#132 Liver Detox and Autophagy with Dr Christopher Shade

Christopher Shade (0:00)

Like anything, it's the pendulum.

The more profound of a pathology you have, it's more related to mass overaccumulation, atherosclerosis, cancer, metabolic disease. The longer you want to fast fast, the more you're trying to just tighten your biochemistry and live longer and be stronger, the shorter the periods of fasting, and then go back and forth.

Siim Land (0:25)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:33)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:35)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:38)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Christopher Shade.

Dr. Shade has a PhD in environmental mercury chemistry, and he's a renowned expert on mercury, heavy metals, and human detoxification systems. Dr. Shade, welcome to the show.

Christopher Shade (0:56)

Good to be here, sir.

Siim Land (0:57)

Can you give us a brief background story about how did you get your PhD and what did you learn?

Christopher Shade (1:03)

Yeah, you almost have to go even back farther.

I was raised an academic, and then I got into college, and I got disillusioned with sort of how science was set up, and I had a lot of, say, mind-expanding experiences. And I left traditional science, and I went into organic farming. I was really obsessed with sustainable agriculture. I did biodynamics and organic stuff, and then I joked that I went out of business the year Whole Foods came around, as I was a little too early, and went back to school and got a PhD around environmental chemistry of agriculture, like agricultural pollution. And then I went for my PhD, and I found it kind of boring what the guys are doing in Illinois, just monitoring nitrate levels and streams, and not really saying anything about it. And I met this guy named Bob Hudson, who was a genius level guy at modeling metals moving through the environment. His specialty was mercury, and he said, hey, can you start a lab, and can you develop me a new system for mercury speciation, which is analysis which separates all these forms of mercury. And I'm like, of course, no problem.

You know, I didn't know how to do it, but I was really good with analytical chemistry and equipment. And so I took on the challenge and beg borrowed and stole all equipment, old equipment from older professors and developed that and then patented this system for separating different forms of mercury. And when we get into talking about mercury in the body, we'll see that there's one main form coming out for dental amalgams and a different form that we get from eating fish. Those are our two main sources.

And all the analytical systems before just pulled them all together as one thing. And when you look at mercury in the blood versus urine versus the hair, they're all specific forms and nobody can make really good sense out of everything. And so you need to be able to separate the forms and analyze them. In environmental chemistry, the reason you needed to separate them is because you're looking at mercury raining down into the environment in one form and then transforming into another.

So it comes down as this inorganic form of mercury transforms into this organic form named called methylmercury. And then it multiplies up the food chain that's called bioaccumulation. So you have these fish that are 10,000 times more mercury or a million, no, yeah, it's like a million times more mercury in the fish than in the water. So we had to separate this little amount of methylmercury in water and soil from this big amount of inorganic and see it move up the food chain. A little different in the body, you're trying to separate a larger amount of methylmercury from a smaller amount of inorganic mercury and seeing where it goes in the body. So I patented that in grad school, then started my company based on commercializing that testing. And that was what got me into testing in people and then developing detox systems to get the body to get rid of the mercury.

Siim Land (4:15)

Well, yeah, that's quite an interesting story.

But yeah, before we get into the actual details of mercury detox, et cetera, I want to cover some of the basics as well for the listeners. So you hear a lot of talk about doing these different liver detoxes and juice cleansers, et cetera, like, is it like, is it just a fad or is there actually some science behind it? Can you like talk about what's the basic principles of like liver detox, et cetera?

Christopher Shade (4:43)