by Moses Nutrition © 2012 revised 2024
Hidden Toxicity
In today’s excessively toxic environment, everyone is exposed to many different toxic metals and chemicals. With our hair analysis, we test for some of the most common of the toxic metals such as mercury and aluminum. There are also nutrient minerals that can exist in toxic forms or in toxic quantities (such as iron, copper, manganese and even chromium and selenium). There is not a single person we have tested in the last 15 years who has not been exposed to the toxic metals we test for. And because most people have nutrient deficiencies and also some level of energy-reduction in the cells, almost everyone has had some trouble removing these toxins and therefore has a build-up of these toxins in their cells. So we expect they are somewhere in the body of each person we test.
The hair is like a ‘trash can’ for the body. When the body is getting rid of things, it often places some of the unwanted item in the hair tissue. This is true of toxic metals. Upon exposure to the metal, the body will often put some of it immediately into the hair. Some of the metal will also be gotten rid of either through the skin, the urine, the feces or the lungs. And some of the metal will likely get stored in other tissues to be dealt with later. The more fatigued and deficient the individual is, the more the body will store these toxins versus removing them. It takes energy and resources to remove toxic metals. As the body gets more energy and more nutrients, it will dig into these stored toxins to remove them.
So, a toxic metal will usually show up in the hair either:
- right after exposure when the toxin is still floating around the body, or
- sometime later when the body decides to clear out some of the old, stored toxin.
Most people today are storing these toxins more than they should be. On the hair test, this appears as very low levels of the toxic metal. So when you see a low level of a toxic metal on your hair test, it doesn’t mean you don’t have that toxin in your body; it just means it wasn’t being pushed into the hair in the last several months. We sometimes write “hidden” over a very low metal or mineral reading on the test graph. This means we suspect that the toxin is indeed there in your body tissues but isn’t being gotten rid of properly by your body so it isn’t showing up in your hair. So in essence you are “collecting” this metal. In Nutritional Balancing, we call these metals “poor eliminators”. To eliminate means to get rid of. We know these poor eliminators are there, because as the person improves their energy and nutrient status on the program, we see these metals come out through the hair as they are eliminated, causing the levels of those metals to go up on the person’s follow-up hair tests. The levels of the metals going up on future hair tests, therefore, is something we actually look for as a sign of improvement.
Nutrient Minerals in Toxic Form
Minerals which would otherwise be good for the body can exist in toxic form for two reasons:
- The body takes in (eats, drinks, breathes, etc.) a toxic form of the mineral, such as hexavalent chromium (as made famous by the film Erin Brockovich), or…
- The body takes in too much of the mineral in non-toxic form and can’t either get rid of it or utilize it properly. This is the most common situation and occurs with many of the nutrient minerals, most commonly: iron, copper and manganese. For example, the adrenals need to be functioning well in order to convert copper into its usable form. When adrenal energy is low, copper tends to build up in toxic quantities and in a toxic form. When copper is out of balance in the body, the body has a difficult time utilizing iron properly, so the iron tends to build up in a toxic form, as well (usually in the liver).
Where “hidden toxicity” is written over one of these nutrient minerals, the level itself is so low (or other readings on the test graph are otherwise cluing us in) that we suspect the body is not getting rid of the toxic or excess amounts of the mineral. This does not necessarily mean we do not need to supplement a good form of that mineral; this depends entirely on the full picture of the person’s body chemistry. For example, a person might have copper built up in a toxic form and still need to be supplemented with a beneficial copper.