) estimated in 2004 from exposure to lead amount to almost 1% of the global burden of disease.
Lead is stored in bones and has a half-life of up to 28 years and can be mobilized intermittently during times of stress, infant breast feeding or hormonal imbalances.
Lead was phased out of leaded gasoline in 1970 with the recognition of all of its adverse health effects and the fact it is considered “extremely dangerous” to growing children, particularly their mental function. .
A report published Pharmacy Times in 2013 noted that lead poisoning has declined from 4.4% in the early 1990s to 1.4% in 2004. In America blood levels of lead dropped from ~15.0 micrograms in the 1970s (can you imagine?) to 1-2 micrograms per blood sample today. With the realization any blood level of lead is toxic, in June of 2012 a lower threshold of 5 micrograms lead per blood sample was established. It was estimated 450,000 American children have blood lead levels greater than 5 micrograms/blood sample.
Exposure to lead is widespread in groundwater, airborne dust created by renovation of old homes (lead-based paints), soil, roadways, old lead pipes, and handling lead shot. Trace amounts of lead are still found in unleaded gasoline.
Lead can remain in the body, in blood, bones and organs for years.
The problem of lead poisoning is much greater than first realized. Population surveys indicate 20% of North American adults have blood lead levels greater than 5 micrograms per blood sample, the somewhat arbitrary cutoff point for toxicity given no blood level other than zero is acceptable. In one authoritative study only 9% of adults were found to have an undetectable levels of lead in their blood.
Alarm bells rang when it was in 2018 it was reported in The Lancet Public Health journal that 18% of all heart attacks and strokes are attributed to elevations of lead in blood samples. There were 14,289 adult subjects surveyed and 4422 deaths over 2+ decades; 631 (14.26%) among individuals with a blood/lead level less than 2.0 micrograms versus 2451 deaths (55.42%) among individuals with blood/lead levels greater than 3.8 micrograms, a 388% increase!
Bone blood levels of lead are correlated with heart rate abnormalities.
A more ominous and disquieting is discovery that an estimated 18.0% of all (2.3 million) deaths (all-cause mortality) in the USA correlate with elevated lead levels which when extrapolated to the population at large amounts to an estimated 412,000 deaths a year! This is roughly ten-times greater than previously estimated. This is comparable to the number of deaths attributed to tobacco smoke exposure.
The percentage of adults who were diagnosed with diabetes was 12.0% in the group with the lowest blood/lead level (less than 2.0 micrograms) and 19.2% among the group with a blood/lead level above 3.8 micrograms (160% increased risk). Only 9.6% of the group with the lowest blood/lead level (less than 2.0 micrograms) had high blood pressure versus 24.3% (253% increased risk) among those with a higher blood level (greater than 3.8 micrograms). All of these subjects were under the 5.0 microgram cut off toxicity level arbitrarily established by the Centers For Disease Control!
This newly evaluated data (see below) suggests ~two-thirds of cardiovascular-related deaths in the U.S. (412,000 of 635,260 deaths) are lead toxicity-related and that cardiologists should embrace chelation therapy, a long dismissed practice, on a more widespread basis.
As an aside, this may help explain why studies involving chelation therapy for heart disease have often failed. If only the human subjects with elevated lead levels were analyzed, maybe those failed studies would have been positive.
The reported decreases in the death rate from heart disease over recent decades may have been mistakenly attributed to improved treatment or medication when it was really due to decline in exposure to lead.
Given that positive large-scale human clinical trials of chelation therapy have now been published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., the American Heart Journal and Circulation journal, and the fact heart disease remains the No. 1 killer in America despite the many advances in cardiac care, resistance to practice preventive chelation within the cardiology profession may have been mounted purely for competitive and financial reasons.
Unexpectedly, in 2016 the manufacturer of the most commonly-used chelation treatment for lead poisoning (calcium-EDTA) raised their prices by 7200% ($5000 per gram; only costs 33-cents per gram in a chemical catalog), possibly because the publication of positive chelation studies was prematurely believed to increase demand for chelation.
It is not likely the cardiology profession is going to turn its cannons around and practice prevention any time soon instead of rescuing patients from the precipice of death with coronary artery bypass surgery. Given that the practice of medicine has become increasingly dysfunctional and treatment rather than preventive oriented, patients with more severe heart disease will likely have to locate chelation therapists on their own.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and NPR and Centers for Disease Control
(with added lead-related deaths and deaths due to medical errors)
Garlic is the best-tested remedy for lead toxicity.
Garlic has been found to be a natural lead detoxifier equal to the effectiveness and exceeding the safety of a popular drug (penicillamine).
Beware garlic pills that advertise they provide or deliver allicin. Stomach acid negates the synthesis of allicin in garlic cloves and capsules. This is simulated by placing garlic cloves or powder in a dish of vinegar (acetic acid) to simulate stomach acid and no allicin is produced. Crushing a clove outside of the body will produce allicin but will be very pungent to consume. A non-odorous alkalinized garlic pill assuredly produces allicin by temporarily countering the hydrochloric acid in the stomach, this allowing allicin to be produced.
Vitamin C is another safe and economical lead detoxifier considered on par with garlic. Dr. Tom Levy, an advocate of daily vitamin C supplementation to health maintenance, says everyone has some degree of lead toxicity and supplemental vitamin C is a dependable way of achieving lead detoxification. Depending upon the severity of symptoms and amount of lead exposure, mega-dose vitamin C has been safely used to detoxify in cases of lead poisoning (a dosage chart is provided here). In fact, low vitamin C blood levels are associated with high blood levels of lead. The only downside is that vitamin C is rapidly excreted from the body. A newly available vitamin C pill that maintains high blood levels of vitamin C on a 24-7 basis is also now available.
Vitamin B1 is a well-known lead detoxifier and is effective in cases of subtle forms of lead toxicity. Its reported use as a lead detoxifier dates back at least 35 years. Its combination with vitamin C makes it more effective. In fact, lead actually depletes vitamin B1. Thiamin works in tandem with zinc to detoxify from lead poisoning. Benfotiamine, the fat-soluble form of thiamin (B1), is the preferred form. (Note: sugar, alcohol, tea, coffee, inhibit B1 absorption.)
IP6 (six molecules of phosphate/1 molecule of inositol) is a commercially available extract from rice bran that is known as nature’s mineral chelator. It is well documented to chelate lead.
Public health agencies mislead when they list the major diseases of death rather than the major causes of death, accelerated aging being the primary cause of premature death among the 2.7 million deaths reported annually in the U.S. The report posted here showed lead poisoning is the 4th leading cause of death in the U.S. but was produced in haste. It was confined to cardiovascular disease-induced death caused by lead. When the mortal effects of lead poisoning are added for other types of diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes from lead-induced hypertension, chronic kidney disease and cancer, it becomes quite clear that lead is by far the leading cause of premature death in the U.S. Most people would guess heart disease and cancer as the leading types of disease that are attributed to death. But lead poisoning, even a trace amount of lead measured in the blood circulation, increases all-cause mortality. Lead poisoning at the smallest dose has health consequences. Lead toxicity is a factor in many of the top-ten diseases that are the leading causes of death (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, stoke from high blood pressure and even suicide. The major paradigm of western medicine, the control of cholesterol, is a misdirection. In Japan it is reported that an increase in cholesterol results in a decline in in mortality. Lead poisoning is the leading cause of death in the U.S. and because lead is ubiquitous in the environment, it would be impractical to suggest chelation therapy for the masses. Fortunately, nature provides garlic, vitamin B1, vitamin C and IP6 rice bran that when incorporated into a dietary supplement program, will keep blood levels of zinc low and counter lead’s toxic effects
Posted in Dietary Supplements ; No Comments »
11
17
52
95
14
24
237
6
56
43
10
116
15
66
105