How to Cleanse Heavy Metals from the Body

Cleansing heavy metals from your body on a regular basis is essential for maintaining optimal health. Without cleanses, heavy metals systematically poison your body. Chronic heavy metal exposure can increase the risk of disease, drain your energy, promote inflammation, give you brain fog, and even accelerate physical aging (1).

The problem is, most detox or cleanse strategies out there are filled with misleading information. Some claim you can experience a complete detox in as little as a week. Or that fasting, herbs, or essential oils can fully detox the body.

This type of misinformation causes people to waste their time, effort, and money on detox strategies that simply don’t work. Which is a shame because heavy metal cleansing is incredibly important. If you want to follow a heavy metal cleanse that actually works to rid your body of toxins, look no further than this scientifically-backed 3-step guide.

Step 1: Minimize Heavy Metal Exposure

Avoiding heavy metal exposure is your first line of defense. It should be a top priority if you’re looking to protect yourself from heavy metal toxicity.

Why is avoiding exposure so important? Think of it this way: if you earned $2,000 a week but spent $3,000 weekly, you would quickly go bankrupt! The same principle applies to heavy metal cleansing. If you are continually exposed to more heavy metals than what your body can detoxify, then you won’t make much progress.

Top Sources of Heavy Metal Exposure

Heavy metals are everywhere, hiding in plain sight. Since heavy metals can silently sabotage your health, it’s important to develop an awareness of the most common sources of heavy metal exposure so you can reduce your risk.

Drinking Water: Public and well water are often contaminated with heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and cadmium. Consider using a water filter that is known to remove these contaminants.

Certain Foods: Large predatory fish such as tuna and swordfish frequently exceed safety levels for mercury exposure (2). And tests show rice is commonly contaminated with arsenic, so stick with other grain options.

Dental Fillings: Amalgam fillings are up to 50% mercury by weight (3). Over time, they begin to deteriorate, slowly leaching mercury into your body. Some dentists are trained to safely remove these fillings without exposing your body to mercury during the removal process.

Beauty Products: Cosmetics like lipstick, eyeliner, blush, hair dye, and even shampoo can contain unsafe concentrations of heavy metals (4). To limit your exposure, check your beauty products on the EWG Skin Deep Database® or the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

Household Materials: Furniture, carpet, mattresses, and even linoleum flooring can slowly break down and release heavy metals into your home’s air.

Step 2: Detoxify Your Body

As you make a conscious effort to reduce your exposure to heavy metals, the next step is to cleanse or detoxify them from your body.

Many experts will tell you to eat more greens, adopt an anti-inflammatory diet, control your stress levels, and to drink plenty of water to support the body’s detoxification pathways.

Yes, these methods help and should be included in any detoxification protocol. But these detox strategies don’t address one of the biggest challenges of chronic heavy metal exposure.

Heavy Metal Accumulation in the Body

When you’re exposed to heavy metals, they accumulate in your tissues. It’s your body’s way of temporarily protecting you from heavy metal toxicity. And since we’re all exposed to heavy metals even before we’re born, many toxic metals are likely already accumulated in your cells.

Lead, for example, accumulates in bone tissue, displacing calcium in the process. When your dietary intake of calcium is low, it causes your body to break down some of your bone to get more calcium, releasing some accumulated lead back into the bloodstream where it can cause damage.

How to Detox Accumulated Heavy Metals

Since heavy metals accumulate in the body, no cleansing or detoxification strategy is complete without a substance that binds to heavy metals like a magnet and removes them from your body. 

There are several natural ways to bind to heavy metals in the gut such as eating detox foods, drinking an organic green juice, and adding herbs such as cilantro to your diet.

The problem is, many of these detox strategies don’t provide a deep-tissue detoxification. In other words, they aren’t very good at removing accumulated heavy metals from your system. To tackle accumulated heavy metals, the best solution is a natural mineral called zeolite.

Zeolite liquid is a volcanic mineral that can travel deep into your tissues to help pull heavy metals out of your body. Just make sure you pick out a liquid zeolite that has been pre-cleansed to be effective at trapping toxins and that it uses nano-sized particles. Otherwise the zeolite particles will not be small enough to get into your cells for detoxification.

Step 3: Protect Yourself with Antioxidants

Once a heavy metal gets into your body (before it’s stored in your tissues), it starts causing damage to every cell in its path.

Specifically, heavy metals cause oxidative damage which can ultimately lead to inflammation,  DNA damage (which is correlated with cancer), organ damage, physical aging, and numerous other unpleasant effects (5).

Since completely avoiding heavy metal exposure is impossible, it’s critical that you protect your body from oxidative damage. This is where antioxidants come into play. To protect yourself from oxidative damage, you need an abundance of plant-based antioxidants in your diet. 

Antioxidants shield your cells from oxidative damage, making them ideal for supporting your body during heavy metal cleansing (6).

Getting Antioxidants that Work

The thing is, not all antioxidants work. If you go to the store and pick up an antioxidant supplement, it will be a complete waste of money because it’s likely to be a vitamin made from synthetic sources. Studies have found that isolated and synthetic antioxidant supplements provide little to no benefit (7).

The best option is to consume plant-based antioxidants found in whole foods, such as veggies, fruits, mushrooms and berries. If you’re always busy, eating enough antioxidant-rich foods every day can be tough. You can easily meet your antioxidant needs by consuming whole food supplements such as an organic green juice powder.

The Bottom Line

Heavy metals are everywhere. They’re in your drinking water, food, beauty products, and even in the air you breathe. Since heavy metals can cause so much damage to your health, it’s essential that you detoxify them before they can cause too much harm.

While there is no perfect detoxification protocol out there, this 3-step heavy metal cleanse will help put you back on track. The benefits of a heavy metal cleanse include better sleep, improved mental clarity, greater energy, and strengthened immunity. So, you can live life to its fullest without health issues getting in the way.