Hacking Longevity Starts with Detoxification

… Christopher Shade, Ph.D., joins the show to take you through a new six-spoke “longevity wheel.” You’ll find out what you can do to live longer by managing toxins and hormones that influences aging.

With expertise in environmental sciences, chemistry and biology, he founded the Colorado-based company Quicksilver Scientific. It’s a group of “chemists, biohackers and age rebels.”

He specializes in the biological, environmental, and analytical chemistry of mercury in all its forms. He presents and teaches in the U.S. and nationally about mercury, environmental toxicities, neuroinflammation, immune dysregulation, and the human detoxification system.

He’s designed detoxification protocols, unique supplement delivery systems, and a patented mercury speciation test. As CEO, he continually drives development and innovation. Right now, the focus is longevity with a foundation in detoxification.

Everyone has a meaningful amount of metals, plastics, molds or other toxins in their body and is pretty much operating with low-grade toxicity. And even though everyone has the same basic detoxification system, people react to and process toxins very differently.

There’s a general universe of toxins: You have exogenous toxins from outside the body (metals, chemicals, mycotoxins or food-borne toxins). Then you have endotoxins, which are made on board usually by gut bacteria and lipopolysaccharide.

That’s why cellular level detoxification matters so much.

“Everything is about creating resilience,” Chris says. “As we get into all these little things that go along with detox and we get into more endogenous toxemia, all that stuff produces resilience. Endotoxin does that at a cellular level, but that’s the main culprit for doing it at a liver level for stopping that transit of the toxins out into the bile. When the endotoxin’s high, it’s hard to get anything done on a detox level. That’s why you have to clear your gut.”

Bile flow, and knowing what blocks it and what opens it, plays a huge role in your body’s detoxification process.

“I see a lot of the people who are really sick, they get to where their bile flow jacked up,” Chris says. “When we talk about detox, that whole detox being totally coordinated with bile flow, that’s a major thing. Toxins leave on bile-flow outlets from your liver, and so people who get locked up in there need some help.”