Heavy Metals
Women's Health South Africa|March/April 2019

Beware, wellness warriors: heavy metals, or toxic minerals, could be lurking in your body, leaving you lethargic and breathing heavily. Melissa Shedden undergoes a deep cleanse

Melissa Shedden
Heavy Metals
Truth bomb: if my life were a Gumtree ad it would read something like: 29-year-old female seeks optimum health. Give this woman a wellness trend and I’m sold faster than R100 vanishes at a farmers’ market. So when late last year some health-check results came back with heavy-metal levels in the red zone, I was blindsided.

Turns out the stuff our 19th-century relations used to get rid of their husbands, arsenic, is partying in my body, alongside nickel and mercury. Huh?! My integrative GP, Dr John Hart, reckons they are the most common metals he sees on the urine chelation challenge (two wee samples, the first when you wake up and the second sampled from 24 hours of collecting your wee in a bladder bag after swallowing a binding tablet), alongside lead. Heavy.

Disclaimer: smug wellness stuff hasn’t always been my jam. I did spend a fair whack of my twenties in a cheap wine and fried delicacies daze. Plus, I remember news reports of arsenic in the water and rice supply. Was this my health hangover?

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