Christopher Shade, PhD, founder and CEO of Quicksilver Scientific, continues to be the driving force of development and innovation. Dr. Shade’s vast depth and breadth of knowledge, passion for healing, and intuitive understanding of chemistry and biology are reflected in Quicksilver Scientific’s well-designed detoxification protocols, unique supplement delivery systems, and patented mercury speciation test.
Dr. Shade is a recognized expert on mercury and liposomal delivery systems. He has lectured and trained doctors in the U.S. and internationally on the subject of mercury, heavy metals, and the human detoxification system. Dr. Shade's current focus is on the development of cutting-edge, lipid-based delivery systems for nutraceuticals, such as liposomes and micro-emulsion systems, to address the growing need of high quality, affordable detoxification solutions.

LEARN MORE AT:

https://www.facebook.com/quicksilverscientific/
Twitter: @quicksci303
Instagram: Quicksilver Scientific 
https://www.quicksilverscientific.com

SHOWNOTES

2:45: Go To MelanieAvalon.com/Quicksilver for 10% Off Quick Silver Scientific Products!

3:40 - LISTEN ON HIMALAYA!: Download The Free Himalaya App (Www.himalaya.fm) To FINALLY Keep All Your Podcasts In One Place, Follow Your Favorites, Make Playlists, Leave Comments, And More! Follow The Melanie Avalon Podcast In Himalaya For Early Access 24 Hours In Advance! You Can Also Join Melanie's Exclusive Community For Exclusive Monthly Content, Episode Discussion, And Guest Requests! Use The Code MELANIE To Get Your First Month Free!

04:00 - Paleo OMAD Biohackers: Intermittent Fasting + Real Foods + Life: Join Melanie's Facebook Group To Discuss And Learn About All Things Biohacking! All Conversations Welcome!

07:15 - Dr. Shade's Personal History: Heavy Metal Toxicity Experience And Findings From Organic Farming

10:00 - The Different Types Of Mercury  (Fish, Amalgams, Etc.)

13:30 - The Difference In Fish Mercury Levels (PPM)

15:30 - Mercury In Fat Vs. Protein 

18:00 - How Do Cooking Methods Affect Fish Mercury Content?

19:45 - Farmed Vs. Wild Fish 

Melanie's Blog Post: Mercury Madness: Exposure Sources, Safe Fish Consumption, Chelation, EDTA/DMPS/DMSA, Detox, Amalgams, The Cutler Protocol, Glutathione, And More!

22:10 - Dental Amalgam Mercury Exposure 

IAOMT: The International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology

27:50 - Mercury Storage In The Body

31:25 - Blood Vs. Hair Vs. Urine Tests  

41:30 - Kidney Filtration And Urine Smells 

44:30 - NATIVE: Get Safe, Non-Toxic, Effective Deodorant! Go To Nativedeodorant.com And Use The Promo Code MELANIEAVALON For 20% Off Your First Purchase!

47:05 - BEAUTY COUNTER:  Non-Toxic Beauty Products Tested For Heavy Metals, Which Support Skin Health And Look Amazing! Go To Beautycounter.com/MelanieAvalon! To Receive A Free Beauty Counter Gift From Melanie, Exclusive Offers And Discounts, And More On The Science Of Skincare, Get On Melanie's Private Beauty Counter Email List At MelanieAvalon.com/BeautyCounter!

48:00 - How Does Natural Chelation Work In The Body? ( And How Is Bile Involved?)

53:50 - Nutritional And Energy Status Factor: What Dietary Approach To Follow? 

55:45 - Is Fasting Safe If You're Toxic? 

58:25 - The Role Of AMPK In Fasting And Detox

Keto Before 6®

1:01:40 - High Vs. Low Carb Diets

1:06:15 - The Importance Of Binders In Detox 

Push Catch Liver Detox

1:12:00 - Antihistamines

1:13:15- The Role Of Fiber In Detox 

​Ultra Binder

1:15:20 - The Role Of The Mind, Autonomic Nervous System, Meditation, Etc. In Detox

1:18:25 - Progesterone To Support The Liver 

1:23:15 - The Importance Of Liposomal Delivery 

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon:
Hi, friends. I am so excited and thrilled to be here today with Dr. Christopher Shade, who I have been dying to get on since I personally, no pun intended, was likely dying myself from something known as mercury toxicity. As listeners know, I'm all about identifying toxins in the environment and how to properly support detoxification in the body. We're super excited to dive deep in today into mercury toxicity and potentially a lot of tangential rabbit holes from there. Having talked to Dr. Shade just a little bit before this call, we have a lot of things we could potentially talk about. Before we jump in, I'll tell listeners a little bit about Dr. Shade. Dr. Shade, he has a PhD.

Melanie Avalon:
He is the Founder and CEO of Quicksilver Scientific. Dr. Shade, by the way, before I knew who you were as a person, I was definitely very familiar with your company. It was referred to me by a lot of holistic medical practitioners. I know you're very well-respected in that world. Dr. Shade, he's a breadth of knowledge, honestly, on all things detox, on healing, on really the understanding of chemistry and biology in our bodies. I think that's really reflected in his products. One of his fortes is specifically mercury toxicity as well as something we will discuss in this episode, which is the importance of liposomal delivery systems. That's a lot of words right now. We're going to dive in deep. Dr. Shade, thank you so much for being here.

Chris Shade:
Thank you so much, Melanie. This will be a pleasure. We'll have the five rabbit hole interview. Incidentally, when I was developing out our website and we haven't gotten to this point yet, we wanted some simple education. Then on each page with the simple education, was going to be a down the rabbit hole button where you go and we dove deep into the hardcore stuff. We'll do that today.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it. When I just had the Intermittent Fasting Podcast and not this podcast, I felt like I was always apologizing because I'd be like, "Sorry, guys, this is a tangent in a rabbit hole." I just love exploring the science of all these things. Now with this podcast, it's wonderful because it's the platform where we can finally do that. Learn, explore. There's just so much out there.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah. You need those where you're not over simplifying everything. You're just going in. People will always say, well, there's a lot to unpack in that. In the interviews I do, and the podcasts, and the webinars and stuff, people watch them or listen to them several times because there's a lot in there. I think this is biohacking thing, we should pack it.

Melanie Avalon:
Exactly. I thought to start things off, would you like to tell listeners just a little bit about your personal health history? What brought you to where you are today?

Chris Shade:
Yeah. Well, it's a long and circuitous route. It take me back to the steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where I was born. There was blast furnaces about a mile-and-a-half away from me. I grew up with this mist of metals and metal dust that was falling down around me all the time. Then I had a dentist who, every time there was a crack in my enamel, he'd drill it out and stick a mercury amalgam in there. I had 17 amalgams by the time he was done with his handiwork there. When they took them out, the dentist, my friend Steve Koral said, "You're not going to like this. You only have one real cavity."

Chris Shade:
I had this massive metal burden from growing up in this town and then having a mouth full of metal. Then I went to school of scientist undergrad. One of the things that was happening to me from all that metal is I was losing some of my cognitive focus. I was super smart, young. Then as I got into later high school and then to college, I just wasn't performing the way I have when I was younger. I wasn't up in the same percentiles of the population as I used to be. I also noticed I had this hair-trigger temper and I was tired a lot. I had all these annoying problems from it. Then I went through a circuitous thing where I lost faith in science. I left. I became an organic farmer.

Chris Shade:
I was a biodynamic organic farmer up in the northeast years and years and years ago. I joke that I went out of business as an organic farmer the year whole foods came around. There just was no high-end place to sell this stuff then. That gave me this focus on holistic wellness. When you're into organic farming, the whole idea there is building a soil ecosystem. It's all this interconnection between the microbes, the organic matter and the mineral matter, and you're trying to grow this into this very healthy organism of a farm. I got out of the farming side and I went into the academic side around farming.

Chris Shade:
I was working at Rodale Institute, which is an organic farming research. Then I went back to school looking at pollution from farming and then landed in my PhD. Was going to do more work around agriculture and pollution, but I've found what they were doing really boring. I found this guy who was doing mercury research really fascinating and he was modeling global cycles of mercury going into the air, coming down in the ecosystems, building up through the biosphere and bioaccumulating. I went to work with him and I did my PhD with him. I developed for him and patented while at the University of Illinois a system for separating different forms of mercury during the analysis.

Chris Shade:
The relevance to people is you have one form of mercury from your dental fillings called inorganic mercury. It's actually present as a mercury metal in your filling and evaporates off as a vapor, which you inhale and you absorb it through the inhalation. Then that breaks down to the ionic form in your body called inorganic mercury. You got the inorganic mercury mostly from dental amalgam, and then you got the FishBase form called methylmercury, and that you're absorbing at a 95% uptake because your body thinks it's an amino acid actually. You have those two different forms, but they move around your body very differently. They affect you differently.

Chris Shade:
That mercury speciation enabled us to look at where the mercury is coming from and how it's distributing in the body. I started my company Quicksilver Scientific around that testing. Then I developed out the supplements to get rid of the metals, upregulate the glutathione system, get the metals out. That led me to doing these high bioavailability formats called liposomes and nano-emulsions. Then we grew out our whole supplement line around these high bioavailability formats, expanded the whole detox line, went into a metabolic line. We've got an immune line. It became much broader than just metals and detox. That's where I came from.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, wow. You touched on so many things. I already have five million follow-up questions just from that one thing. I'm similar to you and that I started experiencing issues, neurological were a lot of them from mercury toxicity. I never had fillings, mercury fillings. Mine was completely from fish, which was really actually shocking to me. I remember when I first got my blood tested, and we can talk about testing methods in a bit, but my blood mercury was actually insanely high. My practitioner was like, "Your blood mercury should never be that high because that would indicate a very intense burden."

Chris Shade:
Yeah. We'll pick that apart, get a little bit more clarity on it. The fish form of mercury does show in the blood pretty well. That's why you were so high. Back 20, 30 years ago, the focus was all on amalgams as the main toxicity driver. Fish, there's a 10,000-fold difference in levels of fish between a sardine and a swordfish. There's plenty of room to really, really get toxic. In fact, the most famous case recently was Tony Robbins. He got a pretty extreme mercury toxicity from eating just tons and tons of tuna and swordfish. We tested him and did his detox. Now he speaks about that all the time when he's doing his event.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. To that point exactly, I didn't realize and I don't think a lot of people realize what you just said, the difference regarding like PPM, which is how they measure mercury in fish, the difference. For example, I was doing some research and now I know that a piece of ... I also know that the ranges are all over the place. It's hard to even go by averages. For example, like a piece of tilapia, by the most recent data I could find, average 0.013 PPM mercury compared to the average for piece of swordfish was 0.995, which I would actually want to ask you. Does that insinuate, if those measurements were correct, that eating a single piece of swordfish, for example, would be like eating ...

Chris Shade:
It's like 100 tilapia. Yup, that's exactly what that means.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. Because basically, I was only eating low mercury fish, tilapia, shellfish, things like that. Then I discovered swordfish. I was like, I know this is high mercury. This was before I'd done a lot of research. I was like, I know it's high mercury, but one piece can't be that bad, right? Now looking back, I had probably three times in a month, knowing I was probably already not so suited to mercury detox. Eating even three pieces of swordfish was potentially the equivalent of my whole years' worth of fish.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, that's 300 tilapia or 3,000 sardines. Not even sardines, the 3000 equal weight equivalence of sardines. You really have to make those decisions carefully. The first famous guy who fell prey to that was the CEO of IMAX films. He got his blood levels up between 75 and 100. He has permanent neurological damage from that. He walks with a cane. He used to be super active. He was a tennis nut. All of a sudden, he was missing the ball and he couldn't do the overhand serve. Then soon, all the stuff set in. He was like a paleo swordfish guy. He just ate tons of swordfish all the time. That's what happened.

Melanie Avalon:
That's insane. It's called mad hatter's disease for a reason.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah. The fish form is very neurological. Once you get up to high enough levels, it's all right in there, in the brain and that is the mad hatter thing.

Melanie Avalon:
That's fascinating. You said that the form of mercury in fish, the body perceives it as an amino acid. It thinks it's "like a good thing" and that's why it absorbs it, is that correct?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, 100%. First, we're going to give you a little quiz here.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh man.

Chris Shade:
The mercury in the fish, where is it in the fish? Is it the fat or the muscle?

Melanie Avalon:
I thought when I first started it was in the fat, but then it looked like it was in the protein.

Chris Shade:
It is, yup. Usually, albeit ...

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, my heart was beating. I was like, oh no, a quiz moment.

Chris Shade:
You're like, oh no, I'd better be right. Albeit a whole room of people and a whole bunch of people say fat. I was like, no, because the fat-soluble toxins are in the fat. Go figure. Mercury instead is sticking on dissolved hydro groups from the amino acid cysteine in the proteins. In fact, there's almost none in the fats. It's stuck to cysteine in the protein strands. There's a sulfur group of the cysteine that it bonds to. Then when your body hydrolyzes the protein down to amino acids, the methylmercury still sticks to the cysteine. You have what's called a complex of methylmercury cysteine.

Chris Shade:
Methylmercury cysteine is a molecular mimic, meaning its same, size, shape, charge structure as methionine. You absorb it through your ... They're called L neutral amino acid transporters in the GI tract, at the blood-brain barrier, at the placental barrier. Your body thinks it's a good thing. It takes it up for growth. It sticks preferentially into the placenta. The growing child in the mother's belly is 30% higher blood mercury level than the mother because you're sticking all those amino acids into the placenta to grow. That's how it gets in. Eventually, the body recognizes it and sticks glutathione onto it and then it starts traveling through transporters that move it out.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow. Okay, and so really random question. Would the typical amino acid profile that somebody is consuming, like a higher methionine diet or a lower protein, higher protein diet, would that at all influence the initial rate of their absorption of mercury based on the amino acids they already have present or is that not even a factor?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There could be a competitive inhibition. You can inhibit the uptake by saturating yourself with methionine. That's how they figured it was methionine transport. It's just going to diminish how much it gets in because they're all fighting for their place at the transporter.

Melanie Avalon:
Another super random question. I was doing a lot of research on cooking methods of fish and how it affected mercury. Because after that happened to me, I was like, I need ...

Chris Shade:
It doesn't.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. The studies were all over the place. Some were saying that cooking increased, some were saying that had no effect, some were saying that it decreased. I was like, I have no idea.

Chris Shade:
Yeah. All the ones that I looked at, they were amateurs. There's a saying in science in analysis. You're either a mercury analyst or you don't touch it. You only give it to people who only do mercury work. Because doing science around mercury is incredibly tricky. It sticks to everything. It does all the things you're not expecting it to do. You've got to be pretty sophisticated to do mercury science work. A lot of people get those wrong, but nothing happens when you ... I mean, if you just totally torched it, you'd break some of the mercury carbon bonds and some of the methylmercury becomes something else. That's not how you eat fish. You eat fish barely cooked.

Chris Shade:
It's like medium rare and it's not doing anything to it. There is some work on whether to leave skins on or off, or take the fat on or off when you're cooking fish because the PCBs are in the fat and they're synergistically toxic with the mercury. That was in areas where they're living off fish that they eat and that's pretty much all they eat. In areas where there was decent PCB levels, there was recommendations to fillet the fish and defat the fish before you cook it to eliminate the exposure to the PCBs in the fat.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, got you. That makes sense. I guess continuing on this tangent rabbit hole, when this happened to me, I just started doing all the research on fish. I did see that it seemed in general that actually farmed fish, at least once that were raised sustainably, might have less mercury content than wild fish because of the amount of mercury that ends up in the fish is primarily from their diet.

Chris Shade:
Yeah. It's because the mercury that's building up in the fish is from them eating other fish. The bigger the fish, the more aggressive it is. The higher up the food chain it eats, the more mercury it'll have in it. Farmed fish, they're usually feeding it soybeans and shit. They're not getting that bioaccumulation. They have other problems. They're using all these pesticides and herbicides to keep them from getting sick. They've got lower levels of different essential amino acids. You just have to make decisions around this. Fish farming is a good thing for our future and the future of our food supply. It's something that we should work on developing out, make it good and being sustainable. Yeah, that answer the question directly. It's almost always has lower mercury than wild.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, yeah. Because I think just my personal health history and I was always like, wild cod is the way to go for health and everything. Now I realize, as with everything, things are so complicated. Now it seems like with fish, my takeaway when I ... I recently released this really long blog post that was pages and pages long with all of my findings about mercury, what I was thinking was it seemed best to eat like wild cod, really low, low on the chain like the shellfish, shrimp, scallops, things like that, and then sustainably raised like where you know the practices, you know what's going into it, companies for specific ...

Chris Shade:
For farm.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, doing your research seem to me ...

Chris Shade:
Just throw one damper on there.

Melanie Avalon:
Please do, please do, please do. Throw it all.

Chris Shade:
The shellfish are really low in mercury, but they're higher in arsenic and cadmium.

Melanie Avalon:
Cadmium?

Chris Shade:
Yeah. Shrimp have that.

Melanie Avalon:
I know.

Chris Shade:
You got to spread it out on be an omnivore, eat a lot of different things, not too much of any one thing. Things like anchovies, and sardines, and kippers, those are real low mercury and pretty much low in everything, but they have a lot of great oils. They're wild and a lot of good nucleic acids and phosphorus contents. Those seem to be the safest bet. I just spread it around.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, awesome. Then since you did talk about at the beginning the amalgam picture, because I do know a lot of people do have mercury exposure from that, does that have the same ... I'm guessing not having the same problem of the body thinking it's an amino acid because you said it becomes a vapor or so. How does that ...

Chris Shade:
No, no. You're getting that right. It's a totally different absorption situation, but it's not a good one. The vapor that's coming off of the amalgam have 80% uptake of that through the lungs. It, as a source, is actually a little worse than the methylmercury. First, let's just say, all right, just picture dental amalgams, the silver fillings. There's two things happening. There's mercury evaporating off of the surface and you're inhaling it, and then there's mercury corroding off of the surface and you're swallowing it and that's going through the GI. We'll talk about that first. The stuff that goes through the GI, you don't really absorb much of.

Chris Shade:
You're not getting a lot in your blood from that, but it's poisoning to your detox system. It shifts your flora in your microbiome and shifts you towards more mercury resistance for the bacteria to live in it, but some of those organisms aren't great. The genes for mercury resistance also bring antibiotic resistance. It's creating all these localized micro inflammation sites, which are blocking detoxification. You're swallowing one form that's poisoning your GI and the other form you're inhaling and you have 80% uptake across the lung, and it goes in as this mercury vapor. It's actually a metallic vapor. Mercury is the only metal that's liquid at room temperature and pressure.

Chris Shade:
Then once it's a little warm, it's evaporating. You've got these small mon-atoms, it's a single atom gas molecule of mercury that diffuses across the membranes of your lung into the blood lipids. Then it can diffuse across the blood-brain barrier too. It gets into the brain too, not through an active transport, but through a diffusive mechanism. It can get anywhere in your body through this diffusive mechanism. Then after it takes a couple passes through the system and it runs into a reaction eventually with the enzyme catalase, which is an antioxidant enzyme for dealing with hydrogen peroxide. When it does that, it slips in there. This is another molecular mimicry.

Chris Shade:
It slips into a site that it's not supposed to slip into. That oxidizes it to the salt form called inorganic mercury. That's when it starts sticking to everything. Instead of being actively absorbed to the GI, it's passively absorbed through the lungs and then it distributes and ends up in this ultimate form, inorganic mercury, which is actually more toxic atom per atom than methylmercury.

Melanie Avalon:
Something I've always wondered. I know people are becoming more and more aware of the detrimental effects of these mercury amalgams. They want to get them removed. Then there's the whole concept that removing them might do a ton of damage because taking them out would create ... I'm guessing, release a lot of mercury when they're getting them taken out.

Chris Shade:
Yeah. It's like a bullshit excuse because that's only if you remove them wrong and you have no protections in place. There's a lot of groups that have developed out methods for removing your mercury amalgams where you get no exposure to the mercury or inconsequential exposure. One group that really spearheads that the most is called the IAOMT, and you can find them at iaomt.org. I think there's a dotcom site. They have something called the smart mercury removal protocol. It's just using latex, dental dams, and suction, and a certain way that they cut them out so that they don't vaporize them so much.

Chris Shade:
In practice, looking at people's blood when they get the mercury removed. I once saw a woman worked for me, run out and get all her mercury amalgams taken out because her dental insurance was running out. She didn't ask me about it. There was no protection in place at all. She already had a really high blood inorganic mercury level. By the time she told me what had happened and I measured her blood, it was a fivefold increase in her blood level. It was a huge, huge amount of mercury in her blood from that removal. Now contrasts that my wife got hers out by the same guy who took mine out and he was using these protocols. She already had a pretty low level.

Chris Shade:
I could barely even measure a bump in her blood from the removal. It was tiny, tiny, tiny, little exposure versus this vast exposure. Now, the conventional dentists, they'll speak out of both sides of their mouth. On one side, they'll say mercury is not dangerous. Then on the other side, they'll say, well, the only danger is taking it out. That's like, oh, well, come on. You just need a holistic dentist who uses these protocols and then you can get it out safely.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. For listeners, the show notes for today's episode, they will be at melanieavalon.com/heavymetaldetox. I'll put a link there to that resource that you provided, Dr. Shade, and anything else that we discuss in this episode. When we do get mercury in our body, what is the typical half-life of mercury in the body if we're not doing any method to pull it out ourselves? Or does it vary by individual? Do genetics play a part in that? What does that look like?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, there's a lot of variations. Half-life in the body, the estimates run between 40 and 70 days. It's a little bit longer for methylmercury than inorganic mercury. Those estimates tend to run 35 to 50 days and the methylmercury ones run in the 45 to 60-day window, generally. Now that's just the average. Now that is going to vary all over the place according to one, your genetics, your snips, and more importantly probably your epigenetics. That's how much you're upregulating or downregulating all of this chemoprotective chemistry.

Chris Shade:
For mercury, that's mostly centered around the glutathione system and then peripherally to activities of the transport systems that move bile and transport systems in the kidney. If you're under a lot of inflammatory stress, you're going to turn down all those detox mechanisms pretty heavily and they're going to work at a fraction of their normal rate. Certain other comorbid exposures, like if you're exposed to mold and mercury at the same time, mold tends to turn down the functioning of your detox system. Then it's going to take you longer to get this stuff out.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. You touched on so many topics I want to dive deep into. It's interesting. When I first got the diagnosis with the mercury issues, which my blood levels were around 40, which I think is ... Yeah.

Chris Shade:
Oh, that's juicy. Congratulations.

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you. I know.

Chris Shade:
You'd be up on my hall of fame.

Melanie Avalon:
Really? Okay. I was going crazy.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, and for a good reason.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, I feel validated.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah. Real overachievers like Tony Robbins can hit 120. For not being Tony Robbins, you did pretty damn good. That is a hell of an achievement.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. There's literally a month in my life that I feel like I lost my memory during that ... It's foggy to me almost. It's when I was definitely really, really in that toxic range.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, I'm sure. That's what was happening to Tony. It was like he was exhausted and couldn't remember anything. He was all fogged out. Can you imagine Tony Robbins like that? This is a huge deal. He's like, "Oh my God, I can't even do what I do anymore."

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. Listeners, it's a real thing. It is for real. You mentioned glutathione. I figured out that that the mercury was the problem. I stopped eating the fish. I actually did start doing pharmaceutical chelation. We can tackle testing methods, chelation, everything like that. We can go into that. Interestingly, I would feel really, really good while doing pharmaceutical chelation. At the same time looking back, I was also doing it with IV glutathione. Looking back, yes, I'm sure the chelation made a massive difference, but I bet I was benefiting a lot from that glutathione as well. Testing methods. Like I said, I had high blood testing. What are your thoughts on the various testing methods? There's blood testing, hair testing, urine challenge test, which if you can imagine what mine looked like, especially since a lot of those are the challenge tests are comparing them to reference ranges and onto ...

Chris Shade:
That are unchallenged. That's the whole failure around the challenge test. Once you know how to read them, yours is probably up around 100 or above and to a minimum what to use.

Melanie Avalon:
It was 200 the first time.

Chris Shade:
200, okay, yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
Actually, Dr. Shade, it was the first time I realize what "off the charts" meant, because it went pass the chart.

Chris Shade:
Well, nine gets you off the chart. Nine doesn't really mean dick. Mark Hyman, his first challenge test was 250, or 280, or something.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh man. For me, that was with DMPS.

Chris Shade:
DMPS, yeah, that's a strong, strong chelator.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. I would love to get your thoughts on DMPS and the different chelators because the cost benefits of those, especially with pulling out other nutrients in the body. Just clarifying for listeners. When you're testing for mercury, the blood test, the urine test, and then the hair test, what are your thoughts, Dr. Shade, on what those can show for the individual and how they should be interpreted?

Chris Shade:
Yeah. They're all slightly different. That's why we do what we call the Mercury Tri-Test. We do all three of them. The real key is to have the mercury speciation where you're separating the different forms. What is in each of these tests? Urine is only inorganic mercury. That's the form that you're getting from the dental amalgams. However, the methylmercury will in the body is slowly breaking down into inorganic mercury and that'll show through the urine. Inorganic is the only form that comes through the urine. The hair, on the other hand, the only form that comes through the hair is methylmercury. They're reading two totally different forms of mercury.

Chris Shade:
That's why they don't align themselves. Then the blood has both, but the blood is dominated by the methylmercury signal in it. If I were to take you and say you had no mercury in you and inject both forms into you in equal amounts and give it, say, five days to equilibrate the body and then I measured your blood, your blood would be 10, 15 times higher in methylmercury than inorganic mercury. Doesn't mean that your body is 10, 15 times higher in methylmercury. It's just that's the distribution. There's a distribution between what's in the solid tissues and what's moving in the blood.

Chris Shade:
That distribution is shifted more to the tissues for inorganic mercury than it is for methylmercury. If your exposure is just seafood and it's really high exposure, you will see high levels in the blood. Now you get a high exposure to inorganic mercury and your total mercury in the blood will not be high. You're going to have a mouthful of amalgams. You eat no fish. Your total mercury in the blood will look low, but your urine will look high. Now once you separate the different forms in the blood and you're looking at methyl and inorganic mercury alone, they're on their own reference ranges and then you know what to look for.

Chris Shade:
If you had a mouthful of amalgams and I took your blood, I separated the forms, I'd see a large amount of inorganic mercury and a low amount of methylmercury. Because this mythical person here doesn't eat any fish. Because we have that technology, then we can do that. Then once we separated the methyl and the inorganic mercury, then you can compare them to blood in urine. If I have the inorganic mercury number in the blood, I can compare it to the urinary inorganic mercury and they should be in a fixed ratio if your kidneys are working right. If they're not, your urine levels are going to go down because your kidneys aren't filtering it right and your blood levels would go up.

Chris Shade:
The ratio between the two, which is what we measure with the Mercury Tri-Test will be off and it'll be in the red zone where we say that you've got kidney dysfunction and you've got retention toxicity. You're retaining that form of mercury. For methylmercury, it's a hair to blood ratio looking at methylmercury. That's more indirect and it's more about how you mobilize methylmercury, but it's still showing you deficits in your detoxification system. We do the blood, the hair, and the urine all together with the speciation technology and we're able to get all of the numbers that we need to get. You don't need to use any chelator.

Chris Shade:
You then with the chelators in the challenge test, that all came about 20, 30 years ago when our analytical testing wasn't very good. If you just measure somebody's urine, usually you can't measure any metals in it. It's just called below your detection limit, but we couldn't read very low. If I gave you a chelator, then your level would jump up 10, 20, 30 fold. Then, oh, okay, there's the mercury. Now I can read the mercury. That was the advent of the mercury challenge test. With that as that simple tool to get the mercury levels up to where we can read them, came this mythology that the challenge test was showing you the body burden of mercury, that it was going into every one of the cells and taking this representative amount of mercury out of the cells and putting it out in the urine.

Chris Shade:
It drew up that that was what it was doing and that there's normally no mercury in the urine. Well, that wasn't true. Now we can measure what's in there on a day to day basis and we don't need this amplifier called the chelator.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow. That explains so much seeing so many different findings or people saying that one method is better or one ... Then people will say with hair analysis, for example, that if your hair is high, you have a high burden. Then people will say, no, if it's high, it's because you're actually excreting it. People will say, if it's low ...

Chris Shade:
It's low, because you're retaining it. Then people will say, well, the mercury in the hair is representative of the mercury in the brain that's coming out of the brain, as if the hair follicle was inside the brain and there wasn't a thing called the freaking skull there. The mythology around hair testing is because natural paths weren't allowed to write scripts for urine or blood testing. They did all hair testing. They had to write the story of everybody's mercury toxicity into the hair tests. Yet then this person comes to you and they have a mouthful of amalgams, they eat zero fish, you measure their hair, there's not going to be any mercury in their hair.

Chris Shade:
Then you make up a story as to why that is. Oh, it's because you're not excreting it. Then the next person comes, Melanie comes and your hair must have been just so freaking high. You could see somebody say, oh, good, then you're getting it out. None of that makes any sense until you have it in the context of what the blood level is. Then you can say it's high or low relative to what it should be for what the blood levels are.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. Then one more question about the blood levels. For example, now I always feel like I still have lots of mercury in me. I just want it all out and it was just so traumatic.

Chris Shade:
You had so much. It's going to take a while to turn that all over, but we can test you. I'll send you a test kit.

Melanie Avalon:
That would be amazing. That would be amazing. The most recent time I got my blood tested though, the blood was a normal range. It was three I think. Can a person have a normal blood level range and still be saturated in mercury?

Chris Shade:
Not saturated. Now we'd have to see what the inorganic mercury was like. Your inorganic mercury load is not from your mercury amalgams, which you never had. It's from the breakdown of the FishBase mercury and you had so damn much that you still may have a lot of inorganic mercury in there. Methylmercury is going out almost exclusively through bile transport. I've seen people get their methylmercury all the way down, yet they've got problems in their kidneys and their inorganic mercury sticks around. That is one possibility. Then there's when you're saturated that much with mercury, some of it is built deep into a lot of the protein structures.

Chris Shade:
It takes a long time to turn over all of those proteins into nuance and release all of that mercury. There's this initial detox where you move most of the burden out, but there's a lot of buried down in there metal that takes another couple of years to come to the surface and get out of there. Then there's individual organs. If they've gone into some inflammatory dysfunction, let's just pick on Hashimoto's thyroiditis. That's autoimmune inflammation in the thyroid. Inflammation is antithetical to detoxification. Inflammation blocks detoxification. If you have one organ that is inflamed more than the rest, it will hold more mercury in it.

Chris Shade:
The burden of that organ is going to take much longer to shake out. Then there's the brain and that's the slowest of them all to come down. The methylmercury from the brain comes out pretty quick, but the inorganic mercury is very slow to come out. When your brain goes full of methylmercury, some of it was breaking down into inorganic mercury and that's very slow to come out and that will be deeply symptomatic. Brain mercury is more symptomatic than most of the rest of the body.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. You mentioned a lot more keywords that I want to tackle. Before that, I have one lingering question that is actually not even related to mercury specifically, but you were talking about the kidneys. This is just something I've been wondering. The kidneys and filtering things through the urine. For example, some people with asparagus will have the urine smell from asparagus, for example. Or I've noticed with different foods and different periods of my life ... Sorry listeners, this is TMI, but sometimes my urine will take on distinctive smells, whereas other times it won't. Does that somehow indicate how effectively the kidneys are?

Chris Shade:
Not really reliably. Some of those things like do you make asparagus pure or not are more related to the enzymes that are breaking down the sulfur compounds in the asparagus. Did they turn it to this metabolite that smells like asparagus pee or that metabolite that does it? That's not as related to the kidney. Things like I drink coffee and my pee smelled like coffee, that's more in the glomerular filtration side, how open the glomerulus is and maybe sometimes over filtering. In the kidney, the repeating units of the kidney are called nephrons. They're composed of the glomerulus, which is this capillary, very leaky capillary structure that's leaking out.

Chris Shade:
Basically, it's plasma into this capsule and then it goes down through the next part of the nephron, which is called the proximal tubule. In the proximal tubule, then there's all the active transport where you're harvesting back water, electrolytes, amino acids, different small molecules you want to keep and you're actively dumping in things like mercury conjugates and different toxins. That mercury detoxification is happening at the level of the proximal tubule. Even if you look at kidney function tests, there's glomerular filtration function tests, but there's not proximal tubule transport tests. That Mercury Tri-Test where we look at the urinary versus blood bound inorganic mercury, that's a direct measure of that transport system.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. I was just been thinking about that a lot recently. Not really the asparagus specifically, but just ...

Chris Shade:
Other things that you smell in the pee, yeah. That's an interesting question. As I was processing the question and answering it, I was almost saying to myself that if you smell a lot of different compounds in there, it might indicate that the glomerulus is a little open and over filtering.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. Well, I first noticed it when I started doing the pharmaceutical chelation because when I would do that, I would really smell from the chelation.

Chris Shade:
Yeah. The sulfur compounds do that too though. Lipoic acid does that. If you eat lipoic acid, you get asparagus urine like smell. It's a very similar sulfur compound.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. I would love to go deeper into the national chelation process in the body. You were talking about things like bile and I'm obsessed with that whole pathway.

Chris Shade:
You should be obsessed with bile.

Melanie Avalon:
I know, I know, right? Well, one of the things that haunts me is I'm on the fence about supplemental bile or naturally supporting your body's bile system. I guess backtracking a little bit. What does "ideally functioning body," which is dealing with these exposures, be them heavy metals, we're talking about mercury specifically, what does that detoxification process look like on a step by step basis in the body?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, all right. Let's say we're up in a cell and we're going to describe the linking of the mercury on to one of our molecules as being glutathione and then a sequence of transport steps to it getting out of the body. We're up in a cell, there's mercury stuck onto a protein, onto a sulfur group on a protein, and you want to get it off and you're going to bind it onto glutathione. You need glutathione, but you need this intermediary called glutathione S-transferase. It's an enzyme that's shifting the electron structures on the sulfur that's holding the mercury and enabling the mercury to jump over to the sulfur group on the glutathione.

Chris Shade:
It's catalyzing the transfer onto the S-group, the sulfur group, glutathione S-transferase. Now we're in the cell and instead of the mercury being stuck to the protein, now it's stuck onto glutathione and it's floating around in the cell. Now you got to get it out of the cell and it's not a passive diffusion. It's an active transport. That transferase actually was called phase two detox. Then phase three is the transport across the cell membrane. There's an active transporter that goes across the cell membrane that moves the mercury glutathione conjugate. It uses an ATP molecule for energy and magnesium as a cofactor.

Chris Shade:
In there is keys to why you're a little more tired when you're metal detoxing, you need energy to drive it, and why magnesium is important. It's important for two reasons actually. One is to drive these transporters and two is that high magnesium sets more parasympathetic autonomic tone in the body. That means you're more in the rest, digest, repair, regenerate, detoxify side of your nervous system and less in fight or flight. If we get time, we'll move over into that because it's a crucial part of all this. We use magnesium ATP to get this conjugate out of the cell and it's moving in the extracellular space. It's going to join up into the bloodstream.

Chris Shade:
It'll go into the lymphatics, and then into the bloodstream. Then at the liver, you have another phase three transporter that's going to grab it from the blood, pull it into the hepatocyte, that's the liver cell, and then another one on the other side of the cell that's going to dump that conjugate into the bile flow. This is why bile is so important. The detox transporters that are dumping toxins out of the liver are dumping them into what's called the bile canaliculus, which are the little rootlets of the bile tree. They culminate down at the common bile duct. The transporters move both bile and toxins. There's two transporters moving bile.

Chris Shade:
One is called MRP2 and it dumps toxins and bile salts, and the other is called BSEP, bile salt export pump, and that just moves bile salts. Then there's a third one involved in it and that's called MDR and it moves phosphatidylcholine or PC, it's the phospholipid that we use to make our liposomes. It moves that into the bile flow to keep the bile fluid and to mix with the bile salts so that they don't digest the bile tree. You conjugate the glutathione, you throw the cell into the blood, you pull it from the blood into the liver, you dump it from the liver into the bile. Now, on the kidney level, those same transporters that were in the hepatocyte are in the proximal tubules, one pulling from the blood into the proximal tubule and the other one dumping into the urinary flow.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. What is the timeline like on that? You described that whole process. Is that something that's happening?

Chris Shade:
You mean how fast? These reactions are really pretty quick. Say we take a bunch of stuff to upregulate all that. There's one of our detox systems that we call push catch and we take a bunch of stuff to wind up those phases of detox, and we take glutathione, and it winds up bile flow. Half hour later, we take our toxin binder. It's a charcoal clay. IMD is a metal binder and pick it all up in the gut. In that 30-minute period, we wind up a whole cycle of detox and then catch it. These are processes that are always going on, but they're either prioritized or deprioritized according to nutritional status and autonomic nervous system status.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. Diving deeper into that nutritional status, I'm assuming being in a good nutritional status is what's going to drive ...

Chris Shade:
Yes. Let's also put energy status relating to NAD and ATP.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. With that, would that mean that adopting a dietary approach for the individual that best suits energy production in their body, and the reason I say the individual is it seems that I don't know what your thoughts are specifically on the ketogenic diet is applicable to everyone or it seems like some people respond to different diets differently.

Chris Shade:
No, everybody should have exactly the same diet. No, I'm just kidding.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. I was like, oh no, it's going to get awkward really quickly.

Chris Shade:
It's going to get awkward really fast. There is not a one body type on this planet. I know. Some people don't do well with the keto. We're going to go into talking about that and nutritional status and calorie status. On just a crude level, if your protein status is low, you won't be able to make enough glutathione because you won't be getting enough cysteine. Then you won't be able to detoxify well. On the other end of the spectrum, if you eat too much, say you eat too much carb and you're in an early metabolic syndrome, then you're going to be on a constant inflammation that is then going to block detoxification.

Chris Shade:
Most detoxification pathways are more accentuated in a fasting period. Your protein status has to be good enough to make all of these things, which brings us to things like intermittent fasting and just making sure that you're having periods of clean, not too many calories and certainly low carb. Then you have periods where you're repleting those stores.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, yeah. Then speaking of fasting, which obviously is near and dear to my heart, is there a potential downside if people are extremely toxic in compounds such as mercury, that their body in the fast period, that it's just too much of a detoxification reaction?

Chris Shade:
Yeah. Well, the whole keto flu is detoxification. People talk about water, mineral status. Those are minor players. Because we made this product Keto Before 6 that flips you into ketosis in an hour-and-a-half, not with exogenous ketones. It's a really strong AMPK activator because it's in this nanoparticle and just about anybody will flip into ketosis. Then we put tons of people onto this. All the ones who would get keto flu in a couple of days, you give them the toxin binder and the keto flu goes away immediately. It's the release of fat-soluble toxins. If your body is not tuned up to process them, then it's got to be more of a toxic load, and especially if you don't have good liver processing and you're not coupling detoxification to the bile flow.

Chris Shade:
Then you just recirculate the toxins and make everything worse. Now when you fast, you get the deepest levels of detoxification. That just means that if you're going to do that, you have to bring on these detox systems to make sure that you're coupling all of these metabolic changes to actually metabolizing the toxins and binding them and getting them all the way out.

Melanie Avalon:
Also, since you were speaking about mercury being related to protein stores potentially more than ... Is mercury in our fat stores as well or is it, like you said, mostly ...

Chris Shade:
No. It's just like the fish, it's in the protein stores and especially the glands where there's a lot of sulfur groups.

Melanie Avalon:
When we're struggling from detoxification reactions from mercury while fasting, this is just me thinking aloud, would that be likely more due to autophagy during the fast, driving that protein turnover compared to fat burning releasing the toxins from mercury specifically?

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah. The autophagy would be releasing mercury for sure, though it's about the total burden to the system. Once you start dumping all those fats, those fat born toxins in and the mercury is already in the blood and circulating around, but then you throw in autophagy too and you'll probably toss in a bunch more mercury into the system. Fasting and detox is the way I've seen the toxic load go down the fastest, but you got to get the system all tuned for that.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. With fasting as a method to detox ... Actually, one really quick rapid fire question. I'm assuming that your AMPK stimulators are a proprietary one, but is it ...

Chris Shade:
Yeah, but I can tell you what's in it. You'd be like, of course, that's in there. When you take it as a capsule, you don't absorb it or shit. It can't get a high enough blood level to do that. It's berberine, resveratrol, quercetin, silymarin, and diindolylmethane, and some cinnamon. Because in this nanoparticle delivery, these things peak in the blood in 20 to 30 minutes and you get all of your peak in there. Your bioavailability enhancement on some things like our curcumin delivery system, it's 300 fold higher bioavailability than raw curcumin. You're getting a ton of this stuff in. You're getting in unmetabolized.

Chris Shade:
Capsules get metabolized in the gut and you're actually absorbing metabolites of them. You get them all in at once unmetabolized and it just ... Wham! It hits it. It's like a megadose of metformin. It will flip you the ketosis. It's a wonderful thing, but it does stimulate a lot of detoxification. Then you need to take it with a binder during those early times.

Melanie Avalon:
That is fantastic. I am so going to look into that more. For listeners, I know this is a lot of big words. I know people are probably familiar as well. AMK, for example, is a gene that it's often linked to longevity and such because it is activated in a state of nutrient deficiency and it can upregulate a lot of these protective pathways as far as, well, talking about detox, but ...

Chris Shade:
Yeah. When you activate AMPK, it activates metabolic ... I like to call it clarity, but it's sending out the signal to mobilize stored resources. When you're eating a lot of carbs, you're storing fat, you're storing resources as glycogen and fat for later use. AMPK is activated when you fast. It's activated when you exercise heavily and it's activated by certain nutritional compounds like we just talked about. Those tell your body to go into your fat stores, burn the fat, and bring it over to the liver, turn it into ketones, and will use that for energy. It tells it to burn the glycogen that's around. It actually turns up how many glucose transporters around.

Chris Shade:
Any glucose that is around you can use more efficiently. It turns up this metabolic efficiency and that ends up turning down insulin resistance, creating insulin sensitivity, it burns off fat in the liver. In fact, some of these protocols that we have in one study, we resolved 82% of fatty liver cases in one to two months with our detox system because the detox system included all these AMPK activators that have these benefits.

Melanie Avalon:
That is fantastic. What was the name of that product, the AMPK one?

Chris Shade:
Keto Before 6. The idea was that you could be keto all day and then for dinner, you could go back to eating carbs. Some people advocate that because you sleep better with the carbs. You get forward there and you build muscle mass back on. It's a way to do what people call cyclical keto within a single day.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. I love that. I love that. A few more questions, say, on the whole dietary route. When I first brought it up about the diet that suits the individual, if a person is following a higher carb diet, for example, and they seem to respond best to that as far as their blood sugar levels go or their inflammatory markers, and then you have another person who seems to respond better to a ketogenic diet, in both of those situations, would it be safe to assume that at that moment in time that diet might be best supporting them for detox? The context I'm coming from is that people will say, ketogenic diet is the perfect diet for detoxification. Then people will be like, no, the high fruit, low fat diet for detoxification.

Chris Shade:
Right, right, yeah. The diet that doesn't screw you up is the diet you should be on when you detox. If it's flipping things around and working against your natural patterns, then that should be the one that you're doing when you detox. You'll see each of these have their strengths. Ketogenic, you have more AMPK activation, you have more liberation of fat-soluble toxins, you have more autophagy. The high fruit diet, as long as you're eating a lot of fruits that have a lot of dietary polyphenols and bioflavonoids, they are AMPK activators. They work out detox fast. They have good aspects to them. You want a diet that is not making you inflammatory, that gives you all the raw nutrients you need. The easiest thing to stick into any diet is a little intermittent fasting and that just gives you that point of clarity where you're not taxing your GI system.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, yeah. I love that, best of both worlds. I don't like to think this way in general. I don't want to think about, oh, I want to return back to this diet I was eating at this one time because it worked for me then. Where I'm coming from is, in general, I feel like I've thrived really well, for example, on a high protein, high fruit diet actually. I was lower on the fat side, more like ... I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Ray Peat.

Chris Shade:
No, no.

Melanie Avalon:
He's fascinating. He's all about thyroid health metabolism, very much about the dangers of polyunsaturated fats in the body. That's where I'm coming from is that in the past, I felt like really, really good on that and I would actually like to maybe get back to that. I've been playing more with ketogenic stuff recently.

Chris Shade:
Yeah. You see, the people who do good on ketogenic feel freaking great on it and the ones who ... I mean, it's really quick and obvious. As long as it's not just the detox reaction throwing you off, then you know pretty well if it's going to be good for you or not. I have no problem with doing detox while doing the high protein, high fruit diet. You're going to do some intermittent fasting and that's going to give you some of that time in more of that metabolic clarity. You're going to get everything you need.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. That's the one thing that through all this craziness of me trying different things like dietary approaches and trying to find that the detox solutions and the answers, the one thing that has honestly never failed me is keeping in my intermittent fasting window. When I would try to play with that, no, no thanks, which is just like crash and burn.

Chris Shade:
Yeah. I love it. When people are asking me about the Keto Before 6 and how to use it in specific diets, I say, the easiest way to do this is just intermittent fast and take this right in the morning. First thing you do, take this and then don't eat. If you want to take the next step and have some butter in your coffee or something, fine. The easiest thing to do is just take this in the morning intermittent fast. You'll have a period of a couple hours where you're making ketones and that'll be fantastic. Then just go about what you do the rest of the day.

Melanie Avalon:
Is it a liquid form?

Chris Shade:
Yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
Does it have a taste to it at all or is it ...

Chris Shade:
It does. You taste the cinnamon and a little bitter in it.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, got you. I'm going to start trying this.

Chris Shade:
There'll be a capsule form of it coming. Yeah, get the liquid. It's awesome. That's one of our best. If you're only going to have one thing, this is that. It's all these wonderful metabolic compounds in a level that you could never get normally.

Melanie Avalon:
That's amazing. Then also going back a little bit, you were talking about the role of binders in detox. I know a lot people experiment with things like activated charcoal or like citrus pectin, different binders and such. I know you have your system, which I will definitely would love to hear about, put links to it in the show notes. As far as the role of taking binders, going back to the timeline thing, if you're feeling crappy from detoxing, is it like ... I mean, I'll often find that if I take activated charcoal, it seems to have work right away. It will clear up.

Chris Shade:
Freaking fast.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. I'm like, is it ...

Chris Shade:
Your brain fog, your fatigue. 15 minutes, you're just like, whoa! God damn, that's so much better.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm taking it orally. Is it getting absorbed systemically or is it just absorbing toxins in the GI tract?

Chris Shade:
No, no, no, no. Well, there's two main reasons for binders. The most commonly understood one is that you're dumping toxins out of your liver with the bile and those toxins then reabsorbed very quickly. They go into the upper GI and a bunch of them get reabsorbed, including methylmercury. It's 95% reabsorbed. You mobilize those toxins down, but you reabsorb it and you feel crappy. If you dump them in there and the charcoal is there, then the charcoal absorbs the toxin and you don't reabsorb. The toxin doesn't go back into the blood. You poop it out and you feel better. Now the other thing that it's doing is binding something called endotoxin out of your GI tract. Endotoxin ...

Melanie Avalon:
Don't get me started on endotoxin. It's like the bane of my existence.

Chris Shade:
It is. It's the bane of all existence.

Melanie Avalon:
I like living perpetual, fear of endotoxin. It's not even funny.

Chris Shade:
Well, guess what binds endotoxins incredibly well? Activated carbon. Charcoal binds endotoxin. Endotoxin is the antithesis of everything good for us. It blocks detoxification. It's an inflammagen. It's little parts of bacteria that get into circulation when you've got leaky gut. Or from different infections, can be nasal infections, sinus infections, jawbone infections, UTIs. Mostly for us, it's from leaky gut. It goes in and our immune system thinks it's a bacteria and it sounds the inflammatory alarm. The inflammatory alarm then shuts down all of our detox pathways.

Chris Shade:
Endotoxin goes up into the brain and it winds up neuroinflammation in the brain, which is a war between the immune system in the brain called the microglia and the glutamate receptors on the neurons. That creates all kinds of hecticness and it shifts your body into fight or flight, whether you have some danger feeling or not. When you shift everything into fight or flight, you turn off all detoxification from a neurological level. Endotoxin is responsible for catalyzing the toxic effects of so many different toxins because it shuts down your whole defense against them. That's part of why you feel crappy after different meals.

Chris Shade:
You eat something and feel crappy, you get a little leaky gut, you get endotoxin, and then that winds up all this inflammation. You take that binder and it's binding not only the toxins that are coming out of the bile, but it's binding the endotoxin from ever being absorbed. That's why you feel better that fast.

Melanie Avalon:
Two follow up questions to that specifically. Because something I will often do is I'll be feeling okay and then I feel like I have this detox overload situation. I'll take activated charcoal, for example, and it will get things better. Would I be better served consistently supplementing my body with lower doses of some binders so that it's always perpetually being bound? Then there's also the issue of activated charcoal binding to other things as well. I know you have your push catch product like ...

Chris Shade:
Yeah. The answer is around that. It's best to focus cycles of detox. What we do is we stimulate bile flow and detoxification reactions at the same time. We have a funny product called liver sauce that winds up all this stuff at once and it's part of this push catch liver detox. You take that, you might take glutathione too, and if you need other things, you'll take them all at once. That'll activate this dump of bile and toxins into the GI. Half hour after the liver sauce, and it's really half hour to 45 minutes, you take the binder and you bind all of that up. You focus it and you'll do that once or twice or three times a day depending on how intense of a detox system that you want.

Chris Shade:
Now, if you are in a very acute phase of feeling bad, then you can dilute the binders of water and drink them all through the day and always be binding a little toxin and stopping some endotoxin. You can't do that for super long periods of time because you'll start to bind up the vitamins and stuff in your food and your supplements. If you're acutely feeling bad after you eat something, take the freaking charcoal. Who cares if you don't absorb a couple of that nutrients? We're all overfed anyways. It's better that you block the endotoxin and dysbiotic toxins. These are toxins made from your food by bad bacteria in your stomach. When you feel crappy after something, it's a mixture of the endotoxin, dysbiotic toxins, and immune reactions to them, say, histamine release from mass cells or IgG reactions. Better to shut all that down by throwing the binder in.

Melanie Avalon:
Quick rapid fire question. You mentioned histamine. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of pharmaceutical type interventions. Do you think there would be a benefit, for example, to taking anti-histamines to shut down that histamine response or do you think it'd be better?

Chris Shade:
Right. Well, of course, we'd solve that problem too. In the nutraceuticals, quercetin and luteolin are the things that stabilize the mass cells from releasing the histamines and vitamin C helps you catalyze the breakdown of them. We made a product called Hista-Aid, which was a nanoparticle of quercetin, luteolin, and vitamin C, and that works really well for that. If it's really wound up intensely, some people have to go to pharmaceuticals. One of the ones that's used the most is called Chromelin for mass cell activation syndrome. Taking a lot of vitamin C, and the quercetin, and luteolin tends to do that. In fact, we built that into our detox system.

Chris Shade:
The mass cell stabilizers are in the liver sauce, so that we're actually doing all this at once. We're doing NRF2 up-regulation, which turns up all the glutathione enzymes. We're doing bile flow activation because we have a better formula in there. We have a histamine and immune stabilizing formula there, quercetin, luteolin, and DIM.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. Also, what are your thoughts on how important is the role of fiber in this whole detoxification process, especially people who seems to be radically benefiting, for example, on a carnivore diet which, pardon me, is like I feel like that could be really healing for me, but then I get really nervous because I'm like, oh, I need fiber for bowel movements and excreting toxins and toxin binding. I know it's a big question.

Chris Shade:
Yeah. Well, fiber is one of the toxin binders. If you're on one of these carnivore diets and stuff, you're trying to control some overgrowth of bacteria that's feeding on the fibers and maybe doing something bad. Long-term fiber is what feeds the best flora in the gut. When things get out of hand, sometimes you have to go on these fiber strict diets. Those are the nuanced questions to keep the fiber or to not keep the fiber. You can definitely do the toxin binding. Now, a little detour in toxin binding. There are multiple different binders and there are multiple different toxins. Each of the toxins has a binder that it's most attracted to. It's called a specificity.

Chris Shade:
If a binder has high specificity for a toxin, a small amount of binder gets a lot of toxin. If it has low specificity, you need a lot of binder to get any little bit of toxin. It's best to make a cocktail of multiple different types of binders. That's what our ultra-binder is. It's charcoal, zeolite, chitosan, and IMD are proprietary metal binding binder and some fiber, the form of a cassia gum and then aloe extract. You got multiple binders for multiple toxins there and a little bit of soluble fiber. The binders can handle all the toxin binding. You'll have to decide whether you want to keep the fiber rolling or whether there's a negative metabolism of the fiber for you. Overall, I'd say you want to keep the fiber rolling.

Melanie Avalon:
Got you. It's just fascinating to me because you're mentioning the importance of, A, and maybe this brings to all full circle, but the importance of the parasympathetic state and then the inflammatory response of the body. It seems actually very motivational because if we can get our body into a diet that is serving our body, not creating an inflammatory response or even I would pause it, changing our inflammatory response to things, be it through entering a parasympathetic state through ... This is a whole another tangent rabbit hole, but things like meditation or ... I don't know, I feel like there's a whole another ...

Chris Shade:
Absolutley. This is a thing that I was hoping to get back to. Autonomic nervous system, you've got sympathetic, which is fight or flight response, you've got parasympathetic, which is rest, digest. It's really rest, digest, repair, regenerate, detoxify. You need to get over into that state for the successful detoxification. Now what are the different aspects of that? Now, first, that means we need to have feeling of safety and that we have to be on all the time. That's the sympathetic thing. When you're in sympathetic autonomic, you are deprioritizing detoxification because you are under a perceived feeling that you need to survive.

Chris Shade:
You put all your energy into muscles and brain to get out of a dangerous situation. You need to get into this state in order to detoxify and regenerate. Now how else do the autonomics fit into the detox? When you're in sympathetic, you block bile flow. You don't want to digest and you don't want to move toxins. You block bile flow and you keep it in. This leads to cholestasis, clinically being stressed. Then reflexively in the brain, the glutamate receptors. In the brain, this sympathetic parasympathetic plays out in the neurotransmitter pair of glutamate being sympathetic and GABA being parasympathetic.

Chris Shade:
The glutamate receptors are actually targets of most toxicities and they make the glutamate receptors hyperactive. When the glutamate receptors are hyperactive, they're overreacting to the level of glutamate in there. The first symptom that gives you, anxiety. Now, mercury is a glutamate excited toxic toxin, meaning it's toxic to these receptors. The most common neurological symptom of mercury is anxiety. The other thing that plays into glutamate is in the hormone side, and that's estrogen. Estrogen makes the glutamate receptors hyperactive as well. Estrogen also blocks bile flow. There's this access between the glutamate receptors, and that sympathetic activation, and the hormones, and the liver. Now what's the opposite of all that? The opposite of estrogen is progesterone and ...

Melanie Avalon:
I was going to say so, to release supplemental progesterone or supporting natural.

Chris Shade:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's one of the best liver openers there is. Your liver is all locked up and your estrogen dominant. It's some cycle of your period or just, in general, progesterone will open up your liver. Where does it go in the neurotransmitters? Progesterone activates the GABA system, and that's why progesterone chills you out so much. Progesterone is also activating something called the PXR, which is a nuclear transcription factor that works with NRF2 to turn up all the detox genes. Progesterone is a massive ally in detoxification.

Melanie Avalon:
That is fantastic. I was just even thinking when you're talking about LPS, for example, I don't know if you're familiar with the workings of Wim Hof.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, yeah. I generally know them, but I haven't looked at them in detail.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, they did some fascinating studies on his work and they found that his meditation and breathing techniques. Participants who utilize his techniques actually downregulated their ... It changed their inflammatory response to LPS when they were actually injected with LPS. I mean, we don't want the LPS in the first place, obviously, but the implications of the whole broad picture of our immune response to things in our body ...

Chris Shade:
No, it's huge. The supplements you used to do that, to down the reaction to the LPS are CBD and GABA. They work exceptionally well for that. What do they do? They chill you out, just like the meditation does. You're in training those effects in a psycho mental way through the meditations or you doing them with the chemistry. Now ideally, you're doing both. I used to sell GABA to a mindfulness school. If they took GABA before the meditation, they got into their zone in 4 minutes instead of 20.

Melanie Avalon:
Was it pH GABA or was it just straight GABA?

Chris Shade:
Well, it's GABA and a liposome, which makes it work more like Pharma GABA. Then we have Pharma GABA and liposome with CBD. You want to talk about, whoa, that works, yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
You do? Oh my goodness.

Chris Shade:
[crosstalk 01:12:49]

Melanie Avalon:
You're like Christmas in a person.

Chris Shade:
I am Father Christmas himself. Yeah, there you go.

Melanie Avalon:
Your name is Chris. Oh man, this is great. Well, this is fantastic. I know for listeners, I'm glad we came to this because I know it's a really scary thing. This idea of all these toxins that we're exposed to and this burden in our bodies. I know for me personally, it's so easy to enter this fear mindset of got to get it out. What do I do? Then not knowing if what you're doing is helping or hurting, but it seems like just talking with you and just in general that our bodies are ... They're adept at detoxification as long as we're supporting them in that process.

Melanie Avalon:
It seems that mindset is so important and having just the mindfulness and the gratitude and everything, I think it's such an important factor. Actually, the last question I ask every single guest on this episode, it's because I've realized just how important on a biological level, even mindset is, is what is something that you're grateful for?

Chris Shade:
Something I'm grateful for? I'm grateful to be able to do what I do.

Melanie Avalon:
That is awesome.

Chris Shade:
People always ask me, they're like, "Oh, so you're doing this to help the world." I'm like, "I'm just doing what I do." I'm just grateful that ...

Melanie Avalon:
And you like doing ... Yeah.

Chris Shade:
... it does help the world.

Melanie Avalon:
I know, right? That's the way I feel with this podcast.

Chris Shade:
This is just what's natural for me.

Melanie Avalon:
I know. People are like, "Thank you so much for helping." I'm like, "It's because I'm just grateful to go down these topics and try to figure this out." It's just so fascinating and wonderful. Because Chris, we didn't even get to half of the things. We were even talking before the call. Something I really want to talk about, we didn't even to get to it. I was wondering if you would like to come back on the future for a separate ...

Chris Shade:
Yeah, let's do another one.

Melanie Avalon:
Not mercury specific, it could be more all these other ...

Chris Shade:
Yeah, then we can get into NAD and stuff. We can tie it back into mercury in general detox and talk about all these things like sweating, saunas, footbaths, red wine.

Melanie Avalon:
So many things I have questions about. We'll get that in the books. Super excited. Well, thank you so much. Again, for listeners, the show notes will be at melanieavalon.com/mercury. I'll put links there to everything that we talked about, all those products that Dr. Shade has formulated. We didn't even talk about the importance of liposomal delivery.

Chris Shade:
Oh my God. It's still pretty AMPK activator.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, long story short.

Chris Shade:
Yeah, we'll get into that. Long story short is ...

Melanie Avalon:
He's made it so that these supplements are actually going to be very usable and effective in the body due to their delivery mechanism, if you like to do a long story short.

Chris Shade:
Your GI tract is not made to absorb everything. It's made to reject certain things in fact, and things like glutathione. You can't get them in a capsule form because you break them down and then absorb them as precursors and put them back together. Liposomes and nano-emulsions are ways to make these little nano lipid droplets that can passively diffuse right across your mucus membranes, right through your mouth into your capillaries, and get some of these super important compounds like glutathione into the body. We've applied it to lots of different compounds that have great promise. There are so many things like resveratrol, this promise to make you live longer.

Chris Shade:
Then you eat a whole bunch of it, barely absorb any. Getting these high absorption methods is able to really radically change things. Like we said, the Keto Before 6 just flip you into ketosis over time. Especially in the detox regimens, we're able to stage these very discreet stages of detox, activate toxins, move them with the bile, bind them, and get very accurate symptom free and powerful protocols.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. Love that so much. I've even wondered with the resveratrol, for example, people want to supplement with resveratrol pills. I don't know if this is true at all, but having it in the liquid form in your mouth of potentially the sublingual delivery of it would even be a factor just because of like compared to the GI tract.

Chris Shade:
Well, I'd say on a sole level, it does a lot more for us to drink it in the wine form.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, true. I think that might be the best thing to actually ...

Chris Shade:
That's probably the biggest benefit, just looking at this beautiful red liquid and all the ferments and stuff. It's a wonderful way to go. Now we have these super high bioavailability ways to take all this stuff.

Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, this has been amazing. Hopefully we can talk again very soon and knock out a lot more topics.

Chris Shade:
All right.

Melanie Avalon:
This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to talking to you again in the future.

Chris Shade:
Thank you so much, Melanie. See you next time.