Aluminum Neurotoxicity

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Neurological and Chronic Disease: The Aluminum Connection

As a neuroscientist, I study various kinds of toxicol­ogy as applied to human neurological disease. For much of my career, I have focused on a disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” ALS is a progressive neuro­degenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, eventually causing paralysis and death by respiratory failure.

It was my interest in ALS that prompted me to look at a mystery disease that was once prevalent on Guam, called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-parkinsonism dementia complex (ALS-PDC). As it turns out, the story of ALS-PDC provides interesting clues about aluminum toxicity, though I did not initially suspect aluminum as a culprit. To properly tell the story requires that I address the related topics of aluminum chemistry, alumi­num’s distribution in the biosphere and aluminum’s use as the dominant adjuvant in vaccines, including its role in Gulf War syndrome.

A MYSTERY IN GUAM

The Spanish occupied Guam for several hundred years, until America took over in 1898 as a consequence of the Spanish-American War. The individual who first described ALS-PDC in the scientific literature was a neuropatholo­gist named Harry M. Zimmerman, who went to Guam with the U.S. Navy right after WWII. He noticed that a disproportionate number of Guam’s indigenous Chamorro people seemed to have ALS.¹

In 1953, Leonard Kurland—considered the “father of neuroepidemiology”—and a neurolo­gist named Donald Mulder arrived on Guam to assess the ALS cluster and then found what they described as “parkinsonism dementia complex” (PDC). Parkinson’s disease, a motor disease that originates in the area of the brain called the substantia nigra, had first been described in the early nineteenth century by James Parkinson.² Characteristic symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are tremors, gait disturbances and slow shuf­fling, but what Kurland and Mulder found on Guam was different. Among the unusual fea­tures that they observed were a strong dementia component, “frozen” faces and, often, a young age of onset in the teenage years.

Kurland, whose career included stints at the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Mayo Clinic, thought that if researchers could identify the disease’s causes, it would be the medical equivalent of the Rosetta Stone (the stele that allowed scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics), providing clues concerning the rise of ALS, parkinsonism, Alzheimer’s and other dementias not just on Guam but around the world. At the time, Guam’s indigenous population was small and relatively geneti­cally homogeneous—what Kurland termed a “geographical isolate.”³ When you’re looking for causal factors, whether environmental or genetic, it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but at least on Guam, the haystack was small. Kurland’s assumption—erroneous, as things turned out—was that this would make the disease’s etiology easier to figure out.

As the twofold ALS-PDC nomenclature suggests, researchers initially thought they might be looking at two separate diseases. My own research on ALS-PDC has led me to believe that it was one disease with two separate expressions. Quite unusually, ALS-PDC could present as classic ALS, as the PDC component or as both. Roughly 10 percent had both components, with the ALS part typically manifesting first. This odd variability was evident in various ALS-PDC “family pedigrees.” For example, if one or both parents had ALS, some of the children might have ALS, some might have PDC and some might have both.

ALS-PDC had a seemingly inexplicable twentieth-century rise and fall. Although there are some Spanish records suggesting its presence in the nineteenth century or earlier, it rose rapidly and peaked, becoming the leading cause of adult Chamorro death, from the mid-1940s to mid- 1950s.⁴ Then, it declined and disappeared. The Guamanian versions of both ALS and PDC have not been seen in those born after 1960.

THE CYCAD CONNECTION

In the early 1960s, Kurland brought in a nethnobotanist named Margaret Whiting, who lived with Chamorro families to investigate nutritional, environmental and behavioral variables that might provide disease clues. Despite the observed “family pedigrees,” researchers had decided that the disease was probably not hereditary.

After years of research, Whiting decided that the culprit was con­sumption of the seeds of the cycad palm.⁵ This hypothesis seemed to be consistent with the peculiar incidence pattern of ALS-PDC—the peak in the 1940s and 1950s and ensuing dropoff—which could at least in part be explained by the displacement of cycad seed consumption by a more Westernized diet and American fast food. Moreover, ALS-PDC occurred on Guam and the neighboring island of Rota but not on the Northern Mariana island of Saipan; when the Japanese occupied Saipan after WWI, they cut down the cycads for sugar plantations.

Cycads are a very ancient order of trees, and consumption of cycad seeds in the form of tortillas or dumplings made with cycad seed flour has been going on for a long time, including as a famine food. Typhoons go through Guam all the time; when crops were wiped out, the Chamorros would go to the forest and harvest the cycad. Today, the cycad flour (which the Chamorros call fadang) remains a cultural icon, and many still eat it.

Cycads may look like palm trees, but as gymnosperms directly fer­tilized by pollination, they are actually more closely related to the pine tree. The seeds are fairly large—about the size of a small grapefruit. Perhaps through bitter experience, Chamorro women knew that there was something toxic about the seeds, which indeed turns out to be the case. Consequently, when they harvested the seeds, they would break open the fleshy outer layer (the sarcotesta) and the protective hard shell inside the sarcotesta to access the internal gametophyte layer. Then, they would chop that into pieces and wash it for up to seven days. Only then was it considered safe to grind into flour and eat.

In the search for cycad components that might cause ALS-PDC, Kurland and Whiting extracted an amino acid called cycasin, which has a sugar molecule, glucose, on one end. When you pull the sugar off, you get a toxic metabolite called MAM (methylazoxymethanol), which has genotoxic effects. However, when researchers Peter Spencer and Glen Kisby at the Center for Research on Occupational and Environmental Toxicology in Oregon fed MAM to mice and rats, they got interesting results but no ALS-PDC.⁶ So, the answer to the question of whether MAM was the causal factor is, “probably not.”

Spencer and Kisby also looked at a cycad seed component called BMAA (beta-N-me­thylamino-L-alanine),⁷ but it turned out to be a very weak neurotoxin.⁸ Feeding monkeys a high concentration of BMAA produced some behavioral changes but no dead neurons—a bit of a problem for something you hypothesize to be causing neurological disease. Moreover, the Chamorros’ practice of washing their cycad meant that they were washing out a lot of the BMAA.

Later, a group headed by Paul Cox looked at BMAA and came up with a hypothesis of “biomagnification,” defining it as “the increas­ing accumulation of bioactive, often deleterious molecules” up the food chain.⁹ Their thinking was that fruit bats, once quite prevalent on Guam, would eat the cycad seeds, and when humans ate the bats, they would get a higher concentration of BMAA. Again, however, when they tested this hypothesis, they found very little in the way of neurological damage. In my view, their findings indicate that while BMAA may have played a partial role, it was not the driving factor behind ALS-PDC.

MY WORK ON CYCAD NEUROTOXINS

In the 2000s, my research group obtained washed cycad seed flour from a Chamorro gentleman who worked with the ALS-PDC consortium with Dr. Ulla Craig in Guam and had harvested cycad both for research purposes and for his family’s consumption. When we extracted a series of molecules and did various toxicology tests on them in a cell-culture model, we found that after all the washing and extrac­tion, three kinds of steryl glucoside molecules seemed to be the most toxic.¹⁰

Our next step was to calculate how much of the cycad starch the Chamorros would have eaten on a daily basis. We made one-gram pel­lets out of the cycad seed flour and fed it to one group of outbred colony mice, while a second group of mice got pellets of regular flour.¹¹ We then did a series of motor tests and found that the experimental group very quickly began to lose a reflex considered to be a marker of alpha motor neuron integrity. When you take a mouse and gently lift it by its tail, it should splay out its limbs—if it doesn’t do that, there’s something wrong in the motor system. In our cycad flour group, this reflex fell off very quickly. At the same time, the mice began to move differently, showing a much smaller gait length. Their bal­ance was also affected. In water maze tests, the cycad-fed mice made a lot more errors. Finally, we observed cognitive deficits in a test for dif­ferent kinds of reference memory.

When we sacrificed the mice and looked inside the spinal cord and brain, comparing the untreated mice fed regular flour with the cycad-fed mice, we observed apoptosis (programmed cell death) in the hippocampus, spinal cord and substantia nigra. Both behaviorally and histologically, the cycad-fed animals looked like ALS-PDC patients.¹² We then synthesized the cycad toxin BSSG (beta-sitosterol-beta-d-glucoside) and found that it did much the same thing, killing motor neurons in the lumbar and thoracic spine and dopamine-containing neu­rons in the substantia nigra.¹³

THE ALUMINUM AGE

Now let’s turn to a consideration of alumi­num. Geologically, aluminum is the third most common element in the Earth’s crust and is mostly found in combination with other miner­als, as in bauxite. It binds very avidly to and interferes with elements essential for life such as carbon, sulfur, phosphorus and others.¹⁴ There are no beneficial biological roles for aluminum in any animal species, and although some plants may use it to offset ions such as calcium that can be overexpressed, plants don’t use it for anything else. Christopher Exley, one of the world’s leading experts on aluminum chemistry and biochemistry, suggests that aluminum was “selected out of evolution,”¹⁵ because, prior to the mid-1850s when it began to be industrially extracted, it was not geologically available ex­cept near volcanic zones.

Because of aluminum’s properties—it’s durable, lightweight, relatively non-corrosive and conductive—many people think it’s a great metal, but in the human body, it becomes toxic. It interacts at all levels of the nervous system— from the genes to the organelles, cells and syn­apses—and affects them all in a negative way. Crucially, it is also a very powerful immune system stimulant. And if it can hyperstimulate your immune system, it can certainly hyper­stimulate the microglia in your brain, which are there to maintain neuronal networks and repair damaged cells.

Note that awareness of aluminum’s toxicity is not new. Over a century ago, in 1911, bio­chemist and dentist William Gies wrote, “These studies have convinced me that the use in food of aluminum or any other aluminum compound is a dangerous practice. That the aluminum ion is very toxic is well known.” Gies was quoting an even older literature. Yet today, aluminum surrounds us and has become part of our hu­man biosphere. Exley calls our era the “Age of Aluminum.”

A seminal paper by my long-time colleague Lucija Tomljenovic has a chart of the major sources of bioavailable aluminum, which in­clude food (aluminum is used, for example, as an anti-caking agent¹⁶), water, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and the aluminum industry itself.¹⁷ Some water treatment plants add aluminum citrate or aluminum sulfate during treatment because aluminum acts as a flocculant, causing unwanted particles in the water to precipitate.¹⁸ The potential adverse effects on human health have made this a controversial practice,¹⁹ but the chemical industry continues to praise alu­minum sulfate as “the unsung hero of water treatment.”²⁰

Pharmaceuticals such as antacids, buffered analgesics, anti-ulceratives and anti-diarrheal drugs contain a fair amount of bioavailable aluminum—and vaccines contain a lot. In fact, roughly two-thirds of pediatric vaccines in both Canada and the U.S. have aluminum ad­juvants—anywhere from one hundred twenty-five to over six hundred micrograms per dose.²¹ Aluminum is also found in cosmetics. Exley’s group looked at the incidence of breast cancer in women who exfoliated under their arms and used aluminum-containing antiperspirants, finding that frequent use of the antiperspirants could lead to aluminum accumulation in breast tissue and increased breast cancer risk.²² When cooking very acidic foods, aluminum is re­leased from aluminum pots and pans and from aluminum foil.

Aluminum is toxic not just by ingestion or injection but also by inhalation. A 2020 study by Chinese researchers looked at the relationship between aluminum plasma levels and cognitive performance among aluminum-exposed work­ers; they concluded that “aluminum exposure may exert a substantial effect on impairing executive/visuospatial functions.”²³

LIES ABOUT ALUMINUM ADJUVANTS

The story of how aluminum first made its way into vaccines is that people working for Alexander Glenny and colleagues at the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories in Britain in the 1920s were trying to get their vaccines to generate a longer immune response. After some trial and error, they reported in 1926 that aluminum potassium sulphate did the trick,²⁴ producing “better antibody responses than soluble antigen alone.”²⁵ Subsequently, aluminum phosphate and aluminum hydroxide compounds came into common use in vaccines. Both are toxic. Merck also makes a proprietary aluminum adjuvant called amorphous alumi­num hydroxyphosphate sulfate (AAHS) that is even more potent²⁶ than the other two; it is a central component of the Gardasil human papil­lomavirus (HPV) vaccine.

My guess is that in Glenny’s day, research­ers may have assumed that aluminum was safe because aluminum potassium sulfate was (and still is) widely available for pickling. Perhaps they reasoned, “If it’s good in pickles, it must be fine in you!” At any rate, aluminum adju­vants took off and became a staple of almost every vaccine. Later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used Glenny’s assump­tions—as well as its own bad modeling (see next paragraph)—to “grandfather” aluminum adjuvants and pronounce them safe. In reality, no regulatory agency has ever tested aluminum adjuvants for safety. “What is found instead,” says Tomljenovic, “are unsubstantiated claims and widespread misinformation about the pre­sumed safety of these compounds, and sadly these are propagated not only by the vaccine manufacturers but also by the regulatory agen­cies.”²⁶

In 2011, the FDA’s Robert Mitkus and his crowd worried that aluminum adjuvants were developing a bad reputation, so they published a paper reporting on some pharmacokinetic studies.²⁷ Their paper is a classic example of bad modeling. They used aluminum citrate as a modeling method, even though aluminum citrate has never been in any vaccine. This allowed them to assert that aluminum citrate “vanishes” the minute you put it in the blood, even though aluminum hydroxide and alumi­num phosphate do the exact opposite! In fact, the work of Romain Gherardi and colleagues in Paris has shown that aluminum adjuvants have long-lasting biopersistence, setting the stage for “slow brain translocation and delayed neurotoxicity,” leading to cognitive impair­ment.²⁸ Gherardi’s research shows that injected aluminum is neurotoxic not just for children but for adults as well.

With lawyers Aaron Siri (of Siri & Glims­tad), who works with the Informed Consent Ac­tion Network, and Mary Holland of Children’s Health Defense, we decided to do a Freedom of Information Act request and ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as FDA and NIH, for the data that they rely on to assert that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines are safe for children and infants. We asked all three agencies for “copies of any human or animal studies involving the subcutaneous or intramuscular injection of aluminum adjuvants relied upon by the CDC to establish the safety of injecting infants and children with aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate or amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate.” All three agencies said, “We could find no records responsive to your request.”

Paul Offit and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) promote mass vaccina­tion with aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines for all children. CHOP used to have a webpage stating that aluminum is an “essential metal,” which it most assuredly is not! They also said on that page, “It is found in all tissues and is also believed to play an important role in the development of a healthy fetus.” That is not true either! Ostensibly to prove their point, they cited a 1986 paper in Environmental Health Perspectives by Swedish researcher PO Ganrot, “Metabolism and Possible Health Effects of Aluminum.”²⁹ Ganrot’s seventy-eight-page manuscript included nine hundred fifty-nine refer­ences, none of which support the idea that aluminum is safe. Quite the opposite: Ganrot concluded, “In no case has [aluminum] been shown to have a definite biological function. Taken together, this suggests that [aluminum] possesses properties incompatible with fundamental life processes.” After I gave a talk referencing this webpage, CHOP took it down (but not before we saved it).

A 2020 paper by James Lyons-Weiler, Dr. Paul Thomas and other colleagues compared the aluminum content in pediatric vaccines over the first two years of life for three different vaccine schedules: the standard CDC schedule, the CDC schedule using low- or no-aluminum vaccines and the schedule as per Dr. Thomas’s “Vaccine Friendly Plan.”³⁰ They found that the standard CDC schedule injects infants with aluminum levels that frequently exceed the declared “safe level” in adults, produc­ing chronic aluminum toxicity.

THE GULF WAR SYNDROME CLUSTER

At a certain point, my research group decided to look for another cluster of neurological disease besides the one on Guam. The Guam clus­ter had led to insights about cycad and the cycad toxin BSSG, but at that time, we still thought that aluminum had nothing to do with ALS-PDC.

We settled on Gulf War syndrome as our second cluster. We noticed that whether or not soldiers had deployed, they all had one thing in common—they had received a large number of vaccines, including the anthrax vaccine, and many of the shots contained aluminum adjuvants. The military gave some soldiers up to twenty-four vaccines.

When we tried to buy some anthrax vaccines from the manufacturer, they refused to sell them to us (no real surprise there). We decided to look at what was in them instead, and the ingredient that struck us as the most likely culprit for Gulf War syndrome was the aluminum hydroxide adjuvant. Next, we did the same type of animal experiment that we had done with the cycad. We injected aluminum hydroxide into mice in a dose comparable to what the soldiers would have received by weight and looked at various motor behaviors. The aluminum-injected mice very quickly lost motor function; they also behaved very differently on an open field (a test of neural damage and anxiety), and they displayed cognitive deficits. In other words, they behaved a lot like the cycad-fed mice. In addition, our histological examination of the mice injected with aluminum hydroxide adjuvant showed that the aluminum targeted the motor system and killed motor neurons by apoptosis.³¹

NEUROTOXICITY CLUES PILE UP

In 2011, Lucija Tomljenovic wrote the paper that I referenced ear­lier—for all intents and purposes a meta-analysis of aluminum toxic­ity—looking at aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).¹⁷ She concluded, “The hypothesis that [aluminum] significantly contributes to AD is built upon very solid experimental evidence and should not be dismissed.” The paper included table after table of data showing that aluminum has impacts at every level of the nervous system and at every level of cell and systems action.

That same year, Tomljenovic and I published a paper that asked the question, “Do aluminum vaccine adjuvants contribute to the rising prevalence of autism?”³² The clear answer, with a high degree of statisti­cal significance, seemed to be yes, whether the level of aluminum was low, medium or high. Recognizing that correlation does not equal cau­sation, we also looked at and satisfied most of the Bradford Hill criteria for causality (strength of association, consistency, specificity, temporal precedence, dose-response relationship, plausibility, coherence, experi­mentation and analogy).³³

Chris Exley’s research group reached similar conclusions about aluminum and its relationship to Alzheimer’s and autism. They did important work showing the presence of aluminum in autistic brains³⁴ and in the Alzheimer’s brain,³⁵ confirming that aluminum gets into and damages the nervous system. Unfortunately, Exley managed to annoy both the aluminum industry and the pharmaceutical industry, and in 2021, he was forced out of his decades-long academic position at Keele University when the university refused to let him take money from private donors to do aluminum research.³⁶ The shutting down of his top-tier lab is a tragedy for aluminum science.

If you have normal kidney function, you will generally be able to excrete over 99 percent of ingested aluminum—although you will get less of it out if you are either very young (and don’t yet have mature kidneys) or elderly (when kidney function is slowly declining). Injected aluminum behaves very differently. Using compounds that aluminum binds to, the Gherardi group has traced injected aluminum hydroxide in mice, showing that it does not remain in the muscle where it’s injected but can travel to the spleen and to different cells in the brain.³⁷ In other words, the trajectory of injected aluminum is entirely different from that of ingested aluminum. Gherardi and colleagues concluded that “continu­ously escalating doses of this poorly biodegradable adjuvant. . . may become insidiously unsafe,” notably in cases of “overimmunization.”

A dozen or so years ago, Spanish researcher Luis Luján observed that sheep who had received an aluminum-adjuvant-containing vaccine for a ruminant disease called bluetongue experienced severe muscular and subcutaneous body wasting and spinal column necrosis.^38,39 Luján decided that what he was seeing was a form of “autoimmune/autoinflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants” (ASIA), a label originally put forth by Israeli researcher Yehuda Schoenfeld.⁴⁰ Soon after doing his work with sheep, Luján contacted our lab to report that they had encountered the same phenomena that we had observed in mice.

The immune system is used to dealing with pathological organisms, but it doesn’t know how to deal with aluminum. All it can do—because it has been “revved up” by the adjuvant—is go on the attack. With other colleagues, Tom­ljenovic and I have published a number of papers addressing HPV vaccines.^41-43 Notably, the nine-strain Gardasil-9 (now the only HPV jab on offer) contains more than double the aluminum content of the already aluminum-heavy bivalent and quadrivalent formulations originally introduced.⁴⁴ Before the advent of the disastrous mRNA Covid shots, both the four-strain and nine-strain Gardasil shots were some of the most notorious vaccines causing serious adverse events, including autoimmune disease and death.⁴⁵

BACK TO GUAM

The early researchers looking at ALS-PDC in Guam briefly considered a connection with aluminum. D. Carleton Gajdusek, 1976 co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for his studies of kuru in New Guinea, hypothesized in the early 1980s that aluminum was interfering with calcium-magnesium homeostasis, leading to neuro­degeneration.^46,47 In a 1989 study, neurologist John Steele reported that Guam’s agricultural soils “averaged 42-fold higher yield of elutable [extractable by solvent] aluminium” compared to soil samples from Palau and Jamaica, leading his research group to recommend further study of soil aluminum in Guam.⁴⁸ By 1995, however, Steele was pronouncing the aluminum hypothesis “unlikely.”⁴⁹ And with that, researchers’ interest in aluminum seems to have evaporated.

Because researchers had discounted the presence of aluminum on Guam, I did not initially consider it as a potential causal factor—but it is! A curious fact, never really explained, was that there were ALS-PDC “hotspots” in three southern villages of Guam. This prompted speculation that there was something about the southern region that was different. In 2022, I published a paper with Tom Marler reporting on our analysis of different metals found in cycad seeds.⁵⁰ In southern Guam, depending on growing conditions, we found an aluminum content in cycad seeds that was up to eighty micrograms per gram. In that region, aluminum and selenium accounted for 90 percent of the seeds’ total metal content. Shaded forest microsites had a higher metals content than seeds grown with more sunlight transmission. We know that the southern region had more volcanic soil and, therefore, more aluminum in the soil than else­where. In my view, aluminum almost certainly played a role in ALS-PDC.

THE STATE OF ALUMINUM SCIENCE

The multiple strands of research I have just described—by my own lab and research groups around the world—reveal an indisputable role of aluminum (and, notably, aluminum adjuvants) in neurodegeneration. We still don’t know enough about aluminum, but we know that it’s a hyperstimulant and is very toxic. Unfortunately, the research done by independent scientists is always under attack. We get labeled as “pseudo-scientists,” which makes it virtually impossible to get grants.

Informed consent, as per the Nuremberg Code and Declaration of Helsinki, requires that people be provided with information about all risks, but that isn’t what happens in practice. Instead, governments respond to safety concerns with “Trust us, we’re the experts.” This has been their standard response every time the public raises questions about chemi­cal, pharmaceutical or industrial products, whether tobacco, lead, PCBs, GMOs, biosolids or, most recently, the Covid mRNA gene products.

The pharmaceutical industry spends more money across both sides of the aisle of Congress than any other lobbying group—even more than defense or agribusiness. When corporations rule, you are essentially looking at fascism, although I agree with Mussolini that it “should more appropriately be called Corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described what he calls a “state of exception”—the space between laws—referring to gov­ernments that work outside of their mandates to enforce measures that are usually for the benefit of corporations. The “state of exception” resembles a state of emergency or state of war, allowing governments to adopt control measures without any real justification for what they’re doing.

One result of the corporatism model is that the U.S. and Canada now have a massive chronic illness problem. As of 2023, fully 76 percent of U.S. adults had at least one chronic condition,⁵¹ as did at least 54 percent of U.S. children according to a now-dated study from 2011.⁵² Aluminum is certainly a major contributor to human disease and to neurological conditions, in particular. Our lab’s studies have conclusively demon­strated that we can produce an ALS phenotype by injecting animals with aluminum hydroxide.

Considering that neurological diseases tend to take a while to emerge (a lot of cell death has to occur before they are expressed), I think what we are seeing currently is only the tip of the iceberg. If you combine the neurological assault from repeat injection with aluminum adjuvants and the new and as yet not-fully-understood neurological assault from injectable mRNA technology, we could soon see a neurological crisis of unimaginable proportions. Alzheimer’s and ALS already impose a heavy caregiving burden on families, with relatives often hav­ing to leave the workforce to take care of their loved ones. How will society manage double or triple the number of neurological injuries? Our goal must be to stop putting substances like aluminum adjuvants—and now, mRNA gene products—in our bodies so that we can restore the health of our population and prevent the chronic diseases of the future.

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SIDEBAR

TACKLING THE ALUMINUM BODY BURDEN

In his book, Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom: Discussions with Mr. Aluminum,⁵³ and in his peer-reviewed publi­cations,^54-55 aluminum expert Chris Exley discusses regular consumption of silicon-rich mineral water as a non-invasive method for reducing the body burden of aluminum. In addition, even if the human body has an easier time excreting ingested (versus injected) aluminum, it makes sense to eliminate aluminum-containing processed foods from your diet.

Another interesting observation—anecdotal at this point because no one is funding this type of research—is that hyperbaric oxygen may be able to diminish symptoms of conditions like ALS. Some researchers speculate that in ALS and other neurological conditions, some of the neurons may be simply non-functional rather than “dead and gone.” There is suggestive anecdotal evidence that by putting high levels of oxygen into the cells, hyperbaric oxygen may recover some of those neurons.

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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2025

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