How much does sweating from a sauna or exercise get rid of lead and mercury?

In my video Is Henna Safe?, I talk about a study that proved lead could be absorbed through the skin and into the body. Researchers applied lead to someone’s left arm and then measured the level of lead in the sweat from their right arm over the next few days. As you can see at 0:16 in my video Flashback Friday: Can Saunas Detoxify Lead from the Body?, there was a big spike, proving that lead can not only go into our body, but also out of it. If we can lose lead through sweat, can we sweat for detoxification?

 

 

“No person is without some level of toxic heavy metals in their bodies, circulating and accumulating with acute and chronic lifetime exposures.” Cultures around the world have viewed sweating as health-promoting. “Worldwide traditions and customs include Roman baths, Aboriginal sweat lodges, Scandinavian saunas…and Turkish baths,” but what does the science say?

When I looked up saunas, I was surprised to see a study on the detoxification of 9/11 rescue workers, with a regimen that “included exercise, sauna bathing and vitamin and mineral supplements.” As you can see at 1:00 in my video, the researchers reported on seven individuals. Evidently, during the month before the treatment, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) levels in their blood stayed about the same. Following the treatment, however, all rescue workers had measurable decreases in these PCBs and reportedly felt better, too. They had all sorts of symptoms—respiratory, neurological, musculoskeletal—and they all felt better after the treatment. These improvements were consistent with nearly 400 others treated with the same protocol.

Hold on. If 400 people were treated, why were the results from only seven individuals reported? That’s a bit of a red flag, but not as red as this: The detoxification regimen was developed by L. Ron Hubbard, the man who founded the infamous Church of Scientology. What’s more, the lead author of the detoxification paper appears to have failed to disclose his financial conflict of interest for presumably profiting off of the treatments.

Nevertheless, sweating does represent a “time-honored treatment” in the field of medicine for mercury poisoning, going back centuries. But other time-honored medical treatments include drilling open people’s skulls to release evil spirits or even giving people mercury itself. Remember mercurochrome? What do you think the “mercuro” stood for? In fact, some believe Mozart died of mercury poisoning trying to cure his syphilis, though all of the bloodletting he got probably didn’t help either. Bloodletting, another time-honored medical treatment that makes Scientology saunas look mild in comparison. There was a case report that described a person who apparently recovered from mercury poisoning “after six months of sweats and physical therapy,” though he might have gotten better anyway. You don’t know…until you put it to the test.

Mercury wasn’t formally studied, but lead was. Study participants stayed in a 200-degree dry sauna for 15 minutes, and, based on sweating rates, about 40 micrograms of lead were forced out of the body, with some people getting rid of 100 micrograms or more per 15-minute session. So, you could drink a gallon of chicken broth, and, even if you absorbed all of the lead in the bone soup, you could be back to baseline after just one sauna session.

Are saunas safe for children? “Based on the present scientific knowledge, sauna bathing poses no risks to healthy people from childhood to old age,” though medical supervision couldn’t hurt. This doesn’t mean it would be as effective in children because adults sweat a lot more than kids do, and, of course, kids are the ones who need lead detoxing the most, as you can see at 3:36 in my video. “There is a clear need for robust trials”—robust clinical trials—to test all of this, but even if it works, it’s not as though everyone who needs it—even those who need it most, like a child in Flint, Michigan—will have access to a sauna. That’s why I was so excited to find a paper that investigated the change in blood lead levels of basketball players after strenuous exercise. Saunas aren’t the only way to sweat. What about strenuous physical activity?

A study found that aerobic endurance training led to a drop in lead levels, with rowing more effective than cycling, but how long and how intense did the workout need to be? The paper was in German, but it seems the researchers ramped up the stationary bike by 50 watts every two minutes until the subjects reached exhaustion. So, it was probably just a few minutes with no significant before-and-after difference in blood or urine lead levels, whereas an hour-long endurance exercise row did seem to drop lead levels by about 12 percent.

I could read the basketball player study, though, since it was in English, and, as you can see at 4:38 in my video, college basketball players’ blood lead levels significantly increased—by nearly 300 percent—after a single intense training session on the court. The researchers suspected it was because it was so contaminated where they were playing. The study was done in Turkey, where the lead levels in the air are so high that all of that extra breathing by the athletes evidently made things worse, which I think underscores an important point.

All of the dietary tweaks I’ve talked about for lead poisoning and sweating it out could be thought of as more expedient and less costly than primary prevention—that is, getting at the root cause. However, “this represents a retreat of sorts from previous commitments to a clean environment and to abatement of hazardous pollutants” in the first place. Indeed, lifestyle “nutritional interventions should be thought of only as temporary solutions and continued emphasis must be placed on eliminating lead in children’s environments” in the first place.

How about diet instead? See How to Lower Heavy Metal Levels with Diet.

What about chelation therapy? Check out Heavy Metal Urine Testing and Chelation for Autism.

What about the non-heavy metal aluminum? See Antiperspirants and Breast Cancer.

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What happened when a 5 percent tea tree oil gel was pitted head-to-head against the leading over-the-counter treatment for pimples?

“Acne vulgaris remains one of the commonest diseases to afflict humanity.” As I discuss in my video Benzoyl Peroxide vs. Tea Tree Oil for Acne, according to some online surveys, tea tree oil appears to be “the second most commonly used topical treatment” for acne after benzoyl peroxide. “Crowdsourcing” may be “a novel research method for evaluation of acne treatments,” but before getting too enamored with popular wisdom, you should know information on facial application of “urine as a home remedy for acne” is also circulating on the internet.

“Urine therapy advocates cite historical use as proof of its therapeutic potential claiming urine not only as a treatment for numerous skin conditions, but also as a ‘free cure’ for many systemic diseases,” apparently forgetting all of the horrific skeletons crowding the closets of medical history. “While recycling what the body intentionally removes may seem counterintuitive to good health,” what about Premarin? (They’re talking about the hormone therapy drug made from PREgnant MARe’s urINe.) The best argument for putting pee on your face appears to be that some women swallow pills made from pregnant horse pee. I’m not exactly following the logic there.

Of course, there are drugs for acne. There are always drugs, as you can see at 1:18 in my video. Though, with drugs come side effects. Antibiotics that suppress the bacteria that cause acne “are the standard treatment…but are becoming less effective probably because of the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains.” The prevalence of resistant strains has grown rapidly, such that antibiotics for acne are no longer recommended on their own as “mono-therapy” and re-evaluations are advised every six to eight weeks.

Bacteria do seem to be susceptible to tea tree oil in a petri dish, however, but many of these kinds of studies were performed with free-floating bacteria, whereas, in pimples, the bacteria form what’s called a biofilm, which generally makes them more difficult to eradicate. The bacteria form like a “biological glue” that plugs up the follicle, so petri dish studies can only tell you so much.

But, even if tea tree oil couldn’t kill off the bacteria, it has been shown to suppress skin inflammation. Indeed, if you inflame people’s skin with an allergen and then try to calm it down, tea tree oil does a decent job compared to an over-the-counter ointment or a moderate-potency prescription steroid cream. So, potentially, tea tree oil could help with acne either via an antibacterial mechanism or from an anti-inflammatory standpoint. You don’t know…until you put it to the test.

As you can see at 2:38 in my video, a 20 percent tea tree oil gel was applied twice a day in a study, and researchers saw a beautiful drop in acne lesions after one, two, and three months. About 24 pimples at the start of the study down to about 11. The researchers concluded that tea tree oil could “significantly improve mild to moderate acne and that the products were well tolerated,” but the study had fatal flaw. Did you guess? There was no control group.

How do we know the subjects wouldn’t have healed even faster without the tea tree oil? In a systematic review of randomized, clinical trials on tea tree oil, the “most striking finding” is that researchers could hardly find any randomized clinical trials on tea tree oil. Given “the widespread use” of tea tree oil, “this is both disappointing and important to note.”

Researchers finally conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of a 5 percent topical tea tree oil gel in mild to moderate acne. As you can see at 3:27 in my video, after six weeks, the tea tree oil group experienced a 40 percent drop in whiteheads and blackheads, a 40 percent drop in red and tender acne bumps, and a 47 percent drop in pus-filled pimples, compared to comparatively little change in the control group. Overall, in terms of total lesion count, the tea tree oil gel was three and a half times more effective than placebo—that is, three and a half times more effective than essentially doing nothing. But, most teens don’t do nothing for their pimples. How does tea tree oil compare to benzoyl peroxide, the gold standard?

By far, benzoyl peroxide is the most popular over-the-counter acne therapy—despite its side effects. It can be irritating, causing “erythema [redness], dryness, peeling, stinging, or burning.” However, the prescription option—the long-term use of topical or oral antibiotics—is discouraged due to the development and spread of antibiotic resistance. As a result, attention has turned to “non-antibiotic products such as tea tree oil.”

Compared to tea tree oil, benzoyl peroxide did cause more side effects, including “dryness, pruritus [itching], stinging, burning, and redness”—but it also worked better, cutting the number of inflamed pimples by two-thirds within three months versus only by half in the tea tree oil group, as you can see at 4:33 in my video. The most recent study found them to be more comparable, though.

Putting all of the studies together, tea tree oil products were not only found to outdo placebo, but they approximate more standard regimens, like benzoyl peroxide or topical antibiotics, suggesting tea tree oil products may be “an appropriate option for treating mild-to-moderate acne.”

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We create more than a hundred new videos every year. They are the culmination of hundreds of hours of researching, writing, animating, editing, and producing. We comb through thousands of scientific papers from the peer-reviewed medical literature so that busy people like you don’t have to. 

In 2022, I covered topics from athletics and atrial fibrillation to vitamin supplements and wrinkles. Which videos floated to the top of the charts this year? Check out the top ten.

 

#10 The Purported Benefits of Vitamin K2: Should You Take Supplements?

This video just came out and has already become one of the most popular of the year. To summarize, there is no good evidence that vitamin K has bone, brain, or heart benefits beyond its blood-clotting function. And, even if such evidence arose, we can get all of the vitamin K we need from eating greens, since there’s no requirement specifically for vitamin K2. Further, if some evidence did arise that there was some unique benefit from K2, our microbiome makes K2 from the K1 we get from greens. And, even if we had a problem with our microbiome, we can make K1 from K2, just like other animals do. So, the bottom line: Eat your greens.

 

#9 How to Treat H. Pylori Naturally with Diet

This video asks and answers the question: What food can eradicate H. pylori in the majority of patients? For some background on the Achilles’ heel in certain Asian diets, check out The Role of Kimchi and H. Pylori in Stomach Cancer.

 

 

#8 Food for Hair Growth

This video captured the eighth spot in our top ten, but I also covered Supplements for Hair Growth and Pills for Hair Growth in case you want to take an even deeper dive. Note I added a correction to the pepper information in the table around minute 2:40. As our new in-house video fact-checker just pointed out, the mg/g values for capsaicin weren’t for regular fresh peppers, but fresh peppers that were then dried! So, it’s a little more daunting. Instead of “a quarter of a fresh jalapeño,” it’s more like “a third of a habanero or a teaspoon of medium-hot red pepper spice.”

 

#7 Do Vitamin C Supplements Help with Anxiety?

A few months ago, the acclaimed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force published a recommendation to begin screening kids for anxiety starting at age eight. I’m planning to create an entire series of videos next year on dealing with anxiety, but until then, check out this video discussing the risks and benefits of using vitamin C for depression and anxiety.

 

#6 Glycemic Index of Potatoes: Why You Should Chill and Reheat Them

If you eat potatoes when they’re cold, as in potato salad, or chilled and reheated, you can get a nearly 40 percent lower glycemic impact. Chilling isn’t the only trick to blunting glycemic impact. You can also add vinegar, lemon, or broccoli. See How to Reduce the Glycemic Impact of Potatoes for more information, and, if you’re in a particularly spuddy mood, check out these others from last year: Do Potatoes Increase the Risk of Diabetes?, Do Potatoes Increase the Risk of High Blood Pressure and Death?, and The Healthiest Type of Potato.

 

#5 How to Heal a Leaky Gut with Diet

In this video, which took fifth place in our top ten, I address the foods and food components that can boost the integrity of our intestinal barrier. If you missed the backgrounder video, check out Avoid These Foods to Prevent a Leaky Gut, in which I talk about the over-the-counter drugs and diets that make things worse.

 

 

#4 Which Foods Are Anti-Inflammatory?

A whole food, plant-based diet is basically synonymous with an anti-inflammatory diet, whereas inflammatory markers can double within six hours of eating a pro-inflammatory meal, which I cover in the companion video Foods That Cause Inflammation. This may help explain the remarkable findings in another popular video this year: Plant-Based Eating Score Put to the Test. So, Why Don’t People Eat Healthier? That’s another one of my favorites released in 2022!

 

#3 The Best Diet for Treating Atrial Fibrillation

This important video is a long time coming, addressing which foods we should eat and avoid to reduce our risk of Afib. It’s chock full of information and ends with a compelling and emotional case report of the power of evidence-based nutrition to reverse disease.

 

 

#2 Fighting the Ten Hallmarks of Cancer with Food

As you may know, I’ve been researching and writing a new book on longevity. After it’s been put to bed, edited, fact-checked, copyedited, and published, and I’ve completed my book tour, my next book will be on cancer survival; so, there will be a lot more forthcoming on this critically important topic. Until then, I have dozens of videos on cancer prevention and treatment, including a mind-blowing series on chemotherapy released this year that asked and answered the questions: How Effective Is Chemotherapy? and How Much Does Chemotherapy Improve Survival?.

 

#1 The Best Diet for Healthy Aging

2023 is the year my new book How Not to Age will be released. It’s heartening that there is so much interest, as evidenced by this video reaching number one, as well as the popularity of two other 2022 hits—How to Boost FGF21 with Diet for Longevity and How to Increase Your Life Expectancy 12 to 14 Years. And these just scratch the surface.

I can’t wait to share everything else I’ve uncovered!

 

 

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