Mercury 102 – How mercury get’s out of amalgam and into your body

See that weird picture right here to the left? That’s a whole body scan of a sheep 29 days after it had 12 mercury fillings placed in it’s mouth. The dark spots in the picture… that’s where the mercury deposited in it’s body. So how did all that mercury get from the mouth to the body? Remember Mercury 101? Mercury amalgams at body temperature constantly off gas mercury vapour. Well it turns out that when you breath in mercury vapour, it easily passes through the lungs at a rate of about 80%. That means that 80% of the mercury you breath in get’s into your body. Yikes.

So mercury definitely get’s into the body through the lungs, but what about through the digestive tract? In most of my research I found sources that say that the certain form of mercury released from amalgam (called elemental mercury) does not easily cross over through the intestines. But Dr. Christopher Shade blew my mind at the seminar on Friday by totally turning this on it’s head. He brought research that showed us that there are bacteria in the digestive tract that can take the elemental mercury and convert it into another form (called methyl mercury… the kind you find contaminating fish), and this form passes through the gut at a rate of 95%. So now you have another source of mercury and the biologically active form at that. We’ll get into more detail about different forms of mercury later but for now, this is how mercury gets into the body, through the lungs AND the intestines.

Oh, and one more picture before we go. The scientists who did the above experiment were criticized for using a sheep because a sheep “chews too much”. The critics said the excessive chewing would release more mercury from the amalgam than a human would. So they repeated the experiment on a monkey. Do you see a difference? I don’t see a difference.

Information Source for experiment here