What are heavy metals and what is heavy metal poisoning?
Toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury can enter the environment – that is, in the air around us – and, as a result, our bodies.
The good news is that if you know the sources of the pollutants posing the biggest threats to your health, you can reduce your personal exposure to them.
What holds the world together at its core? Heavy metals! The earth’s core of iron and nickel makes up a third of the mass of the entire earth and thus plays a major role in ensuring that gravity keeps us on the ground.
Aluminium and iron are absorbed from the earth’s crust into the soils and plants, and our Stone Age ancestors already ingested them through their food. Not only that – volcanic eruptions have always ejected mercury and arsenic from the depths of the earth into the atmosphere.
In the last 150 years, however, industry, mining, power plants and road traffic have raised the emission of heavy metals to a whole new level. This is a problem. Because the toxic metals can accumulate in our bodies, trigger heavy metal poisoning and various diseases.
What are the long-term effects of heavy metal poisoning?
Once heavy metals have entered our body through food, the air we breathe or our skin, we usually cannot get rid of them very easily.
They enter our blood and lymphatic system via our respiratory tract or gastrointestinal tract and spread throughout our body. They accumulate in different parts of our bodies – for example, in our bones or in organs such as our kidneys, liver and lungs.
They can remain there for a long time because our bodies can only break them down slowly. Some metals, like lead and mercury, also settle in our nervous system.
Our bodies needs particular metals to function – for example, iron, zinc, selenium and copper. But too high a dose of these essential trace elements can also pose a threat to your health.
What diseases can heavy metals cause?
Researchers suspect that long-term exposure to arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury may increase the risk of anaemia and cancer as well as cardiovascular, lung and neurological diseases.
Scientists around the world are currently researching links, especially between heavy metal exposure and cancer – arsenic, for example, is considered a carcinogen.
Lead and mercury are particularly dangerous for children, as these heavy metals can affect the nervous system and impair brain development.
How does our body get rid of heavy metals?
Our body can usually cope with small amounts of potentially toxic substances. The liver and kidneys, in particular, ensure that heavy metals are gradually excreted from the body through our urine and stool, but also through sweat, for example.
However, sometimes, heavy metals accumulate in our bones and organs for years. We therefore absorb them faster than we can excrete them, so that over time there is a build-up. This means they can then damage cells and block enzymes – this is how lead, for example, damages our nervous system and blood formation.
What foods help remove heavy metals from the body?
If you want to help your body absorb as few heavy metals as possible from food and air and eliminate them effectively, make sure you do not develop a nutrient deficiency! For example, studies show that the body absorbs more lead from food when it is deficient in zinc, calcium and iron. The mineral selenium is also involved in eliminating heavy metals.
Below are some foods that help with removing heavy metal toxins from the body!
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