You know the feeling you get when you learn something new about a health problem you've

been trying to reverse, maybe high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, well there's

nothing I like better than bringing you the information that will help you do just that.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast, I'm your host Dr. Michael Greger.

Today we explore what dietary change can simultaneously help detoxify mercury lead and cadmium from

the body. We've previously explored the issue of lead contamination in calcium supplements

like bone meal, but it wasn't just bone meal, it's the substantial quantities of lead

were found in other more common over-the-counter supplements. Still, testing revealed continued

public health concern over bone meal, but thankfully it's not as popular these days. So many

of us are not likely to get directly exposed to the lead in bone meal anymore, but may

get indirectly exposed to the animals we eat in the US. 5 billion pounds of meat and

bone meal are produced, it was slaughter us byproducts every year. What do we do with these

millions of tons every year? We feed it back to farm animals, particularly chickens.

Now most of the lead in the bone meal passes right through the animals into their waste,

but then we take that waste, cow pig and chicken feces and feed it back to the animals again,

you guessed it. So you can see how the levels of contaminants might build up in their bodies.

I've talked previously about what that might mean for making something like chicken soup,

but the original concern about these kind of feeding practices, feeding cows to cows and

pigs and chickens, was the spread of pre-on diseases like mad cow disease, but it's not just

pre-ons that this kind of recycling can magnify, but other toxic substances including lead.

So more plant-based diet may be able to lower lead exposure and even more plant-based diet could

theoretically lower exposure even more, but you've got to put it to the test, but should we expect

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