Zeolites and Health

I received an email from a very good friend who said:

Just doing some online research for a close friend whose wife has just had her cancer return after a break of 7 years and thought I would share this with you and lifeintherightdirection. Interesting stuff.

She sent this along with a link to a page about zeolites. I hadn’t heard of zeolites before so I began to look into them. This post summarizes what I’ve found.

What are zeolites?

The picture above makes zeolites look like some sort of rock from outer space. What are they really? The Collins English Dictionary gives the following definition;

• any of a large group of glassy secondary minerals consisting of hydrated aluminium silicates of calcium, sodium, or potassium: formed in cavities in lava flows and plutonic rocks
• any of a class of similar synthetic materials used in ion exchange and as selective absorbents

Zeolites are natural occurring, highly porous minerals and crystals that are commonly found inside lava flows (a good example is shown in the picture above). They are also made synthetically and use heavily in industry for filtration purposes.

The zeolites website from my friend

My friend sent me the link to this website because of interest in using zeolites for our health. At first it seems very strange that you might consider taking zeolites as a medicine, especially when you see them in crystal form as above, but there appears to be many powdered forms of zeolites that could be used as a supplement. The link sent to me by my friend is for a site trying to sell an Activated Liquid Zeolite.

Immediately, I’m skeptical. Why would we want to eat a rock, a crystal, even if we could make it into a powder or a liquid? It just doesn’t seem natural. I believe that everything we need for our health is available naturally, and unnatural things are usually bad for our health.

Ok, I can hear you say that zeolites are a naturally occurring mineral. That’s true. I just can’t imagine anyone trying to eat them naturally.

There is another similar, highly absorbent, natural material called diatomaceous earth that I’ve known about for a long time. With a bit of searching, I’m surprised to find that people do take diatomaceous earth as a supplement. Apparently there’s something called “food grade” diatomaceous earth.

So, I’ll keep an open mind here.

Back to the website trying to sell Activated Liquid Zeolite. Their main claim is that there’s one particular zeolite (Clinoptilolite) that is safe for human consumption and that it’s an excellent agent for absorbing heavy metals and toxins in the body and eliminating them, and they want to sell an activated liquid form of this.

I found this website a bit confusing and I found it hard to find really good, factual information on it. A lot of the information seemed anecdotal. I got the feeling that the main aim of the site was to sell their product and I don’t like sites like that.

I needed to check elsewhere to figure out how useful zeolites could be.

Zeolites on some of my trusted sites

Two sites I regularly check for health information are Mark’s Daily Apple and Mercola.com – I’ve used these a lot and grown to realize that the information is generally accurate, balanced and useful.

On Mark’s Daily Apple, he has a very interesting page on “eating dirt” or “geophagy”. Apparently the idea of eating dirt has been around for centuries or more. If you think about it for a bit, most animals eat some dirt all the time because they don’t clean everything before they eat it. And, we do need minerals like iron and copper in our diets. So maybe it’s not so strange. Also, I remember reading how gorillas get vitamin B12 from fruits and vegetables because they eat them without cleaning them.

Maybe this idea of eating zeolites isn’t so strange.

Dr. Mercola mentions zeolites on a few of his pages. One that interested me was this one on mercury detoxification. This page really helped me understand what’s going on here.

When you body is trying to get rid of toxins and heavy metals, it usually tries to eliminate them out through your bowels. The toxin is pushed from inside your body into your intestine through the intestinal wall (it’s interesting that, as far as your body is concerned, the material in you intestines is considered to be outside your body – only when accepted through the intestinal wall is it considered “inside”). These toxins sit on the wall of the intestine waiting to be excreted. However, if there’s no mechanism to eliminate them, they may be reabsorbed back into the body. This is where something like zeolites, or diatomaceous earth, or activated charcoal, or a host of plant based options come in. They bind the toxic material to themselves and carry them out of the body. They act as binding agents.

The important thing is not eating the earth (zeolites) and digesting; the important thing is having them pass through your body. It’s not really about going into your body but more about passing through and taking some bad guys (toxins in the intestinal wall) with them.

It’s pretty clear that our bodies are under a lot of stress in the modern world with pollution and exposure to unusual chemicals and substances. The build up of toxins and heavy metals in our bodies is strongly suspected as one of the causes of the increasing cancer rates we’re seeing. Anything we can do to help our bodies deal with these toxins, like using zeolites, could be very beneficial.

Can zeolites help cure our bodies?

With this knowledge, I’m open to using zeolites to help with the detoxification of my body. I’d like to stress the use of the word ‘help’ because using zeolites would not replace – only assist – my current strategy.

If you want to quickly and dramatically improve your health (as is often prompted by something like a cancer scare), I recommend first considering the following strategies. Each are easy, (almost) free, and will have a rapid and dramatic impact.

• dramatically reduce the amount eaten
• try fasting or juice fasting
• switch to organic foods only
• eliminate sugar, alcohol, refined carbohydrates, wheat, meat and dairy
• drink large amounts of water
• get as much gentle exercise each day as possible
• be still with yourself and meditate
• eliminate stress
• get in contact with nature (real physical contact – skin touching nature)
• allow your loved ones to support you

Adding zeolite supplements could well be of assistance and may be worth a try. My personal feeling is that the list of strategies above would have a bigger impact than zeolites but everyone is different and different strategies will work for different people.

Do you have any experience with zeolites or anything else discussed here? Please share with us in the comments section below.

Related Links – Zeolites

• The webpage sent to me – http://zeolitereview.org/read-this-first/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite
• http://www.marksdailyapple.com/eating-earth-exploring-the-mysterious-world-of-geophagy/#axzz3JIoZZidm
• http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/01/13/mercury-detoxification-protocol.aspx