Having spent many years fighting off marketers who use the flimsiest of research to justify spending money on expensive new supplements, I am naturally sceptical when I see advertisements for products that make new claims. So many products come and go. In the 1990s there was a time when Germanium was all the rage. The fad was based on some claims that it could boost immunity in Aids patients. Aids was relatively new at the time, so the story hit the headlines, and sales of Germanium supplements rocketed, making a lot of money for the manufacturers before they moved on to something else. Nowadays few people have even heard of Germanium.
Zeolite has emerged recently as a supplement that claims to remove heavy metals from your body. This is certainly an attractive claim, since the very term “heavy metals” refers to pollutants like mercury, aluminium and lead, which are very difficult for our liver and kidneys to excrete. So difficult in fact, that your body’s only route to get them out of your tissues is to put them in your hair as it grows. Hair mineral analysis is used to measure your body burden of these harmful pollutants. They are particularly harmful to the kidneys. They are also poisonous to the metabolism. Their molecules can mimic important body minerals such as calcium and magnesium. If these are in short supply, the body will instead incorporate mimics into bone, soft tissues and enzymes. Unfortunately these mimics cannot do the same job, so they cause metabolic and neurological disruption.