My Heavy Metal Results

Going off how you feel (and learning about the best awareness of how to judge this) is certainly a good way to go. And doing various testing and looking at lab reports is another worthwhile method.

It shouldn’t be an either/or conundrum, because it’s worth doing both.

Recently, we found out about a new company named EverlyWell, which makes various lab tests from home a cinch to do.

To test them out, my team and I bought a bunch of different tests to give it a go. Over the coming weeks and month, we’ll be sharing those reports with you, which include a variety of different tests.

We like to share this kind of stuff because showing numbers on my own health, acts as a scorecard for how I’m doing. Since I teach about health, it’s good to know whether or not I’m practicing what I preach and if it’s working!

While I make no claims of perfection, I aim to get close. (An earlier example, where I scored 992 ng/dL total testosterone.)

Starting off, I just got back the results of my Heavy Metals Test.

This urine test took a morning and nighttime measurement (pee in a cup and then stick a piece of filter paper in it, and send those in).
Very easy to do.

About a week later I got my results back, which you can see here.

Everything came back pretty good, however, there were a couple of flags.

Good on Mercury, Cadmium, Bromine and Creatinine

The potentially worst heavy metals measured here was mercury and cadmium. Happy to report that I was quite low on both of these heavy metals.

Interesting to find bromine on here as it’s not really a heavy metal, but is worth looking at. It competes against iodine and thus can disrupt things like thyroid.

Then there was creatinine. As this is something produced in your body, I was wondering what this was doing on the test, but they explained it. “Urinary creatinine is used as a control to make sure that other markers being tested are not reported inaccurately from kidney filtration problems.”

Low Selenium

I’ll start with the quick ones. My selenium was a little low. Easy fix. I’ll make sure I eat two Brazil nuts (one of the best natural sources of selenium) per day on a regular basis.

While I’ve done this in the past, I have not been doing it lately. Should be very simple to correct as I’m just under the ideal zone.

Low-ish Iodine

While still in the ideal zone, my iodine was close to the border.

I have a couple bottles of Lugol’s solution, a supplemental iodine, and iodide form, which I’ll also start taking semi-regularly.

High Arsenic

My arsenic level came back a bit high, in the red zone at 55 μg/g, when you want it to be under 42 μg/g.

The good news is that I’m not having any of the symptoms for arsenic poisoning, which include headaches, confusion, severe diarrhea, drowsiness, convulsions, changes in fingernail pigmentation, vomiting, blood in the urine, cramping muscles, hair loss, and stomach pain.

I find this interesting because years ago (2012) I did a heavy metals hair analysis and it also found high arsenic.

The difficult part is figuring out where this may be coming from. Some common sources include drinking water (I plan on measuring what I drink for arsenic soon, but I doubt that is the problem since I have a different water supply than six years ago).  Also, foods including rice, seafood, mushrooms, and chicken, I do eat some of these but I tend to get them all from good-quality sources.

So that begs the question: are the herbs giving me a heavy load or arsenic?

I punched up our Heavy Metals Breakdown page found here. (If you haven’t seen this page it’s pretty amazing! This is something my brother Zane, our chief quality officer, put together that shows that you shouldn’t fair heavy metals when it comes to our herbs.)

The average maximum amount of arsenic allowed is 10 ppm (parts per million). Different agencies say different things. In general, we follow the guidelines of the AHPA, which is more strict than US agencies.

None of our herbs even have 1 ppm of arsenic!

The lowest I found was Goji Berry Juice Powder with just 0.01 ppm. The highest was Shilajit Resin with 0.88 ppm.

Therefore, my arsenic load doesn’t appear to be coming from these herbs.

I’ll be doing a bit more to see if I can figure out what may be the culprit in my higher arsenic levels. Perhaps, more importantly, I’ll be looking into effectively detoxing the arsenic from my body.  Perhaps in the future, I’ll share another test as well as what I did to lower it.

Now, I do wish this test had a couple more things in it. Lead and/or aluminum would be nice. But I’m happy with the results and the actions I’ll be doing based off of them.

If you’d like to find out more details about the EverlyWell Heavy Metals Test, or their many other testings options go here.

They’re not the cheapest things out there, but I find tests like these to be a worthwhile investment done once in a while. We’ll be sharing more different test results coming soon…

[Note that this is an affiliate link. If you purchase a test at EverlyWell, we do receive a small commission, which helps support our operations and bringing you informative articles like these.]