What Are Hidden Toxic Metals?
by Nikki Moses
© 2012
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 and 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 30 years who does not have an excess in their tissues of each of the toxic metals we test for. So we expect they are there in each person we test. Unfortunately, when the body is very fatigued and very deficient in nutrients, it has a hard time ridding itself of these toxins, and as a result, they build up in the body tissues.
The hair is like a ‘trash can’ for the body. When the body is getting rid of things, it often places some of the discarded 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 excreted 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.
- 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. Where “hidden” is written over your metal or mineral reading, this means we suspect that the toxin is indeed there in your body tissues but isn’t being eliminated properly by your body. So in essence you are “collecting” this metal. In Nutritional Balancing, we call these metals “poor eliminators”. 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
- The body ingests a molecularly or atomically toxic form of the mineral, such as hexavalent chromium (as made famous by the film Erin Brockovich).
- The body ingests too much of the mineral in non-toxic form and can’t either excrete it or utilize it properly. This is the most common situation and occurs with many of the nutrient minerals, most notably: 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 clueing 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.