Wellness Wednesday - Mercury Fillings: Ticking time bombs in your head?

Mercury vs porcelain.

In a previous post about dental health and nutrition, I briefly mentioned mercury or amalgam fillings. All I really said was that you should get them out but I didn't elaborate on the "why" of it. The "why" is really important and definitely deserved its own blog post.

Let's face it, mercury fillings are NOT aesthetically appealing... If I see an open mouth in front of me, filled with silver, it makes me cringe away bit, I can't lie. Most of us have fillings, but a mouth that is more silver than white messes with my head. It doesn't look terribly appealing, but it says something about a person's health because, as I mentioned in my dental health post, your health starts with your teeth. If your teeth are unhealthy, your body is definitely in even worse shape!

Mercury fillings are a constant, hot debate between conventional medicine and holistic medicine. Conventional medicine will tell you that mercury, in small doses ie. in fillings, is not bad for you at all. However, the next sentence after that is always "but it shouldn't be used for children under 6 or pregnant women."

I've never really understood that kind of thinking. To my mind, if it's harmful to a child under 6, or to a foetus, it's not exactly going to be GOOD for anyone, is it? Children under 6 are still developing. I get that. You don't want to affect their development. However, after the age of 6 our bodies are still going through constant changes. As I've mentioned before, in this post, you can lose anywhere from 200 000 to 3 000 000 cells per SECOND so your body needs to regenerate those cells and it actually goes through a complete turnover about once every 7 years. That doesn't mean you get a whole new body as you hit the 7 year mark. It means that, by the end of those 7 years, all the cells you started with at the beginning of that 7 year cycle, will have been replaced with new ones and those new ones are going to be built from the fuel you have been putting into your body.

Surely that means that you should be putting good stuff into your body as much as possible? Otherwise that 7 year turnover is going to make a huge difference from a wear and tear point of view! You know when someone says, "Wow, she literally aged overnight!" Yeah...

Mercury fillings are small. That's why most institutions say that there isn't enough of them to make much of a difference. But these things are IN YOUR MOUTH. Think about how young you probably were when you got them. Most people start getting fillings before the age of 10 (boggles the brain because kids just shouldn't be getting holes in their teeth) By the time they are 30, they've had over 20 years of exposure to the mercury. The problem with the mercury in your fillings is that it doesn't just lie dormant. Simple, everyday acts like eating, drinking, chewing and grinding up food against your mercury fillings increase the amount of mercury vapour released and absorbed into your body. If you are an incessant gum chewer, you are in an even worse situation because you are constantly activating that mercury to release vapour. Heat causes the mercury to release vapour in large amounts as well so if you are a big coffee and tea drinker, you are setting off the vapour with every cup.

If we're going to only take things at face value and believe that the FDA and the SABS are right and the dose is too small to really have any consequences, then that means that processed foods, GMOs, household cleaning products, beauty products and fluoride are also fine for us because they've ALSO approved those. And yet, there is NO question that heart disease and cancer are now as common as a cold. Diseases like Alzheimer's and Hyperthyroidism and many autoimmune diseases are becoming just as common. I do think that the body is fairly tough. If you are going to be exposed to stuff like that a handful of times in your life, but 90% of your life is filled with clean, organic, natural products, then you'll probably be ok, not taking genetics into account.

BUT...

Mercury fillings are in your body FOR LIFE. That means its not going to be just a small bit of exposure. It's going to be every second, of every minute, of every day for the rest of your earthly life. I wonder, when they ran their tests, if they let it run for 60 or 70 years to test just what mercury can do to a person's health in the longterm...

Mercury is a poison. That's a fact. Just like fluoride is a poison. So many countries have stopped adding fluoride to drinking water BECAUSE it's so toxic. Yet we are still allowing them to put mercury into our mouths.

The dental establishment claims that amalgam lets off very little to no mercury vapour, but, interestingly enough, they then turn around and blame mercury–free dentists for “unnecessarily exposing patients to excess mercury” when removing mercury fillings. So I have to wonder why they are contradicting themselves there. They have all but admitted that they release mercury vapour. There is NO DOUBT that mercury fillings DO release harmful mercury vapour. You can read these articles, The Scientific Case Against Mercury Amalgam and Understanding Risk Assessment for Mercury From Dental Amalgam.

So, what can you do about it? Well, the dental establishment IS right. Removing amalgam fillings can expose patients to unhealthy amounts of excess mercury. According to this website:

"Less well studied than mercury vapor is the problem of amalgam particulates. Taking out fillings with a high speed dental bur generates a cloud of particles, at least 65% of which are one micron or less in size. These are fully respirable, get deep into the lungs, where the microscopic particles are broken down and the mercury is systemically absorbed within a few days. This mercury exposure can be as much as a hundred times greater than that from the vapor."

Unfortunately, about 12 years ago, I visited a dentist for a check up and, without a word to me, he simply removed my mercury fillings. I'm grateful for it today, but I'm pretty sure that he didn't know the proper procedure back then and it must've sent a huge dose of poison into my body! However, NOT removing them is going to be worse in the longterm so today I'm grateful that they're gone.

A lot of dentists will tell you that the white fillings aren't as resilient. I CAN tell you that mine have been going for 12 years with no problems. I'm also confident that, since I am eating the right foods for my teeth, those childhood cavities are healing themselves under all that white stuff.

There are loads of dentists that are now mercury-free and, if you google mercury-free dentists, you will definitely find one. We have one just down the road from us which is handy. Even better if you can find a dentist that believes in holistic treatments rather than just shoving chemicals into your mouth.

Your health is paramount. If you are doing everything in your power to improve it, but you are still getting exposed to mercury on a daily basis, you are basically running to stand still. If you haven't given it a thought up until now, then now is the time. Start taking steps to get your fillings replaced and allow your body to remove the years of toxic build up of mercury in your system. There are any number of reasons a person might get cancer. This is a big one it's something that can be fixed quite easily.

Very few people actually like visiting dentists. I think I may dislike them more than anyone else;) But this is  a really, really good reason to do it. It may just save your life.