ocotober 29, 2024
Aluminum in Your Body? New Testing Breakthroughs Reveal What’s Really Inside
Is aluminum quietly building up in your body? High levels of aluminum are increasingly linked to cognitive decline and other health issues. Thankfully, there’s a simple way to find out if aluminum is affecting you.
I have to thank one of my more astute patients for helping me with this one.
So I started researching some home testing options. Let’s face it, technology is moving faster than these big diagnostic companies can keep up (and it is hurting their bottom line). We have lots of options for affordable home testing that also allows us to keep our results private. In the laboratory, Dr Exley considers urinary excretion of aluminum the best relative biological indicator of a person’s lifetime exposure. This lifetime exposure is the sum of all the forms of exposure and all consequences of its removal from the body. I’m not going to get into hair and blood analysis, because quite simply, routine blood and hair analysis do not yet give us the information we want to know.
The formation of urine involves the filtration of blood over time and is a continuous process. The kidney basically “samples” the blood, removing from it all forms of aluminum that are below a critical size. The glomerulus of the kidney is its filter and is permeable to all forms and complexes of aluminum that have a certain molecular weight. Aluminum collects in the urine, and it is then excreted from the body in discrete volumes during the day. So essentially, urine is a composite sample of the aluminum content of the filterable fraction of blood over a specific time.
Now let me just clarify: Dr Exley prefers using a 24 hour urine sample instead of a spot urine sample.
While I don’t disagree with his logic on the accuracy of the 24 hour urine collection tests over spot urine samples, we have to think rationally about how reasonable it is for an individual performing a home test to collect a urine sample for 24 hours. It’s possible because you can buy 24 hour urine collection bottles on Amazon. But is it reasonable?
The short story is that the human body has no normal threshold for aluminum, so any amount of aluminum in or on our bodies is toxic. Aluminum, in all of its forms, is incredibly abundant. It is actually the third most abundant element (after oxygen and silicon) of the Earth’s crust. Aluminum is also super reactive, both chemically and biologically. This presents a significant paradox, because the abundant and reactive aluminum in our environment has no biological function in the human body (or any living organism for that matter). In practical terms, this means that when we stumble upon aluminum in our everyday lives, our bodies only see it as an invader. We have absolutely zero biochemical defense mechanisms opposing aluminum. “There is no aluminum homeostasis, no protection against it, and no controlled elimination.”
Here is the aluminum urine test that I found on Amazon. One test kit costs $28 plus shipping. I suggest testing twice on two different days and averaging the two results.
Special thanks to my patient, who spent quite a bit of time researching the maker of this product, Osumex, to make sure that their ownership didn’t have any conflicts of interest, as the majority shareholders in a company often can and do influence board decisions.
