There's a book out by Ann Louise Gittleman  titled "Why Am I Always So Tired?" about the effects of copper excess.  She points out that estrogen causes women to tend to accumulate copper, even before you add sources of excess intake like copper pipes, soy products, chocolate, copper fungicides on produce, or the many causes of low zinc which allows more copper to enter the body.  I’d become aware over the years that copper was bad for me, and in recent years had been successfully playing games with my body chemistry.   So here’s your introduction to what I call “Chemistry games you can play with your body” or “The Wacky World of the Senses”.    
 

    Take a penny, preferable pre 1990 if you can find one handy.  Rub it between your palms for at least 30 seconds, try to warm it up a bit in the process.  Now sniff your hands and the penny.  Can you smell anything?  Results range through:
 

"No, I don't want to do it, I already know I can't stand the smell of pennies."
 

"It's awful, now I have to go wash my hands."
 

"It smells kinda bad, or kind of dirty."
 

"I smell something, not bad really."
 

"I don't smell anything."
 

"Smells kind of good actually."

If you will get other people to try the test, you'll find that it's more often men who can't smell it or actually like the smell.   Most women with fibromyalgia will dislike the smell intensely.  Iron, zinc, manganese, copper and molybdenum all compete to get into the body.  Deficiencies in the other minerals will allow copper to enter the body in larger amounts than it normally would.  So how do you know which ones you really need?  This is something that has interested me for a long time.  You can actually get a blood test for some of these things, but apart from the serum iron, you might have to go to a pretty specialized doctor and lab.  It's worthwhile to know more about the minerals themselves. 
 

    IRON:  The number one deficiency in gluten intolerance/celiac disease, which damages the duodenum where iron is absorbed.  Even mild deficiencies which do not show up in the blood can cause fatigue.  Every cell in the body needs iron to make energy in the mitochondria.  Only when you are so low that all the cells are deficient will anemia develop.  If you have taken iron supplements before and know they make you feel better, you probably do need iron and should ask yourself why you are deficient.  Do you have low stomach acid so you don't absorb it?  Do you have excessive losses?  Do you have gluten intolerance? 
 

    If you can get your serum iron/ferritin levels tested, you will know whether you are short of iron.  Most labs can do this test, and it's the round-about test I used to find out why I'd had 18 months of diarrhea.  If the iron is low, consider gluten intolerance.  If iron levels are high, consider genetic hemochromatosis, which can cause dysbiosis as pathogenic bacteria really like iron.  Good intestinal bacteria use manganese instead of iron, they are the only bacteria on earth that can live in the sterile iron free intestines of a breastfed human baby.  There are even suggestions that iron fortified baby formulas may cause many health problems in babies and may set them up for asthma later in life.
 

Excess iron can build up in someone who is exposed to high levels at work, especially lathe operators.  One in 7 of the US population carries a gene which causes them to absorb 50% more iron from their diet and inhaled iron than normal.  One in 200 carries double genes for this and absorb 3X as much iron.  High iron levels damage every organ in the body, especially the liver, pancreas, and joints.  If you have a family history of cirrhosis, primary liver cancer, or arthritis, or suffer from fatigue, heart arrythmias, right upper abdominal pain, or chronic joint pain esp in hands and feet, or have ever had elevated liver enzymes, you may wish to have an iron panel done.  Do not trust the doctors to know what the test means or whether you need treatment, most doctors were taught that hemochromatosis is rare, so they brush off even high test results.   Find one of the support organizations online to evaluate your test results.  Treatment consists of simply drawing blood every week or two till the stored iron is removed.  Since there is no money for the pharmaceutical companies in this disease, no one is looking for it, so when it is finally found after a decade of increasing symptoms it may take 6-12 months of weekly blood draws to get iron stores down to normal.  If your doctor won't do the test or you don't want your insurance company to know the results, you can order  it yourself from:  https://www.healthcheckusa.com/tests.asp?productid=61
 

Men in general tend to have higher levels of iron in their bodies than women who are in their menstruating years.  In general men find the penny sniff test less offensive than women do.  My husband, who has hemochromatosis, used to carry pennies around in his pocket when he was a kid so he could enjoy sniffing them now and then.  People don’t realize it, but they are always doing things to try to bring their body chemistry to normal.  It’s worthwhile to pay attention to your cravings, they do have meaning.  Women with hemochromatosis usually found that prenatal vitamins caused vomiting, probably due to the high iron which their body didn't need.  We have had people on the online support group with babies that had liver damage at birth from high iron levels.  It is interesting that some babies with projectile vomiting will stop if switched from an iron containing to iron free formula.  This is a lot cheaper and easier on everyone than surgery for the condition.
 

ZINC:  Zinc is used in 50 digestive enzymes, plus it is required to make stomach acid.  You cannot have good digestion if you are short of zinc, but in a vicious cycle, you can’t absorb it very well if your stomach acid is low.  Zinc is required for a good sense of taste and smell.  Zinc supplementation can enhance the ability to detect sugar by 50X.  Healthy plants are mildly sweet, and fruit at the peak of ripeness is at it’s sweetest, so man’s eternal quest for sugar is simply a search for nutritious foods.  This has been turned against us by food manufacturers, who peddle nutrition free sweets.  Zinc is depleted by a diet high in refined carbohydrates.  
 

There is a fantastic tropical plant dubbed “The Wonderberry”.  If you smear one of the berries on your tongue, for the next hour or two, sour things will taste sweet.  You can get the same effect in milder form if you dissolve a zinc gluconate tablet on your tongue, it's a rather unpleasant experience, but if you will endure it long enough for the thing to dissolve slowly, you can clear your palate by licking a lemon.  For about 10 minutes, sour things will taste sweet.  Save some lemon or lemon juice or vinegar to come back later and check again when the effect has worn off.  It’s a good reminder that people with good zinc status find the world of food a very different place from those with low zinc status.  Anorexics are invariably zinc deficient. 
 

 Iodine is needed to make thyroid hormone, but zinc is required by the liver to convert the thyroid’s output of T4 to the more active T3.  T3 is what your muscles to use to make energy and warm you, yet doctors seldom test T3 levels.  Many women who complain of constantly feeling cold and other low thyroid symptoms show normal thyroid tests, because their thyroid per se is fine. 
 

Zinc is well known for it’s immune system enhancing effects.  Zinc and vitamin C are required to make new tissue and are used up in the process.  Zinc deficiency is the cause of white flecks on the fingernails, smelly feet and BO.  Growing boys are famous for these symptoms, and many are left with stretch marks on their low backs from that summer they grew 6 inches.  Stretch marks from pregnancy are also related to zinc deficiency. 
 

            Zinc deficiency is associated with celiac disease, but an even more common problem is pyroluria.  Found in 10% of the normal population and 40% of alcoholics and 40% of people with psychiatric disturbances, pyroluria ties up zinc, manganese, and vitamins B6.  It makes people feel really tense, and since stress increases the production of the abnormal pyrroles, those who have it do not deal well at all with long term stress!  Pyroluria also leads to depression in many by interfering in serotonin production.  There is a simple urine test which you can handle yourself, provided you can find a doctor or chiropractor to order it. 
 

MANGANESE:  Here is a metal that FMS suffers really need to think about.  Little known, except in the world of chicken feeds, it is needed to make strong tendons and connective tissue.  Can you touch your thumb to your wrist?  (You have to bend it over using the other hand)  If so, your joints are hypermobile.  Some FMS cases are thought to be connective tissue disorders such as Marfans or Erlos-Danlos syndrome.  But the most common connective tissue disorder of all is seldom considered:  Celiac disease.  Celiac disease is a malabsorption condition brought on by gluten intolerance.  The only proven cure is a gluten free diet.   Manganese acts much like iron in metallurgy, and though I have no proof, I would suspect it’s absorbed in the same area as iron, the duodenum where all celiacs are most damaged. 
 

I have gluten intolerance, but don’t seem to have suffered much from iron deficiency.  However, I had terrible posture all my life, I simply slumped.  I suspect the cause was poor connective tissue, though a very simple exercise improved my posture immensely long before I learned about manganese.  Calcium also seems to strengthen and stabilize joints, and zinc deficiency (leading to low stomach acid) is a good way to run short on calcium.  Taking Calcium citrate got rid of my 15 years of back pain and strengthened my wrists.  But manganese seems to be very good for me, something I need. 
 

Manganese toxicity is not something you want to get into either.  Manganese miners may go mad from toxicity.  A pair of researchers have linked Mad Cow Disease to excess manganese combined with low copper.  It’s interesting that nearly all the short British breeds of cattle have now been interbred with the larger continental cattle, which tend to need as much as 4 times as much copper as British breeds.   
 

MOLYBDENUM:  This is another little known metal, important mostly to people who own sheep.  Sheep don’t require very much copper, and if fed on horse or cattle feeds can develop copper toxicity.  The treatment is to feed them plenty of molybdenum, which then out competes with copper to enter the body, until the excess copper is gradually excreted by normal means. 
 

Molybdenum has gained more publicity since it’s effects on aldehyde detoxification have been known.  If you have trouble around molds or perfumes, you may need to supplement molybdenum.  Oddly enough, in an AK test for formaldehyde, I found that manganese worked as well under test conditions as molybdenum, and the doctor testing me said some people seemed to need selenium to deal with aldehydes.  Stephen Cooter ran a little trial of Mb after it got rid of his years of fatigue and candida symptoms.  About 2/3 of those who tried it got better, some dramatically so.  But be warned that some people will feel worse, we found this with 2 out of 3 friends who tried taking it for the first time.  Digging a bit on the Net turned up that this can happen before you start feeling better.  I tend to pay close attention to how things make me feel, and am likely to quit something before the “worse then better” effect is completed. 
 

Molybdenum and B12 deficiency are involved in onion and garlic sensitivity. 
 

COPPER:  Let’s not forget that this culprit in excess can be a friend when needed.  I would definitely recommend you do the penny sniff test at least once a month if you begin supplementing with these competing metals.  I haven’t done it myself, hmm… just checked, can’t smell a thing.  I might need a little tiny bit of copper, but past experience has shown that even a couple of days of supplementation bring back the bad smell of pennies to me.  At present, I am probably very well balanced in my copper vs competing metals.   
 

Copper is required to make  new blood vessels.  Dr. Joel Wallech, who made the tape “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie”, claims that in 1957 a quarter million turkeys died on American farms from aneurysms.  He says that in 1958 none died because they had discovered the problem was copper deficiency.  My old Rodale press gardening book specifically mentions turkey manure as a good source of copper for the garden.  The flip side of using copper to make new blood vessels, is creating a deficiency to stop cancer growth.  Angiogenesis is the creation of new blood vessels so that tumors can grow.  In "Copper Reduction Therapy, copper levels are chelated down to 20% of normal, at which a person  can get along but cancer cannot spread.  This is a cheap, safe and little known new treatment for cancer. 
 

One in 90 people carry a gene to accumulate copper and probably are not too efficient at dumping excess copper.  One in 10,000 carries double genes for this condition, called Wilson’s Disease (not to be confused with Wilson’s Syndrome).  In Wilson’s, the enzyme which normally carries copper out through the bile cannot be made, these people tend to accumulate copper to the point they develop neurological problems, and may die without treatment.  The golden eyes that romance novelist Jayne Ann Krentz gives to many of her heroes makes me wonder if a few years down the road our heroine will find her catch is going mad.  One symptom of Wilson’s disease is copper rings in the iris of the eye. 
 

    I was told by someone at our local water treatment plant that older electricians tended to continue the practice of grounding wires to cold water pipes even after copper pipes were introduced.  He said this caused fairly rapid loss of copper into the water supply and eventually destroyed the pipes.  I read somewhere years ago (when most electricians didn't know any better) the claim that if you had copper pipes, someone in your family would go mad.  Conversely, if a peice of copper pipe is put into a galvanized system, electrolysis tends to put iron in the system, and the homeowner, noting the reddish water and bad taste, may be told by the plumber who did the original (bad) repair that their pipes are too old and they need their whole system replaced.  I corresponded with someone who went through this and suspected this was a favorite scam of that plumber, but fortunately she knew what the problem is. 

Now that you have done the penny sniff test and probably said “Pee-yuw!”  and want to try all this stuff, let me warn you of the pitfalls.  I took zinc and manganese for 2 months and stopped AK testing weak for copper.  I also was able to smell hybrid tea roses in a local garden for the first time.  But if I take only the zinc and not the manganese, I start getting a metallic taste in my mouth that can only be stopped by taking manganese.  It all goes back and forth, and the key is balance, balance, balance.  I don't know sniff tests for all the metals, though I have been told by a woman with Thalassemia that "The smell of an iron skillet being scoured is the worst smell on earth."   Presumably doctors had her take vast amounts of iron over the years trying to cure her genetic anemia before someone got smart and looked for the cause.  I know that rusty iron has a smell to me, at least at times, not pleasant, and my iron is in the normal range.  Perhaps someone with low iron would be attracted to the smell of iron. 

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That's all for now, this is a work in progress.  If you know something about trace minerals and interactions
that I have missed, please contact me at: redherring@tnaccess.com    Donna Hudson, 2005