The Age of Toxicity
| Heavy metals arent music to anyones ears. Frequent headaches, dizziness, brain fog, and nausea are just a few of the symptoms that tell us that mercury and other neurotoxic heavy metals are increasingly evident in our air, food, water, and even the medicines we take, causing many members of the medical community to call the 21st Century The Age of Toxicity. These deadly substances kill neurons in our brains and throughout our nervous systems, progressively wreaking havoc with our delicate biological processes. However, one super hero in the wings may just be mercurys kryptonite. Its a little green algae called chlorella. |
Peculiarly, as medicine advances, we find that its often wisest to reach back into the past to find natural alternative remedies that work with our bodies, instead of beating our bodies into submission with synthetic pharmaceuticals. Although chlorella was first identified in the late 19th century, this tiny algae has been around since the beginning of time.
What is Chlorella?
Through its 2.5 billion year existence, chlorella has generated specific detoxifying proteins and peptides that combat every existing toxic metal. A single-celled plant, chlorellas fibrous, indigestible outer shell (the cell wall must be broken before it can be of benefit to us) is packed with vitamins, minerals, proteins, and amino acids.
Chlorella is a fresh-water green algae. Green algae contains some of the highest sources of chlorophyll in the world. Of all green algae, chlorella is the highest source or chlorophyll, ranging from 3% to 5% pure. In fact, because of its purity and high nutritional value, chlorella was initially researched as a food source.
Chlorella was first identified late in the 19th Century and cultivated soon after in Holland. In the early 1900s, European, and especially German scientists sought to take advantage of the 60% protein composition of the fast-multiplying plant and began researching chlorella as a food source.
Although researchers were enthusiastic about this potential new food source, World Wars I and II interrupted studies until 1948 when Stanford Research Institute successfully grew chlorella in a pilot study. However, research was again tabled due to financial constraints until the 1950s when the Carnegie Institute completed the study and concluded that chlorella could be grown on a commercial scale.
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Japan, with a serious postwar food shortage, partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation, co-sponsoring Dr. Hiroshi Tamiyas study at the Tokugawa Biological Institute. Dr. Tamiya developed the technology to grow, harvest, and process chlorella on a commercial scale. Several other Japanese organizations were established to continue research and development of chlorella growth. However, the high costs of growing chlorella as a food source proved to be poor competitors against the ready availabilities of rice and wheat and most research was discontinued. However, in the early 1960s, Japanese researchers began concentrating on the medicinal and dietary values of chlorella and chlorella took its place as a popular dietary supplement in Japan. |
Making War on Mercury
Detoxification is currently a hot topic. Health spas expound the virtues of body wraps, soaks, steam baths, and saunas. Yet, heavy metals, like Mercury, attach themselves to our internal tissues and organs (including the brain) and arent easily eliminated. If we are serious about detoxification, we need to consider ways to free these heavy metals from our tissues to help our body put them in their place on the outside!
Chlorella is just one of our many natural weapons in helping our bodies both mobilize and eliminate Mercury and other heavy metals.
Chlorella assists our bodys removal of Mercury through a process called chelation. Its fibrous outer shell latches onto Mercury before it attaches to our tissues. The chlorella binds with the Mercury, enabling our bodies to eliminate it naturally.
A leading detoxification scientist, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt says, The body is constantly trying to eliminate neurotoxins via the available exit routes. However because of the lipophilic/neurotropic nature of the neurotoxins, most are reabsorbed by the abundant nerve endings of the enteric nervous system (ENS) in the intestinal wall.
Klinghardt, also one of the founding fathers of chelation therapy, clearly asserts that mobilization is different than, and necessary to detoxification. Mobilization means ferreting mercury out of its hiding places. Dr. Klinghardt says, “Mobilization may lead to excretion. It also may lead to redistribution. Detoxifying or detoxing means mobilizing AND moving it out of the body.
If mercury is not excreted, the body reabsorbs it. This is a critical factor that determines the success, or as in the case of most conventional treatments, the failure of chelation therapy.
Ninety percent of Mercury elimination takes place through fecal excretion. The binding action of chlorella facilitates fecal excretion of Mercury. In addition, chlorella stimulates, regulates, and helps clean the bowel, enabling our bodies to mobilize attached Mercury into the bowel where chlorella effectively continues the elimination process.
How Safe is Chlorella?
While the trend today is towards oral or intravenous chelation methods, synthetic chelation therapies such as DMSA, DMPS, and high dose EDTA, mobilize mercury and other heavy metals but do not necessarily carry them out of the body. It is for this very reason, that many of these treatments can cause disastrous side effects due to reabsorbtion in the intestinal tract.
Several factors influence the safety of a chelating substance in Mercury elimination:
- Can you both metabolize and eliminate the drug with or without mercury?
- Does the drug adversely affect other minerals and nutrients in your body?
- Will the drug mobilize mercury, yet redistribute it instead of eliminate it?
- Will the drug too rapidly pull mercury from body tissues not allowing it to effectively control elimination?
A major benefit of chlorella is that it isnt a drug. Chlorella is a whole food. Not only does it allow natural elimination of Mercury as well as other heavy metals and toxins, it provides your body with nutrients to improve your overall health and well-being. Moreover, because chlorella is a food and not a drug, overdosing is nearly impossible.
Chlorella also improves elimination in all four major elimination channels, which is key to detoxification of the body.
Detoxifying with Chlorella
Chlorella is available in tablets, liquid extracts, and powder. Powders can be baked into breads, cakes, and cookies and liquids can be blended with fruit and vegetable drinks.
| The general recommendation for chlorella in tablet form is to begin with one gram of chlorella taken three times daily, about 30 minutes before mealtimes. After determining its effect on your bowel, you may gradually increase dosage up to ten grams for very active detoxification. After a couple of weeks, decrease the dosage again to one gram again for maintenance. However, do follow container directions and indications for the specific application of chlorella you choose. |
Side effects are most often those from the mobilization of toxic metals. You can avoid most side effects by increasing your chlorella dosage. Small dosages mobilize more metals without binding them, while larger doses bind more of the toxins and speed detoxification and elimination.
There are many producers of chlorella, with all of them not necessarily producing clean product. Be sure to do your research on the company you purchase from. What do we recommend? Yaeyama chlorella is by far the freshest, purest, and most readily attainable chlorella on the market. Many manufacturers repackage the yaeyama product under their own brand name, so it shouldnt be difficult to find.