Laura on the Heavily Metalled Podcast!

Did you know your diet could be the key to combatting metal hypersensitivity? We dive into this and more as we explore the low nickel diet in my appearance on the latest episode of Heavily Metalled.

I had a wonderful time being a guest on the Heavily Metalled podcast. Shari Guess is doing a great job gathering the experience, research, and stories of so many patients, researchers, physicians, and other practitioners in the metal allergy space. I appreciate her making my first interview experience relaxing and enjoyable!

Please check out the other episodes of this enlightening podcast full of scientists and physicians digging into metal allergies: HEAVILY METALLED PODCAST: https://www.heavilymetalled.com/

Transcript below:

My name is Sherry Guest, and this is the heavily meddled podcast.

On this podcast, I interview patients, medical professionals, and industry insiders having important discussions regarding the all too commonly experienced but lesser identified symptoms of hypersensitivity to metals contained and implanted medical and dental hardware, diet, and environment. These medals often cause a variety of dysfunctional immune responses, chronic pain, and other syndromes that fly under the radar of most patients and physicians.

During these interviews, the patients and I discuss ideas for managing symptoms, share personal lifestyle modifications, and talk about how to advocate, date with, and educate providers pre and post surgery, along with options found for implant removal and the how to of adverse event reporting. This podcast does not give medical advice.

From time to time, I may interview medical professionals that render personal opinions you can use to follow up with your individual provider. Let's roll.

Hello, metalheads, and welcome to the Jungle. Thank you for coming back today for this edition of the Heavily Meddled podcast. I am super excited to have our special guest, soon to be Doctor but not yet, Laura Duzette with us. She is the author of the brand New, released this week Low Nickel Diet Cookbook.

Are you also triggered by food? I am so triggered by food. And that is like one of the number one things we hear with people just diagnosed with a nickel. Super, super excited to have you with us today. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the I'm really excited to be here.

I'm super excited that you're here. I'm going to let you tell our guests all about who you are. You have this incredible background. You've done a lot. Of nutritional education. You're in medical school. Give us the background. I studied philosophy in college, which is very different from what I do now, obviously.

But I really loved asking questions and getting to the root of things. But then I ended up working in the tech sector as a program manager. It was kind of an accident,

I worked at Netflix and eBay, things like that. But I wasn't that fulfilled by those jobs and I was trying to figure out what I should do next. I lived in a van so I could save a bunch of money. I've done a lot of really OD things. But I decided one day, okay, I'm ready.

One month from today, I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to really figure out what the next thing should be that will fulfill me in life.

the very next day, I was on my bicycle and I got hit by a car and I got a traumatic brain injury.

So the. Universe wanted to stop me in my tracks. I guess I'm really lucky because it could have been a lot worse. I know people that have it a lot worse than I do, but it was still very challenging for me. And I had a lot of trouble recovering.

And my doctor said, okay, you just have to wait. Usually we don't know how things are going to be for six months, a year, sometimes two years, and they're just going to have to give it some time. And they didn't really give me much other help than that. There was some occupational therapy and stuff that they were doing, but no diet, no nothing.

I did some research and I found this diet called the Gaps diet, and it's a gut healing protocol made by a neurologist, Natasha Campbell McBride.

it's a gut healing protocol that's supposed to help with your brain. So she built this diet before every, everybody agreed with the idea that the gut and the brain were connected, right? Now, that's a little bit more accepted.

I did this diet, and surprise, surprise, I started getting better. Finally and my brain got a little bit clearer, my energy was better, all of those things. It still took a couple of years for me to get back to relatively normal but it really started that process and I fell in love with the power of nutrition on helping the body's natural ability to heal because that's what I experienced.

And so I got a certification in nutritional therapy. It's about a year course and at the end of that I'd started helping people change their diet to support gut and neurological conditions. But I ended up out of nowhere getting dyshydratic eczema on my right hand. So even though my brain was getting better my hand was covered in terrible eczema

it got so bad that I went to see the doctor. He gave me some creams, the typical thing which did help reduce inflammation but it didn't stop the cycles

it got worse and worse to the point I couldn't use my right hand. I could barely. Use my left hand. My whole body was getting covered in eczema. And so I went back to the doctor, and he said, okay, we'll get you to a dermatologist.

it wasn't for two or three months that I could see dermatologist. And meanwhile, I could barely leave the house. I was in a terrible mood, all that kind of stuff. And so I went to Dr. Google and did some research on my own and found some great communities with good information.

Some information I know now isn't necessarily 100% accurate. But it still helped me on my path, which I'm really grateful for. I tried a couple of things, tried to remove certain chemicals that can cause some dermatitis of the hands. And there is this one thing called the low nickel diet, because of a nickel allergy that I did not want to do, because there were things in that diet that I had used to make my brain feel better, that were high in nickel, and I didn't want to change this beautiful diet that had fixed my brain.

That worked for you. Yes, exactly.

finally, I was. Okay, you know what? I'm just going to try it because things like

legumes, nuts and seeds, I was having a lot of that and those are high in nickel so I had to remove all of that.

me stop you for 1 second. What even made you go there? Had you had jewelry allergies prior? Had you had any exposure that made you think you might have a nickel issue before that?

I think it's interesting because have read some other people who have said some people naturally just stop wearing jewelry not realizing it, that they stop wearing the jewelry because they have problems with it. And I think I was one of those people. I got piercings very late in life, like around 1718 and they would get infected and they would never heal up and they would always be problematic there.

And so I just stopped wearing

earrings. I stopped wearing jewelry almost completely and the jewelry that I would wear was like rubber. I didn't put one together so I'm pretty sure that I was already allergic to nickel beforehand.

So I looked at the diet and I started doing it. And within a few weeks, this hydraulic eczema was a little bit better. The cycles were still happening, but they weren't as bad. And then a couple of weeks later, after that, the cycle slowed. There was more time between cycles.

It was getting better and better.

finally got to see my dermatologist. We went through the whole rigma role. She diagnosed me with systemic nickel allergy. And then I really looked into, okay, I'm going to have to do this for quite a while now.

I was really disappointed as someone who knew a lot about nutrition and had very strong opinions about nutrition, that there was like one cookbook out there, and it was full of flour and sugar and things that I knew weren't good for metabolic health, weren't good for brain health, weren't good for gut health, weren't good for weight loss, for sure.

Yeah, those things, too.

so I said, okay, well, I'm just going to have to figure this out for myself. The lists of nickel, what's high and low in. Nickel were inconsistent. We have to eat below 150 micrograms of nickel per day and what food comes with a label that says micrograms on it or what recipes come with micrograms per serving, all that kind of stuff.

There were really well intentioned researchers and doctors and other people who tried to provide resources and point systems and I really am glad that they did that. I'm sure that's helped people. But to me, especially as someone who was an expert at improving processes and making things more clear that are complicated, the things that I did in tech, I have this natural need to take complex things and make them simple and easy for people.

And I saw this big problem, the low nickel diet situation. It's like this is something that could be fixed, that could be a lot easier for people and I would like to make this more intuitive and easier. I think that I can do that. Eventually I started and I went through the first three years of.

Medical school, finishing it. I've had to do it in pieces. I learned how to take photos, and I did the recipes the summer before med school started, and then after first year, because I could not do anything during the actual med school other than study. The summer after, I did the research for the guide, part of the book where we talk about the immune system

hopefully a simple enough way for most people to understand how this allergy happens and some of my philosophy behind different approaches people can take.

then I did all the crazy calculations

that people could look up ingredients and see in a tablespoon, in a teaspoon, in a cup how much nickel is in that, so they can take their own recipes and figure out how much nickel is in those. Then I did all the stuff for my recipes. Okay, stop. I'm going to stop you from it because you were, like, mind blown right now.

Okay, we're going to come full circle, but I got to take you back for just a minute. When you were diagnosed, were you diagnosed via a patch test, or did you have a lymphocyte transformation test? Have you ever had an LTT test or is strictly a patch test? Just a patch test.

And did you get lucky with a dermatologist that could diagnose you with systemic nickel? Full disclosure, I suffer more with internal stuff. I don't really have a lot of external symptoms on my skin. I don't really have any eczema at all. From time to time, I'll get a bleeding rash or something.

My experience with dermatology in the world of skin breakouts with nickel allergy is limited. So I've heard that it's a little bit uncommon for a dermatologist to diagnose with systemic allergies. They typically think type one allergy on the skin. They don't really think internal. Did you just luck out?

I know now that I lucked out because there aren't as many dermatologists in the United States that are educated on it. There's some that know about it but don't believe in it. They haven't looked into the data. But I can tell you I was just at a contact dermatitis conference last weekend.

They had people talking about it in the conference. Multiple talks about it. In fact, Dr. Neteros, she did a whole talk. Systemic nickel allergy and birch allergy. So it's fairly well known in the contact Dermatitis community. There are levels of evidence for everything. We'll get to that later. What is the difference between dysydratic eczema and contact dermatitis?

Can you just briefly summarize that? Yeah. So dyshydratic eczema, it's going to happen on the palmer side of the hands

palmer side of the foot. So underneath, not on top and especially on the hands, it's going to be more

the interdigital sides of your fingers. And then this is called the volar side of the hand. I think that's the word here, and along the edges. So you're going to get more vesicular. So like vesicles, you may see under the skin it's like a little bubbles that look like water and will start out really itchy and red and then the bubbles will come up and they'll maybe have some fluid in it and you may want to squeeze them and fluid would come.

Out, then it scabs over

then it heals.

it doesn't start again, but if it does, the whole cycle starts over again. And that takes a couple of weeks to go through. That whole cycle only on your hand? Yes. Nowhere else on the body?

Except the feet. Hands and feet, yeah. Dyshydratic eczema. It has to be vesicular, and those are the areas that it happens. You can get other types of dermatitis on the hands, but it's usually more in the palm

the dorsum of the hand. You can also get some vesicles here as well, but you can also get contact dermatitis here. Those are the definitions provided to me by Dr. Neterost out of case Western.

contact dermatitis would be in relation to nickel allergy would be what, in contrast. So I think technically you could say dyshydrotic eczema is a type of contact dermatitis. It's like a more umbrella term. But if, for example, I said you can get contact dermatitis on this surface of the hand, that could be something like, if you have a sense.

Sensitivity to something in a soap and you're washing your hands with it. I just saw a little boy today who had terrible eczema on the top of his hands right here. And he was washing his hands really hard at school with this soap that was probably not good quality.

that's more a response just on this location. Right,

what Dr. Neteros also said is that when you see dyshydratic eczema, it means there is a systemic

Always. Not necessarily nickel, but a systemic allergy. Yes, that's right. Because there are other causes, but nickel is the biggest one. Yeah. Okay,

we have the dyshydratic eczema, then we have contact dermatitis. But then how would you define for me being just a layperson who doesn't know dermatology really well? There's people that have scars with nickel allergy that are rubbed over their hardware. Or like, for me, I get breakouts. Actually, I think I have one right now.

So I don't know if you can see it. There's little, like. Boil. That kind of opens up when I have something high in nickel. Sometimes it'll show up here. Sometimes it'll show up on the shoulder. Yeah. This is an area for systemic nickel. You will get. So you actually.

You can also get around your mouth. You can actually get it in a lot of places. I get it on my chest. So the craziest thing, I have a fusion at L five. S one. I get it in an unmentionable place on my posterior. And because of the hardware, I have SI joint infusions, and above it, a fusion L five.

So. And every time I eat nickel, I break out in that unmentionable place in a bleeding rash that we couldn't figure out forever until I made the connection. So what kind of dermatitis is that? What kind of reaction is that?

It's okay if you don't know. It would just be a guess for me. We don't learn a lot of dermatology in med school. Believe it or not, I want to become a dermatologist, but I probably won't know of that until I'm in residency. Okay, so that's the goal, ultimately, is dermatology for you?

Yeah, I just decided that a couple of days ago. So you're hearing it. Yay. But I did want to mention something, since you just talked about it, and this is very interesting. You know how there's patch testing. Yes. So if you take somebody who has a patch test and it's positive for nickel sensitivity, and they had, for example, let's say I had dermatitis on my ear where the nickel was before.

So if eight nickel, the patch test spot, it will flare up as well as other spots where nickel was sensitized on the skin. Yes. Additionally, you could have somebody where you then put more nickel here, for example, like maybe I wore some earrings here with some nickel in it, and then the site of the patch test would flare up right after the test.

Yeah. There is a memory that your immune cells have of where these things happen and where they need to go. When something bad is happening or what they. Dr. Kaiseto talked about memory lymphocytes in the last adaptive immune system thing, so that was really fascinating. I'll tell you the super quick personal experience I had with it.

I have a son who's adopted with a nickel allergy that had been throwing up his whole life. We thought it was a soy allergy. We could never connect the dots, and it wound up being a nickel Allergy. Wasn't the soy. It was the nickel in the soy. But anyway, long story short, he is a blacksmith, and he likes to work with metal, and he had, at one point, gotten a piece of metal under his skin while he was working.

It healed, it scarred over, no big deal. Well, you know how since nickel allergies, antigen driven, he winds up with Lyme disease because the immune system is compromised? And when he got Lyme, this scar that had been healed for two years turned into this big, massive boil that we had to go to his doctor, who's great.

She's a pA, and she's amazing. And nobody knew where it came from, though. It's like, yeah, it's a scar in it, but it's been healed, and all of a sudden, it's erupted into this big, huge thing that they had to cryo off. Well, When we finally made the nickel connection, it's like, oh, metal skin, prior exposure, immune systems down.

So perfect example of what you said. That's exactly what happened. It fired.

Okay, so I'm going to bring us back on track here. Okay, hang on. I'll edit the funny stuff out.

Okay, so you're. You're allergic to Nick. You find out you're allergic to nickel. The diet's coming. Oh, no. You write this, you get the dyshydratic eczema. Talk about, let's go back to basics. And again, I'll cut the funny stuff out, but let's go back to basics and talk about what a nickel allergy is and how it manifests in people that are allergic in all the ways.

It doesn't have to be just diet specific. Like are all people people that have skin reactions allergic systemically? What do you think the percentage is? As far as I know, there's not great data on this. And yet. It's definitely not definitive, but I've talked with multiple specialists about this, and overall, they have said if you test positive, there's, like, at least a 40% chance that you may be systemically sensitive to nickel.

Additionally, you can think about it this way. If your immune system has been trained to be reactive to nickel and to make all of these T cells looking for Nickel everywhere,

be able to tell the body, hey, there's nickel, let's fight it. Then, when you consume nickel and it gets past the gut barrier and gets into the immune system, as well as the bloodstream, that will cause systemic inflammation, that will cause inflammation in that area, because it will reach some of these T cells, who will freak out and release all their mediators and say, hey, hey, let's fight.

So, logically, it makes sense that anyone who has this allergy on the skin likely could have. Nation just from absorbing nickel through the GI tract. There is definitely research that indicates that, but I wouldn't say it's without question. It's not commonplace yet, but it needs to be. Do you feel like there are any demographic racial boundaries?

Does it have locational boundaries or do you feel like it would span the globe? As far as reactivity, do you have any data seen, data about racial boundaries? Think for sure. It tends more towards women and children, but children can grow out of it. Also, if people live in environments where they're eating a lot of foods that are grown in volcanic soil, there's more nickel in volcanic soil.

So for example, Italy is one of the countries that

they're at the forefront of research in this area up because they have been researching it and battling it far longer than we have because they have a lot of nickel in their soil. That would also mean Hawaii most likely. Would have a. Yeah, like, you don't want to be drinking Kona coffee.

I do have a couple of friends that are black that have experienced nickel allergies. I don't know, in the Asian population or in the Middle Eastern population. I guess it bears further research, but I was wondering if you had any stats on that. The low nickel diet is not near as commonplace yet as it needs to be.

I think everybody that ever has had a jewelry allergy probably needs to at least try a low nickel diet. But how does the nickel and diet affect people with nickel allergies, and how big a deal is it? We've already talked about some dermatological manifestations of systemic nickel allergy, and those are probably the most well researched.

And that's because dermatologists have been studying at least contact dermatitis to nickel for a long time. Over 40% of IBS patients that have been tested have tested positive to nickel. And so it's possible that over 40%, it could be nickel allergy that is the root cause of their issue.

That's a huge percentage of people. We've also seen. GeRd and diarrhea. There's definitely comorbidity to celiac disease, non celiac gluten sensitivity. A lot of GI issues have been linked to nickel allergy. Endometriosis has a couple of good research papers on it, connecting it thyroid disease, my specifically, lactose intolerance.

Also burning mouth syndrome, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia. Those are all the big ones. I would also say that's more the syndromic idea, which means it's more than just one symptom from that root cause. And the problem with syndromes is they're very difficult to prove because a lot of these things can be caused by multiple things.

so I would never want to discount anyone's experience or what they have seen in the order of things as they have happened. It's just we don't have good data. But there have been reports of all of these things. And I think what's most important is that. Document all of these things and try to do as much research as we can, and then also just focus on what is the root cause, and how can we address this root cause to hopefully address as many things that could be happening from it.

So that's why I focus a lot on the gut health part and a healthy diet that supports the whole body. So let's talk for a minute about common sources of dietary nickel. Our listeners, some of them know quite a bit. Some of them know nothing. So for the person who knows nothing, what are the common sources of dietary nickel?

I'll start with the heartbreaker. And that's chocolate

and legumes, like peas and refried beans. Thymus beans. I still eat some sometimes, but humus. Humus, I know. Nuts and seeds, grains, oats are high in nickel. I would say any processed food can be high in nickel. Canned foods, high. And nickel. Vegetable and processed oils, those are the big ones.

Coffee. Is coffee high? It depends on the coffee, yeah. Okay. My first. Viral post that went to over a million people was a post that said your stainless steel water bottle could be making you sick and you would not believe the people said, me too. Me too. My mouth goes numb when I drink from it.

I felt terrible. I thought it was just me. Every time I drink from it, I can't taste anything for a few hours. I mean, the strangest comments from a stainless steel water bottle. I believe it more than just food, the diet and the environment. Talk about some of your key principles and guidelines from your low nickel diet cookbook.

There's a section in my cookbook that I call the Three tenets of a successful low nickel diet. I think I also have it on my website. You want to reduce nickel intake, you want to increase nickel release, and you want to be kind to your immune system. Hopefully that makes sense.

Those are the three pillars, if you will. You want reduce the amount of nickel that you're intaking. So that would be through food and most definitely through water. Because unfiltered water is by far the biggest in. Take of nickel of all possible sources and that's one of the more surprising things.

You really want to be careful with unfiltered water then trying to make sure if you can that your cooking utensils aren't made of nickel so you don't have any nickel leaching into your food that you're cooking. That would be 180 stainless steel or wheat straw or bamboo. I hate to say plastic.

I'm not a big fan of plastic but I guess you have to pick the lesser of the evils. Glass. I like glass a lot and then also you want to reduce it in your environment. You don't want to be wearing any nickel. You also don't want to smoke. Cigarettes are a big source of nickel and even pollution.

You can get nickel from pollution. My last guest that I had on about the low nickel it she was getting severely inflamed from her shower. It was an hour after she took her shower all the nickel in the water pipes. Yeah so big sores. Back to the unfiltered water.

You kind of went over what types of food they should avoid until they can get into the cookbook. What are some safe foods to start with? What's safe? The safest thing and the most nutrient dense things that you could eat are meats and animal products. They're the most nutrient dense.

So thank goodness, you will get almost all, if not all, the nutrients that you need eating just meat. And they are by far the lowest in nickel. So those are very safe.

some good vegetables that are low in nickel would be squashes. Squashes are like go to cucumbers aren't too bad, right? Yeah, cucumbers.

tend to do apples pretty well. Apples and pomegranate, sometimes grapes. Bach Choy is low. Radishes, sometimes baby lettuces aren't too bad because they haven't been in the soil that long. Hydroponic vegetables aren't going to have nickel in it. Okay, now, here's a question. Hold that thought. I'm going to interrupt our little flow here to ask you this question.

So I thought hydroponic. Would be amazing.

then somebody said, you know, with hydroponics, you have to feed them. You have to feed them a liquid plant food. Do you know the nickel content in the liquid plant food? Have you ever done any research into that? No. I would assume you have to make your own mix.

I actually have an herbalist with a nickel allergy who is actually thinking of trying to figure out what that looks like. I know a patient of doctors, Iris. He hooked me up with her and she does hydroponics. And I was going to get some information from her because I know there are a lot of people that are interested in that.

So she may be a good resource for that. For all of us. That would be awesome. And you have to let the podcast know on that for sure. Fruits, melons are pretty good. Apples, bananas, blueberries, as long as they're not wild. Pomegranates do pretty well for me. Okay, that's good.

I think they're annoying to eat, so I never think about them. Yeah, I actually do really well with pomegranate and grapes. Within moderation have done okay for me. Yeah, it depends where they're grown. White bread, white pasta, white rice tend to do well. Yeah, those are low. Yeah. Corn is interesting because it's so hard on the gut.

So it depends on how you're getting it. It's also not meant to be a food, so I try not to eat corn, but I understand it's very good. Olive oil is usually not too bad. Are there specific foods that help alleviate symptoms, or is it just pretty much abstaining from the high nickel content?

You could say that things like parsley or cilantro, they have mild chelating effects, which means that they can bind to metals

that you'll poop them out and you won't absorb them. The same with vitamin C. So those foods could maybe reduce your absorption a little bit and help you excrete the nickel without it being absorbed. You could also look at it from the perspective of maybe not an immediate benefit, but a long term benefit.

Eating foods that.

You nutrients that help rebuild your tissues, especially your skin, hair, nails, gut lining. And you get those in animal products. That's why I'm a big proponent of meat stock, especially meat stock made with chicken feet and bones and skin so that you get plenty of the collagen and proline and glycine and all of the fats that your body uses to rebuild those things.

And then not eating things that are stressful to your gut or stressful to your immune system, that helps relieve your symptoms as well.

I want to talk to you for a minute about some of the things I mentioned that I didn't have as much time to go through your book. I just literally want to sit and read every page. It looks amazing. Before we actually get there, let me come back. You did all your own photos for the book because they were fantastic.

Like, thank you so much. I was so self conscious about it because my partner is actually a very good photographer, and so when I was trying to learn how to do it, I felt like. My photos were terrible, but in the end, I think there's some pretty good ones.

There's some maybe not so great, but yeah, I did them all. All the food photos are mine except for the COVID photo. I hired someone for that.

you wrote all the recipes yourself? Yes. Well, there's one of my grandmother's recipes that I put in there with her permission. That's awesome. That's a proud thing. Okay, so going back, a lot of people with nickel allergies suffer with mass cell activation and super sensitive to histamine. Is your book a safe place to start, or do you think that they're going to need to adapt some of those if they're still having a lot of histamine reactions?

I have both a type one and a type four allergy to nickel, so I'm super high histamine reactive. And I have alpha gal also. Do you know what that is? I don't think so. It sounds. It's the tick borne allergy to red meat.

know it's going away. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know it could go away. That's great. In a lot of people, it goes away after three to five years. I'm on year six and I'm starting. Be able to eat beef again, which is great. I have to kind of space it out.

Ostrich and emu are red meat. They're poultry, so they're safe, and they taste just like beef. So there's that, really. But anyway, I'm dealing with some different allergies. But the big thing is, most people aren't dealing with alpha gal. There are three of us right now that deal with nickel and alpha Gal, so we're kind of our own little group.

It really is spreading, but I know there are so many that deal with mass cell activation and histamine issues. How many of the recipes in your book would be friendly to a low Histamine diet in conjunction with the Low nickel? The way that I wrote this book was, basically, I took all of the comorbidities that are typical or common with systemic nickel allergy, and I found the most evidence based diets, many of which are actually used as standard of care in medicine to treat

support these diseases. So, for example, the low FODMAP diet is standard of care to treat IBS.

Well supported. However, not all of those foods are low in nickel. Right. But I use that as one of the kind of pillars of the diet. Also a low carbohydrate diet and the Mediterranean diet and a little bit of influence from the gaps diet as well, although that one does not have research around it.

just my personal experience with it and with my clients and I know nothing about the gaps diet. A gut healing protocol I would say. I took a lot of my love of broth

soups and some of the elimination diet aspect of it

this diet. So I used all of those kind of filters on the low nickel diet and that's where all of my recipes come from. However, I do notate in each recipe that may have some high FODMAP foods or that aren't FODMAP and what you could take out. Basically I made it so that each recipe you could see what some of the problematic things were and what you could exchange for.

And stuff like that. There aren't a ton. You can have normal rice instead of cauliflower rice, for example. I try to stay away from rice, especially if I'm flaring up, because it can be hard on the gut. So that's why I kept that out, especially at the beginning.

is there no rice in the book at all?

example, if I ever mention that it has rice, I'm going to reference to the cauliflower rice recipe. But I'll also say you can just use normal rice if you want to. It's kind of easy, things like that, where it's more like

a normal cookbook. It's just for the people who want to stay more in the line of low FODMAp and those sorts of diets. They have those recipes of what they could do differently. So I'm a super all or nothing person. I see the list of super high nickel and I'm like, I can't ever have that.

Can't ever have that, can't ever have that. I never did the Italian nickel detox diet or the super hardcore things. It's kind of weird the way my brain works, but you use coconut aminos. Never think that coconut aminos were safe because coconut is in it. But I noticed several spots where I did find in your book that you use foods that I would typically think are

problematic for nickel, but you're not afraid to use them. I mean, part of me is black and white, all or nothing. The other part of me is kind of moderation in all things, and it's probably okay to have a few berries. It's okay to have a salad once a week because I'm in a place in my healing where I can do that.

Right. How do you know when a little bit is okay or a little bit is too much? I guess that's the question. That's definitely tricky, I would say, for some of those things, like coconut aminos and whatnot. I went to the community and asked them or found posts where people talked about whether or not they had trouble with it.

And a lot of the things I use that some people worry about are high nickel. So many people had no problems with it, and so I tried it and I didn't have a problem with it. And other people I've worked with, they haven't had a problem with it. So that's why I put it in there.

There are other people that have nickel and cobalt. Or Balsam of Peru in addition, and I couldn't write the cookbook for everyone because that would be impossible. But I tried to make it as flexible as possible and point out potential problems as much as possible so people could be aware, especially if they try something and they're not seeing as many good results as they think they should.

I give them some options of additional things. They can try to get a little bit more hardcore with it, but when it comes to when to risk it, I would say when you start, if you're starting the low nickel diet, if it's going to be healthy for you, I would try to be as strict as possible.

In fact, I would say consider going completely carnivore, if you can, for at least the first few weeks, because that will be the lowest nickel you could possibly eat. So it allows time for your body to get rid of nickel and kind of get back to an equilibrium in.

It's also very low inflammatory. It's very good for the immune system

at least do a couple of weeks of that and then slowly start adding in low.

Fruits, low vegetables, or maybe you just start with mostly meat and one or two vegetables, one or two fruits and just make you just slowly change and see how you're feeling. If you're feeling fine, give it a go. Just allow a couple of days after you add something new to make sure that you don't have a response to it.

Most carnivore diets are okay with dairy, is that correct? And dairy is thought in many other realms to be pretty inflammatory. Correct me if I'm wrong. It can really depend on your gut health and your microbiome. But I think that you're right. That's up for debate. There's data in multiple directions and I think it's also dependent on your gut history, your genes, all sorts of things.

I have seen many, many people who have started out with like a lactose intolerance have done certain diets with me, and after six months they could have any dairy with no problem. That's not going to be everyone, but a lot of people. Have issues with dairy, not because they actually have real issues with dairy, but because their gut microbiome, their gut health is bad.

Okay, I've got a million dollar question. So I appeared on a podcast. I'm going to hook you up with these doctors. It's a gastroenterologist and acrna. They are amazing. They're super progressive. They called me to have me on to talk about my experience with metal allergy. So in favor of the nickel thing and taking it to patients, he has a supplement that he gave me to try called Atronteel Pro, the main ingredient.

It's really high in polyphenols, and it's super amazing for gut health. But one of the big players in it is horse chestnut extract. How do you think that would go off in a nickel allergic patient?

think it depends how sensitive they are. Know, I don't know anything about this particular supplement, but let's say me right now. I had some chocolate cake a while back. I have beans every now and again. I can eat more nickel. Without reactivity, and that's because I went long enough keeping it low.

My T cells died off. So I've got way fewer T cells running around looking for nickel, so I can have more nickel periodically without a problem. So if you feel like you're in that kind of place and you want to try something to up your game with, let's say, your gut health or whatever, you want to try this, I would say, yeah, just don't change anything else and try it and see what happens.

Know, because I see, like, the word nut, and I'm like, no, can't happen. But then part of it is like, my friend roasts his own cashews, and I had to have some the other day, and they were amazing, and I actually didn't die. It also depends on the pollen outside.

It depends on what I ate yesterday and the day before. Like, how bad am I going to be and how much pain do I want to endure? And now a word from our sponsor. Attention, metalheads. Are you struggling with skin rashes, joint and systemic pain or fatigue that just won't go away?

Type four metal allergy is often overlooked as a culprit in many of today's chronic illnesses. Get to. The root of the problem with MELISA testing Melissa is a scientifically proven and clinically validated test that measures immune reactivity to metal allergens like nickel, cobalt and titanium. With fast and reliable results, you can get the answers you need to find relief and live a healthier life.

Don't let metal allergies control your life any longer. Visit Melissa.org to learn more and schedule your test. Trust us, you'll be glad you did. Melissa A valuable diagnostic tool in medicine.

But yeah, the interesting thing so we talk about vitamin C being able to help absorb nickel. So my gut health

pretty wrecked from everything I went through and I would wager to say that it still is. And it's so sensitive that I can't take a lot of supplements. I can't really handle citric acid very well. I can't handle vitamin C, certainly not with every meal and certainly not 1000 milligrams.

So what do people like me do that have that issue? If you can't take the. Vitamin C. I mean, where do you start to rebuild a gut that's that wrecked? I was going to say this earlier with the histamine sensitivity. I'm definitely not

expert on histamine sensitivity, but I can tell you that a lot of people with histamine sensitivity, it's not an issue with histamine. It's an issue with gut health again.

a lot of people who fix their gut health all of a sudden don't have this histamine issue anymore. So the gut health is the most foundational thing for all of these things. If you can get that healed, if you can get that working, well, a lot of these things are not a problem.

Can I be your first patient?

Of course. When do you graduate? I'm there. I'm patient number one. I'm not saying that that's going to solve everybody's problem. It solves a lot of people's problems. They're definitely real histamine sensitivity people. They're mass cell activation syndrome people where that's not going to solve their problems. But. Help significantly because, well, I didn't have a problem in the world.

Yeah, it's the root. I didn't have a problem in the world till I had all this hardware put in. I didn't have a single allergy that I would tell you, the more and more I've had out, the more and more I can tolerate. More nickel, more nuts, more salad, more.

So it's working. But, yeah, I've got to rebuild. You talk about some probiotics in your book. Can we handle probiotics? Yeah. Listed the probiotic strains that have been shown in the research to help people with nickel allergy. I have personally taken L Routeri.

not sure if that's exactly how you say it. Periodically, like on and off over time, and maybe I felt a difference. And it's the same thing with vitamin C. There's some evidence that it can help. Is it going to help as much as lowering the amount of nickel that you eat?

No. Is it going to help as much as sleeping at least seven and a half hours? Night? No. Is it going to help as much as reducing your stress? No. These are tiny improvements. And I would say if you're starting, if you just were diagnosed or you're having a bad flare, focus on the biggest bang for your buck changes, not on these little piddly things.

Those can be little things that you add once you get all of the most important things down first. So the things I list, like really getting your diet down, getting your water filtered, getting your sleep right, getting your stress right, get rid of all of these people that stress you out in your life that aren't good for you.

Get rid of commitments that you've made that they don't necessarily need. You set three months in your calendar where it's about you getting better and getting back on track and just get those major things down and then worry about the little things. I would say I'm going to take you down a scary path for a minute.

Well, maybe not scary, but. So gluten. I spent ten years gluten free because. Right. That's the thing. It's anti inflammatory and gluten. Inflammatory. And then I heard back to that all or nothing thing, that all the gluten free grains are the highest in nickel. And gluten honestly never really upset my stomach.

I was not one of those that was sensitive to it, especially when I went to Europeanated. So when I heard that gluten free grains were high in nickel, I just quit gluten free grains and I added gluten back in. Now, I'm not crazy over the top. I love sourdough bread.

I'm so happy to have gluten back skin. But in your cookbook, there's no gluten. There's very few grains. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to advocate more toward gluten free grains if you do grains at all. Am I wrong there? Tell me your position on gluten free grains, white grains, grains and nickel.

Probably the only grain that I would really support is rice, but I don't support that in the beginning. The thing is, everybody's going to be different and good for you right now, maybe not good for you later. I'm not saying that gluten, or food that has gluten is like the devil for everyone.

Know for a fact that gluten creates intestinal permeability in every person, not just people who have celiac syndes or non celiac gluten sensitivity. Every single person, when they eat gluten, it separates the space between the cells in the gut lining and allows more things into the bloodstream. So if you are someone who has a nickel allergy, you want to reduce the amount of nickel that is getting through.

So you want to do whatever you can to keep that gut lining as selective as possible. And that is why I support no gluten in the diet. Plus, so many people with gluten or with nickel sensitivity and nickel allergy have IBS. And one of the best treatments for that is a low FODMAP diet, which is gluten free.

So that is why in the cookbook,

recipes are gluten free. But I am totally fine with people having gluten that is totally fine. I just am trying. To create the most healthful diet and recipes that target the root causes, the root way that nickel is getting in.

it's kind of like saying, okay, if you want to be super hardcore and follow the science as much as possible, you could do it this way. But it is not the only way to eat. It is perfectly fine to have gluten. I'm not saying that it's going to ruin everything.

I'm just saying if you're having trouble

you're eating a low nickel diet, but you have gluten, then maybe consider taking the gluten out to see if that helps you. But if you had a preference, it would probably be no grain, gluten free grains, and then full gluten grains. Would that be? Well, when you say gluten free grains, I think of what would you consider gluten free grains?

Like amaranth. I am so terrible with food. I'm not kidding. I am like the most food challenged person, and you should see what I eat. It's like a chicken breast and some sliced zucchini. It's like, so nothing. I am not creative. Your recipes. I cannot wait because I'm so bored with everything.

Eat. But I would just think you go to the store and you buy a gluten free flour blend. So whatever's in that, that like tapioca starch and

starch and all sorts of crazy gums and stuff in there, I just don't mess with it. I just want things to be simple and easy. So you're pretty much no grain. You would rather. No grain. I mean, I would rather eat all of the bread in the world because I love it.

But if you're asking me what I think is most helpful and addresses the foundational health and foundational causes of this stuff, I would say, yeah, I would stay away from that, at least for the first one to three months

get everything as good as possible, and then start adding little things in and seeing how it makes you feel. Like, get to a really good place and then add one thing at a time and see if it triggers you. I'm in a fairly good place, and I seem to do pretty well with white sourdough.

And I have not gone downhill too bad with quinoa. Yeah, quinoa is one. Yeah, you're right. Quinoa. So those would be safer if. Like, you have to have some grains. Yeah. Quinoa, white rice and white flour. White sugar potatoes. I do well with potatoes. Yellow potatoes. Yeah. Potatoes can be problematic only in that they can really get nickel from the soil.

But you don't know. It depends on where they're grown, and that's really true of every plant, unfortunately. I'm not sure if I put it in low nickel or moderate nickel, but it really depends on the measurement. And so I think potatoes can be great. How do you feel? This may be out of order, but how do you feel about stainless steel cookware?

We've talked about silverware, but do you think filtering your drinking water probably a big deal? No berkeys, no Yetis. Sorry, Yeti. Actually, I do use a Berkey. Do I do. This is probably going to make you crazy. My pain diminished probably by 20% when I stopped using my Berkey.

That crazy then that was the right move for you. I guess we're. Sensitive. We're all sensitive. Well, you are probably more sensitive than I am then,

so some people can use it. So Berkey is not necessarily a hard no for a lot of people. Yeah. If you put metal under heat, obviously it's more likely to leach out nickel. If you have acid, that's more likely to leach out nickel. If it's cold, then it's less likely.

But also, like you mentioned earlier, even with cold water in a hydro flask, people can get reaction to it. Yeah, I thought it was the most random post that I posted, and it was the one that had the most comments and the most people saying, oh, my gosh, me too.

And you also have to think about if they're getting an immediate reaction from it, then that sounds more IgE mediated, right? Sure. Yeah. I don't get any of mine's all systemic. I don't get the exterior very often. I only have my frame of reference. Okay, so what impact do you hope your cookbook will have on people with nickel allergies?

And eczema. I hope that it makes it as easy as possible for people to understand the allergy and to implement a diet at A level that removes their symptoms. What level of healing have you personally experienced? You've referenced that you can eat more. Is your eczema gone? Have you stayed in remission?

Do you consider yourself all the way better? Yeah, I

probably not all the way better. I think that's pretty much impossible, because once you have created the sensitivity, once that T Cell has been activated, it's over. It's going to be forever. It's just about how many of those T cells you have, and you can reduce those. And I am definitely at a point where they're far fewer because I haven't had

outbreak probably in over a year now. I have had. Just today I was driving, and I could feel, like, the tiniest hint of a little bit on my finger, but that was it. And that's pretty much all that I will experience is that, like, oh, there's something there. I guess I'll just eat really.

Low nickel the next couple of days, and then it goes away. But I don't get any itchiness. I don't get anything anymore. Now, sometimes I do have digestive symptoms. I'm not sure if they're related to nickel or not. So that's where I'm at.

one who never has had the eczema, I would guess it's quite painful. Yes, it's very painful, especially at the worst of it. And when it's at the beginning stages, when it's so itchy,

don't know if you've ever had eczema or something that was really itchy, but it drives you absolutely mad. That's why when I see these kids come in covered in know, in the dermatology clinic, my heart just breaks for them and I just want to fix them. I say, I didn't have anything, but back when I had all the hardware and all the Lyme disease and all the things, I did go to a dermatologist and I was diagnosed with Grover's disease.

Now, I don't think it was Grover's disease. I think it was nickel allergy. But yeah, I was itching. I felt like I had chickenpox and I mean, I was itching twenty four seven, and it was horrible. And. Which is one of the worst things ever.

It just drives people insane. Yeah, well, I'm glad that you're not dealing with that anymore. So what advice would you give to listeners who may not have nickel allergies but are interested in maintaining a healthy diet? Would they be helped by your cookbook?

Yeah, definitely. Like I said, I built it with a foundation of evidence based health diets that help address things like obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, IBS. So it helps with gut health. It helps with metabolic health. So those are all really good foundational things to do. I didn't get to the end because I just kept reading in the middle, and so I never made it to the end.

Is there dessert in the book? Yes, there is. I'm not a big dessert person, but made sure there were dessert recipes. This was probably one of the last sections I did. Awesome. What kind of sugar or what kind of sweetener is the safest with a nickel allergy? Oh, this is a great.

Question. So I use alulose, which is this fabulous molecule that mimics fructose.

It's the opposite. Like if you took like a mirror, it's the same shape, it's just on this other side, which means that you get the taste of it, but it is excreted through your urine and it actually grabs onto glucose and removes it from the system. So it helps lower your blood glucose.

And that is why the FDA won't even call it a sweetener because it doesn't actually act like a sweetener, but it tastes exactly like fructose. It's just not as strong. If I go to the store and I ask for Alulose, they're going to look at me like I'm even crazier than I already am.

Well, you can find it on Amazon easily. A lot of the health food stores will have it. I've seen it in normal stores as well. It's an absolutely incredible sweetener that actually makes you healthier. And there's been research that has shown it helps people lose weight, it helps reduce.

Blood Sugar. Obviously, there are a bunch of things. There's a section Where I wrote about it and I talked about the research behind it. I'm a really Big Proponent of Alulose. That's Awesome. Now there's going to be a Big run on Alulose

to you. Are There Support Groups, online communities, or resources For People with nickel allergies and EcZEma, Besides the Heavily Meddled podcast? Right.

There's a Big Spot in my heart for the Facebook Group that I spent so much time on. And it's got a really long Title. It's like the Low Nickel Diet and Lifestyle. That's the beginning of the name. Yeah. And it has those cute Little Birdies on there. There are Also Some other Facebook groups that are focused on just Nickel Allergies.

Then there's a Reddit group that I've started and some other REddit Groups. If you go to my website and go to resources, I have links to all of those and some other websites. How many recipes are in your book? I think it's 140 something. And how long did it take you to write your book?

I've been trying to figure that out. I think I started in 2019. So about four years. And where are you in your stage of medical training? I'm in my third year. This is the year that we get to try out a bunch of different specialties and figure out what we want to do.

Graduation is next year. Well, yeah, next year I apply for specialty and I try out at a bunch of residencies, and then I graduate, like May of 2025. Wow. The end is in sight. What part of the country do you live in? I live in Vegas. Oh, Vegas, baby.

Like Vegas proper? Yes. Very cool. All right. Is there something that you want to share that we haven't touched on yet? You had this question about research. It was about plants for further research or projects. So when I was at the conference last weekend and I was speaking with one of the specialists, she had mentioned, this is so great that you're more in touch with the online community and the.

Patients there, we should do a research project to get information from them. And I said that, yeah, I've wanted to do that. What information do you think would be the most helpful to the medical community? So she thought for a minute and she said, well, I know that we could really use information about all the different symptoms, like where the rashes are, what other symptoms are they having, stuff like that.

Getting a lot more data on that would be very helpful. And then for me, I think one of the things that's really missing

information about the experience as a patient with this issue, because I believe that a lot of people end up on the Internet and in these online communities seeking information and help because the medical system has failed them. And

those are the very people that medicine needs information from in order to improve the treatment of these conditions. And so it would be great to all also have some questions, getting some information about what all of our experiences were like. How long did it take for us to finally get diagnosed?

How long did it take for us to get the. We needed on the treatment that we needed. Where are the pitfalls in medicine that we could work to improve? And so once I get the IRB to approve the survey, I would love to spread that to as many people in the community so we can get that feedback and I can publish that information in the journals that these doctors read so we can start making amazing.

Well, however, the heavily Meddled podcast can help in that endeavor. I'm willing to put up a link, throw out a survey, bring my followers along to your website, whatever we can do. But yeah, you're right, that's totally needed. And I don't know if you have seen, I can't remember which episode it is.

Jeefa Dordunu, she's doing a lot of clinical studies. She's an RN, but she's a professor at the University of Victoria in Vancouver, British Columbia, and she is doing some studies with explants and implants, and she's doing some research studies. I don't know if she's gone into the derm rtology realm, but she's really good at putting together those studies and it'd probably be a good place for you to connect, even if your focus is slightly different.

I could hook you two up. Yeah, Be helpful. She's amazing. We all have so many dreams for our little metalhead community, don't we? Yeah.

don't think there's another low nickel diet cookbook out there, is there? There is one. I have different philosophy and different goals with my book. If you search on Amazon, you'll see mine and you'll see that one as well. I think it's got, like a red and white cover. There are a lot of different angles that you can take improving or mitigating symptoms from this that are not just diet.

And that's really why I wanted to move beyond just nutritional therapy. And I wanted to go to medical school because I wanted as many tools in my tool belt as possible to help people. And so while we focused a lot on diet in this episode, and my book is mostly about doing a loanicle diet, I do talk about and really support a holistic approach to addressing it and doing the things that you are capable of doing in a way that's not stressful to.

But in a way that can be helpful so things like I talked about a little bit like sleep and stress there's plenty of research to show that just one night of poor sleep reduces the immune system's ability in your skin and in your gut and in the rest of your body to do what it needs to do just one night I slept 4 hours last night.

I'm in trouble. Yes, too simple so why do it? A lot of the most simple things that you could do are actually the most powerful and it's asleep reducing stress. I'm going to hammer on that so much you can focus on that you can focus on doing exercise. All sorts of exercise can be super helpful in multiple ways.

There are medications out there that doctors can prescribe that can help you in a flare, reduce your symptom and get you back to a good baseline that you don't have to take all the time. If you're against that, they all have their place and never feel like you have to follow what.

What I say perfectly or what somebody else says perfectly. Just use the pieces that put together your own protocol and be willing to try new things. Just make sure that it's not stressful to you, because that's not going to help you. It's just going to make it worse. Well, and you're going to love this.

It's actually the episode that follows you. I have noticed, especially where I tend to emphasize quite a bit on the internal metal hardware and the surgical approach, the dental approach, the same would apply with eczema and diet. So many of us with nickel allergies or pick fibromyalgia, a mass cell or Lyme disease, pick a plague, if you will.

So many of us have suffered such gaslighting and such PTSD, and we feel our body shutting down and it's whack a mole with the symptoms, and there's a lot of PTSD and we do not care for our mental health. We don't know how. We are so busy having a caregiver and trying to show up in our life, to mother to parent, to work, that we ignore.

We're just so busy. Pushing through. Dr. Kim Duramo. I don't know if you've ever heard of her. She is a mind body medicine physician. She's an allopathic doctor. She was trained in the ER. She worked in emergency medicine for a long time, decided that was not where she felt called, and left her career to do mind body medicine.

And she does a lot of limbic system retraining and neuroplastic retraining and things like that. And she is actually the episode a little bit of a departure for the heavily metal podcast, but that is the episode in two weeks after this one. I'm so glad you're doing that. As an osteopathic student, we really focus a lot on the very holistic, multifaceted approach and view of the body and of wellness.

That's why I wanted to be a do not because it's better than an MD. It's just because it's so much more in line with my philosophy and what I've seen and how I would practice. And MDs also can do that, not like they can't either. But it's very in line with how I'm trained and what I believe and how I will practice.

And I'm so glad that you're going to have that. And. Really encourage you to continue finding people like that because it's just as powerful, if not more, in some cases. And there's plenty of research to show that, too. Have you ever seen the experiments on water? I'm not sure.

Look up the experiments on water. So there was a. I don't know what his profession was, but there was a man who literally found, I will just tie this into me. I didn't really, really start to heal until I started speaking wellness over me. We don't realize how much we talk about our illness.

We talk about it all day, every day. I got this thing and this thing and this diagnosis and this diagnosis ad nauseam.

when you start to know I've got this symptom and this symptom, your body hears you. If you say that you are well or you are working on something. Case in point, I've got a Facebook follower. Every single post. I watch this woman post, and you know who you are.

She says, I am worse daily. I am worse daily. And I'm like, stop. You start saying, there are things I'm working through. I'm trying to solve some issues. You don't say, I'm worse daily. Your body hears you and. Literally can change DNA. So the experiments on water. This is a scientist, Doctor, I forget his profession, but he literally was looking at molecules of water under a microscope.

You got to look it up. It's the most amazing thing ever. And he would speak loving words, love, kindness, joy. And as he would do that, the water would form these beautiful crystalline,

if you will, and then you speak something bad into the water, like you fool or something like that, and the structure would dissolve. It would just become a flat thing of water. And when you start seeing. There was a musician I followed for a while who wrote music in frequencies that have been shown to heal DNA.

And our bodies were designed, my personal feeling, by a higher power and a creator to heal themselves. They know what to do if you give them space. But if we're always pushing through, running, fighting, staying in that sympathetic dominance, fight or flight stage, our bodies can't heal.

And I'm with you, I think it's just as big. There's a lot of people like me. I have hardware in my body that can never come out. Am I going to say I'm always going to be reactive? I don't know what's possible. It's possible that I might not always be reactive.

It's possible that I, 100% in my body, do not see that at all. I'm not an ascended master in that at all yet, but I'm working in that direction, and we've got to come together and get out of that fight or flight response if we ever hope to heal.

I absolutely love that, and you are going to love my response. Or maybe you're going to hate my response when you ask me my favorite heavy metal song, because I have a little story about that. But before we go there, the placebo effect is very similar in that it's real and it actually helps support that idea.

Right. If you think you're doing something that is going to help you, then it has been shown that the body will heal itself or will think that it's healed, just like the sham. Know about the sham surgery experiments that they've done this a lot in orthopedic surgery, where they will tell patients they're going to go in for, like, a shoulder surgery, and they'll actually cut, like they did this shoulder surgery but not do it.

And then they'll do it on half the patients and then sham surgeries on the other half. And a lot of those people actually are perfectly fine afterwards, even though nothing was done. So you think, why is that? So? If our brain wasn't powerful, why would our body heal like that?

Placebo can't just be a random coincidence. It has to be something that actually happens with our words and our belief. Yeah. Secret in a bottle. I really started to heal when that happened. So, yeah, it's really important. I wanted to ask you what you thought about the desensitization stuff.

So the fact that you have this nickel in your body, how do you feel about the whole idea that perhaps the longer that it is in your body, you may become desensitized to it? I haven't really studied. That at all. But do I believe that desensitization is possible? Do I believe that I can train my body through NAET therapy or some other kind of modality to be less reactive to the metal?

I do believe that. So I do believe that that's a core belief. But I struggle. I kind of think like you, once the T cells are activated and those memory lymphocytes are activated, I think you kind of might always have the allergy. My understanding again, just a layperson, I think

difference would be hyperreactive immune system versus a normal immune system. You're either like reacting to every little thing all the time, every stimulus, and paying attention to every little stimulus all the time, or it's just like it's there and it's a thing, but it's not a thing.

kind of can be more like that,

Yeah. I mean, the immune system is incredibly complicated. And there's a lot of research that I've read that really surprises me. Sometimes it does the opposite of what I think it's going to do. But there is research out of the Italian group. That I told you about. They've done a lot of research to show desensitization working for patients, giving them a little bit of nickel at a time, over time, being able to mitigate a lot of their reactivity.

Now, it didn't necessarily reduce their symptoms in every case, but it did reduce their patch test reactivity. I think I'd be interested in a follow up interview, and I'd like to get you and Dr. Zaire on at some point together. Talk more intelligently about that. Oh, no, you're plenty intelligent.

I'd like you to see that innate and adaptive immune system episode in regards to nickel, because that was wonderful. But I know for me, I'm trying to kind of branch out a little bit. And with the supplement that we talked about, that's made, from what I say, horse chestnut.

I see nut and I want to run, but I'm trying not to rule it out before I try it. Right. Because sometimes if we give our body the chance, our body will surprise us. Case in point, there was a medication that, I'm not diabetic, but I was prescribed a diabetic medication.

Medication to see about managing some swelling and blood sugar, and I didn't have a single side effect. I was worried because I normally have every side effect. I didn't have a single side effect, and I felt like a human being. It literally was life changing for me. So I didn't really realize how abnormal I really had been feeling in my body until a medicine that came on to balance blood sugar was brought on.

I was like, man, I feel like I have a normal metabolism. I feel like a normal person. So now it's going to be insurance doesn't want to pay for that med because I'm not a diabetic. So now it's going to be figuring out how to do that and balance blood sugar and reduce fluid retention and things like that in a more natural way, because that's obviously something my body's missing and needs.

I think we've got to listen to our body. We all have this innate intelligence, even if it's that little voice that's like, you shouldn't eat that today. We need to pay attention to that, because we all have that and how many times I believe. Yeah, and what you just said, my heart just is.

About that because a lot of us with these issues, especially when it's like, food related, people start fearing their food. They start fearing eating because they've connected the food with these terrible symptoms that they've had. Right. In your case, you distrusted your body. It was like you're at odds with your body.

Your body is not helping you. It's hurting you. And you probably went a really long time feeling that way. And that's why you had that strong reaction to like, wow.

actually responded like a normal person.

see this come up on the episode. I talk with Dr. Kim about how many times we just go through our life and we don't even breathe. We don't want to feel the feeling. We don't want to feel the fear. We don't want to feel the hopelessness of the situation that this diet or this lifestyle has put us in.

And we fight it. We have to show up. We have to be strong. We have to push it. Know, we have to take on the FDA, and we have to take on the CDC, and we have to take on all the doctors. No. Sometimes we need to sit with the hopelessness and cry and feel it

let that energy move. Instead of trying to suppress it, it's cathartic. It actually works. Instead of just trying always to run from the tiger. I don't know. That's why I'm such a big fan of the idea that I know it's a luxury, but to do everything you can to try to set aside some time for your healing journey, for a time to befriend your body again and to partner with your body, like, okay, I'm going to spend.

I'm focusing on you, and we're going to hold hands, and we're going to try and heal together and do whatever we can to help each other instead of. And how many of us send the I love you message to our body instead of, oh, my stupid immune system. It's always this, it's always that.

No. Your body sees nickel and those T cells and those little army guys are out there Fighting because that's what they're supposed to do. There's something that's going to harm you. There's something you're allergic to. Your body is trying to protect you. Your body is your friend. It's not doing this to make you a little confused, but it's trying to help you.

It's just miss. And that can be beautiful. The immune system is. So incredible. I'm in love with it. You're going to be an amazing practitioner. You're going to make such a difference. I can't wait to talk to you at Dr. Zaires. I'm super excited you came across my desk.

This is the best thing to happen all week, so I know that the listeners are going to feel amazing and I thank you for coming on. Okay, so what is your favorite heavy metal band

your favorite heavy metal song?

I've never spent a ton of time in the genre, but when I was in my biology class,

had to do an experiment with plants, and I was aware of

idea that singing to your plant could potentially help it grow better. And some of these other experiments, like singing to your body, helps it grow better. Right. Same principle.

I decided that I would try. One plant is just normal, there's no music, and another plant was going to get exposed to a heavy metal song

a certain amount of. Time, a certain amount of days a week was like four weeks or something like that. So I chose Dracula by Rob Zombie. Okay. Yes. So that's my favorite heavy metal song because I listened to it so much for this experiment. And it did turn out that the plant that listened to Dragula unfortunately did not grow as well as the other plant.

So there's that. It's not like a happy end for heavy metal, but, yeah, that's my story. Okay, so what's your favorite heavy metal band? That was the favorite heavy metal song. Do you have a favorite heavy metal band? No, I have a favorite math rock band. I was into Math rock.

What's Math Rock? I don't even know what that is. What is that? Math Rock is like

Schoolhouse rock, conjunction Junction. What's your function? You're probably not old enough for that, but I know what that is. Okay.

do. I think that was in my time. I just didn't watch it. Okay, so Math Rock is rock. That is very focused on crazy time signatures. Very heavy drums, beautiful, deep drums. So my favorite math rock band is Shiner, and they're from Kansas City, Missouri side. Awesome. I'm going to go check that out.

I'll get back to you on that. They're good. Okay, well, thank you for coming on. Super excited that you were here. Where can they find you? And where can they find your cookbook? And let me actually paraphrase that by saying there will be a link in the show notes to Laura's website and to the cookbook and to all the things, but you tell us, where can everybody find you?

Okay, well, first, thank you so much for having me. This has been really great, even better than I thought. I just really enjoyed talking with you. And it's so nice to talk to somebody who understands, right? It's so nice to talk to somebody who's as passionate, if not more so, than I am, about getting the word out on this.

I just feel like there's so many people that need to hear this. That need the support of our community as well. We're so supportive of one another. I love that so much. So thank you so much for inviting. You're welcome. Thank you so WW dot thelonicklediet.com that's the website and most of my social media is just thelonickle diet.

You could find me on most of those things. I think my Twitter, or X as it's called now, is just my name name Laura Duzette. But other than that, you can find me on the low nickel diet everywhere else. We are going to do it. Let me tell everybody.

I'll remind you again about the show notes. So there are a lot of resources. Show notes@Heavilymetaled.com make sure you spell mettled with two L's. There's a link in the show notes to any photos. I don't know if you have any photos from your dyshydratic eczema or before and after stuff that you want to share, photos from pages of the book.

We can put all of that up in the show notes so we can put that there. You may not be aware we didn't talk about this, and some of my listeners aren't aware that. There is a petition also on the website that I have started to urge medical facilities, doctors offices, hospitals, surgical centers to implement metal hypersensitivity screening in their routine screening prior to surgery.

My vision for that is you all go sign that petition. If you have metal allergies and you've had experience with hardware or nickel in the diet or a surgical setting, please write a short version of your story. A short comment My vision is to ultimately make this petition available offline for listeners and laypeople to print out and take to their hospital and surgical center and doctor's offices so we can start getting the word out there and so they can ask something as simple prior to surgery as have you ever reacted to metal or have you ever reacted to jewelry?

If we can start the conversation and keep the conversation going, then

bring all of us to the table. We find our tribe, we have better non metallic implant options, we have better diet options and cookware. Options, and this is really a movement that I feel like needs to grow. You can find all the podcast episodes on there, but until then, guys, thanks for tuning in and being part of our tribe that tells the world and the medical community that we aren't going to take it anymore.

We're here to heal. We're here to get better. And rock on, y'all.

You, you. Thank you for tuning in today. Please don't forget to follow me on social media and to, like, share and subscribe.

primary mission is reaching out to others who may be suffering from hypersensitivity reactions to metal implants and pointing them to resources that can assist with hope, help and healing. If you know someone that suffers from chronic illness, you might ask if they have any implanted metal hardware and if they've ever had a reaction to jewelry or metals of any kind.

So. Might not even be on their radar. Visit us@heavilymetal.com where you can find images and documentation relating to our show today, as well as a number of valuable resources and links to assist you on your own personal healing journey. Until next time, keep on rocking.