elements, they can be transmuted through nuclear fusion in exploding stars, but they are not destroyed in mundane Earthly environments. Until the industrial revolution accelerated mining and pollution operations across the planet, most toxic heavy metals were buried deep underground, far from the concerns of simple human civilizations. As human industry expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, toxic heavy metals were mined, smelted, and added to any number of products that released those metals directly into the environment. Leaded gasoline, for example, released lead directly into the air with every stroke of the combustion engine. Mercury fillings resulted in thousands of tons of mercury being expelled into the atmosphere as the bodies of those who passed away were cremated. Lead arsenate was also widely used as a pesticide on orchards and food crops across North America for much of the nineteenth century.
Once expelled into the open environment, heavy metals may be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed into humans, animals, plants, and fungi, or they may be transformed and combined with other substances to create new compounds . . . but they cannot simply vanish. They persist.
It is the industrial exploitation and expelling of these elements—which were originally sparse and spread out at relatively low levels—that has turned vague primordial threats into everyday dangers. As by-products of smelting, ore extraction, energy production, and commercial goods, heavy metals and refined chemical compounds have poured into our air, water, soils, foods, ecosystems, and bodies.
In September 2013, the CDC issued its updated fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, detailing more than 201 chemical substances that have been identified in blood serum and urine levels throughout the U.S. population.8 These can be ingested, absorbed, stored, excreted, metabolized, or bound to other compounds—potentially interacting with, blocking, or amplifying reactions within the body.
While many elements, including trace levels of certain minerals, are essential nutrients for catalytic conversions and biological functions, alarming concentrations of toxic forms of these elements have found their way into our lives at a pace that’s wildly out of balance with nature and hazardous to our health and longevity.
A few dozen key contaminants may be taking a crucial but yet uncalculated toll on the well-being of everyone around the world—with increased levels of toxins in everyday foods contributing to a general rise in inflammation, immunological and digestive disorders, neurological damage, organ failure, heart and lung ailments, cancer, and other serious diseases and conditions.
When most people think of being poisoned, they typically imagine ingesting a large, concentrated dose that quickly induces acute toxicity, often followed by a swift and horrible death. In reality, the real danger to health comes from long-term exposure to low-level doses of toxins over time, including heavy metals.
Science now recognizes that these detrimental health effects are triggered by gradually accumulating, minuscule concentrations of toxins through repeated dietary or environmental exposure.
The tidal wash of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, rodenticides, fertilizers, preservatives, emulsifiers, and additives across the agricultural practices of the entire Western world—and increasingly the developing world—has contributed to the introduction of known toxins into the environment at apocalyptic levels. They interact with and are absorbed by soils, bodies of water, vegetation, fish, and wildlife. They are absorbed and integrated into plant and animal tissues. As humans, we breathe in these compounds, eat them, drink them, and accumulate them in our bodies. We also excrete them, or their metabolized by-products, back into the environment, furthering the cycle of death and destruction brought on by these toxins. While further research is needed to expand our understanding of exactly how these toxins interact to produce disease and death, there is little debate about the importance of limiting environmental and dietary exposure to these toxins in the first place.
Dietary exposure to toxic heavy metals through foods is a far greater problem than most people suppose. Even USDA-certified organic foods are not tested for heavy metals like cadmium, lead, arsenic, or mercury. Thus, there are no limits on heavy metal levels in these foods, including those sold in upscale healthy food retailers such as Whole Foods. The organic label simply describes the process through which the food was grown and that a farmer hasn’t used additional pesticides, herbicides, or other petrochemicals during that process. “Certified organic” in no way requires any heavy metals testing of soils, irrigation water, or even the final food product.
The reality is that one farmer’s “organic” food can differ widely from another farmer’s food simply because the air, water, and soil in which the food is grown is overwhelmingly contaminated with heavy metals.
Toxic heavy metals and other elemental poisons—whether they circulate around us or are absorbed into our bodies—definitively remain in the biosphere in one form or another in perpetuity. They are part of a vicious and deadly cycle that modern life has exponentially accelerated through the industrial mining, concentration, and dispersing of toxic elements that would have been far better left alone, buried in the Earth’s crust.
Some of the worst offenders, including metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic, have long since thoroughly infiltrated our lifestyles, and each poses its own significant hazards. Because the functions of the body are complex, many of the harmful effects are still being discovered and documented to this day. The scientific work on understanding the effects of toxic elements on biological systems, in fact, has only just begun.
Already, there is ample evidence of heavy metals disrupting chemical reactions throughout the body and blocking important nutrient absorptions. Toxic metals often compete with nutritional elements in metabolic processes; poisonous metals can imitate essential, or “good,” trace metals, rendering elements the body needs unavailable as chemical catalysts. Even when heavy metals don’t interfere with key metabolic functions, they still cling to cell walls, interfering with other cellular functions such as waste excretion, immune defense, healing, and adaptation.
Scientists have spent a considerable amount of time and effort researching the processes by which heavy metals undermine and destroy the body over time. Oxidation is one such process, whereby cells are disrupted and damaged, often leading to disease or weakened organ vitality. This is one reason why antioxidants are essential for good health: They protect cells from dangerous and deadly exposure to free radicals.
Emerging science reveals that toxic elements, including heavy metals, have a greater propensity than previously thought for damaging DNA and disrupting cellular processes. Not only are these metals shown to cause cancer, but there is increasing evidence now confirming their potential roles as co-carcinogens that increase mutations and disruptions when combined in the body with other types of toxins.9
Heavy metals poisoning is trans-generational
An even more important—and destructive—role may be played by toxic heavy metals in interfering with the process of DNA methylation, which transforms cytosine and adenosine nucleotide bases in the DNA sequence. This interference can cause inheritable changes in what is known as the epigenome, a genetic roadmap parallel to DNA that records changes to gene expression that are passed on to the next generation.
The process of DNA methylation plays a role in gene regulation and is a vital process during early fetal development when methylation during cell division directs specific tissue formation and other processes. Approximately 70 percent of human DNA is naturally methylated when the attachment methyl groups switch a gene on or off, but when toxic metals attach to these methyl bonds, they can interfere with vital cellular functions or even block them altogether.10
Through the still-emerging understanding of epigenetics, science has uncovered the specific process by which environmental factors, diet, stress, and exposure to toxins rewrite the intended gene expression and alter DNA. This,
