Mercury in your body harms your nerves and can slow weight loss....

Today's Post: Friday, 4-30-2010

Back in March this year on 3-18, Dr Mark Hyman’s blog had an article about how low thyroid can make you feel de-energized and prevent fat loss by lowering your energy level and metabolism.

Fri, 5-7 newsflash: Avoid eating farmed fish. (Virtually all salmon in restaurants is farmed.) Not only is it high in many pollutants, I recently found out that the PCB's its very high in harm and lower thyroid output !

It seems that excessive mercury levels in your body slow or reduce thyroid function to produce those effects.

Next time, we’ll discuss how to do some of the other things he lists that can boost low thyroid to solve that problem.

But, high or excessive mercury levels in your body also harm your nerves including those in your brain and can cause or mimic Alzheimer’s disease.

Basically, the winning strategy is to avoid getting high levels and to remove any mercury already in your body.

You can get high mercury levels from having the old kind of dental fillings removed by a dentist who has not been trained to do this without exposing you to excess mercury.

But, the most common way to get high mercury levels is to often eat fish high in mercury.

Of the fish you are most likely to eat, tuna has the most mercury. So, eat it once a month or less. And, if possible only eat tuna that is pole caught as that kind of tuna is reported to have less mercury. (Sardines, herring, and small mackerel and wild caught salmon are very low or low in mercury. All are wild caught. Do NOT eat farmed fish if you can possibly avoid it. They are unusually high in several kinds of pollutants!)

Swordfish, shark, super sized mackerel called King Mackerel, and some other fish are so high in mercury, you are much safer if you never eat any.

The other thing you can do without getting tested and treated medically if your level is far too high is to eat cilantro often. It seems that it tends to bind with mercury and remove it from your body.

So, if you eat cilantro in a larger serving than is common two or more times a week, it will lower your level of mercury.

Cilantro is quite inexpensive to buy. But a bunch of cilantro is so large that you may need to buy more than you over a month’s time. It goes bad quickly. Even in the refrigerator it only lasts a couple of days. So you may need to buy it twice a week and eat a quarter of a bunch two or three times a week. You can chop it fine and add it to salads with milder flavors or to salsa.

We even tried it once diced with canned, pole caught tuna and bits of goat cheese. That made the tuna much safer to eat. The dish was very filling between the fiber in the cilantro and the fat and protein in the tuna and goat cheese. My wife loved it while I didn’t much care for it.

Next time, we’ll post on how to test for low thyroid and several other ways to increase thyroid function. Some of those also improve and protect your health and also help with fat loss.