Last week I did a talk about the 250 and more symptoms that mercury causes. Other poisons only cause one or two symptoms. In The Detox Manual, we give the examples of cyanide, carbon monoxide, ozone and hexavalent chromium which each mess with you in one particular way. But mercury is more like the death from a thousand cuts. Although mostly you don’t die, you just go slowly mad or get dementia or MS or something like that.
In the far, far distant past, when we communicated from abroad with aerogrammes and there were no cell phones or internet, I lived in Tangiers, in Morocco. At that time, the macrobiotic diet, with its Japanese guru, George Ohsawa, was all the rage. One equally young person described to me how she had been eating brown rice and gomazio according to the protocol, but fell from grace, broke her discipline, and ate a cheeseburger. The repercussions were immediate, and she got sick. At the time this caused me to hoot with derision (behind her back). Now I realize this hooting was religious intolerance on my part.
Beliefs about diet and what we should and shouldn’t eat are close neighbors of religious convictions. The big, established religions have got all kinds of diet rules for certain, but even non-religious people will get evangelical about food. There are the raw foodists, the fruitarians, the vegans, the carnivores, the ketogenic people… it is a whole landscape of religious beliefs. People will espouse one way of eating and pontificate on the internet. They even get angry. It is astounding, really.
People who have been poisoned by mercury tend to have all kinds of digestive issues. We have people who show up in our groups who have been reduced to eating only two or three things because they are so sensitive to ordinary chemicals in food. And eating foods to which you are sensitive can cause symptoms ranging from indigestion to psychological problems.
Toxic people have impaired metabolisms. But how they react to whatever chemical they encounter will be mercurial (so to speak). Some people can eat everything, while others are reduced to hardly eating anything at all and they lose weight. Andy Cutler used to say that following a careful diet can be the most profound thing a person can do to control symptoms. But what that diet will be is highly dependent on the individual. We say in The Detox Manual, don’t “assume because a totally raw vegan diet resolved all kinds of issues for you that it is going to be the right thing for your equally toxic neighbor. They may need to eat steaks and bacon to feel good.”
Don’t let yourself fall prey to food evangelists! You will have to find out what works for you. If following a strict diet may be too hard for you to undertake, do what you have to do! “There is no moral imperative,” as Andy would say. Following a particular diet is strictly to control symptoms. It is not going to cure you of anything. What is going to get you better, and hopefully make you able to eat whatever you want without repercussions is getting the mercury out of your body. And that you accomplish by chelating.