Aluminum by Christopher Exley, PhD, FRSB
Book Review by Carolyn Betts and Catherine Austin Fitts ( Solari Report)
If you care about the future health of the human species, you should read this absorbing book by the world-renowned expert on aluminum, Dr. Christopher Exley, who has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers on the subject. Jennifer Walters, host of Solari’s Health Series, selected Exley for her first interview in 2022. After reading this book, we understand why.
This is a self-admitted “love story” by a brilliant scientist in love with his research topic, though that sentiment is unrequited by the powers that be in the world of prestigious medical and scientific journals and by Exley’s own Keele University. For five years prior to the publication of his book, Keele betrayed Exley’s devotion by failing to support his research efforts in any meaningful way. In the face of financial bribery by the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the “arrival on campus of an outlet of Well, the United Kingdom’s largest independent pharmacist,” Keele’s lack of support extended even to the point of censorship and turning away a generous research donation by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In mid-2021, Keele shut down Exley’s lab entirely.
At the book’s outset, Exley explains:
I say I am writing a love story because my pursuit of the understanding of aluminum’s role in life and living has occupied all my working days. Without love, without passion, my aluminum crush would have passed long, long ago. Indeed, many whom I respect and admire have, on numerous occasions over the years, encouraged me to consider a quick divorce from aluminum. In doing so they were only thinking of my well-being and my academic career, though I am sure that they expected their advice to fall on deaf ears. Persistence, indeed pursuance, in science needs an appreciation, if not a love, of the subject and, for most, some acknowledgment of years of effort by your peers. The latter proves most elusive. While thirty-five years of continuous effort have afforded me the label of “Mr. Aluminum,” in truth it often feels like I am the person who knows most about something that few are really interested in knowing about. In scientific circles, aluminum—in relation to human health specifically—has gone the way of the dinosaurs, though unlike dinosaurs there has not yet been a popular revival. Perhaps the resurgence is about to begin? Each waking day I continue my quest to understand aluminum in all living things, my Holy Grail, because I believe that it is the greatest untold story of science and, yes, it is belief that continues to nurture my fascination and not a vain hope that my scientific peers will one day reward my efforts.
You may ask whether this is hyperbole, but when we learn that aluminum is the third-most common element in the earth’s crust, and that it only began to be isolated roughly 150 years ago, and that it now is ubiquitous in vaccines, soil, and the very air we breathe, you may understand the importance of Exley’s call to arms against this toxin. It has virtually no redeeming industrial value other than as a light substitute for stainless steel, and no natural biological function (as opposed to other metals such as magnesium and iron). Super reactive and capable of migrating into the brain, aluminum fatefully entered the biologically reactive cycle in 1889 through a chemical extraction process invented by Charles Martin Hall, whereby it was separated from silicon/silicic acid. As Exley observes, there is a poetic explanation for what aluminum does—as in an orchestra, it creates “cacophony when [it] substitutes for an essential metal and, acting as a conductor, directs notes from compromised instruments at all the wrong times.”
Readers who are scientists or chemistry experts presumably will be impressed by this book, but the wonderful thing is that Exley’s account is also highly digestible by non-scientists. The beautiful color photographs are fascinating—including (among others) images showing a reimagined Charles Darwin Tree of Life demonstrating the emergence in evolutionary time of biologically reactive aluminum; human sperm cells lit up with aluminum; a schematic drawing identifying the main factors in humans’ uptake and excretion of aluminum (hint: sweating is good); and florescent microscopy showing aluminum located with amyloid-β in an Alzheimer’s disease plaque.
One of the most useful, if horrifying, aspects of Exley’s presentation is the enumeration of ways in which we are daily exposed to aluminum. The following is an abbreviated list!
Cosmetics and deodorants
Foil-like packaging
Aluminum cans
Infant formula
Breast milk (from mothers who have been exposed)
Cookware
Aluminum salts in many prepared foods
Aluminum sulfate to make bread white.
Food contamination through aluminum machinery in food processing
Contamination of tea, coffee, tobacco, marijuana, soy, and other edible plant products from aluminum in acidic soil resulting from poor farming practices (acidic soil is better able to take up aluminum, and glyphosate is a strong aluminum binder at low pH levels)
Weather control (“climate engineering”) through “chemtrail” spraying composed of barium and aluminum.
Food spray-on products including herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides.
Medications—importantly, these include antacids, phosphate binders used for kidney dialysis, buffers present in many painkillers, and intravenous preparations (for babies and hospitalized adults)
Transfused fluid (e.g., blood) warming devices.
Prosthetic devices (including hip replacements and dental products)
Volcano plumes
Incompletely combusted hydrocarbon and other fuels, including aluminum propellants.
Fish exposed in the contaminated sea and freshwater.
His conclusion is that traditional methods of chelation and detoxification are useless in removing Al3+(aq) from our bodies. In his research-informed view, consumption of silicon-containing mineral water in large amounts and of silicon-containing beers are our only defenses known to date (in addition to natural bodily processes involving excretion through semen, urine, feces, skin, sweating, nails, etc.). He recommends 1.5 liters/day of silicon-rich mineral water (e.g., Fiji Water and, recently, Acilis in the U.S., and Volvic and Acilis in Europe).
Exley is careful to distinguish between what he believes, based on years of research, and what he can prove—to the point of refusing to draw any conclusion without near-perfect proof in the form of results from carefully controlled lab experiments. Nevertheless, he does share his considered opinion about diseases and conditions that may be caused (or partially caused) by aluminum exposure, which he categorizes according to the level of proof obtained through his and others’ lab work and science-based experience. From a list of 37 such conditions and diseases ranked according to the probable role of aluminum in causation (where 1=low and 10=high), he gives a “10” to Alzheimer’s disease, anemia, and dialysis encephalopathy; an “8-10” to breast cancer; and a “7-10” to immunosuppression. Earning a “7-9” are conditions like asthma, autism, autoimmune conditions, Parkinson’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn’s disease (as well as irritable bowel disease and ulcerative colitis), and issues related to fertility and reproduction. Finally, arthritis, other cancers, diabetes, vascular disease, and stroke earn a “6-8” rating, and hyperactivity gets a “5-7.”
It is safe to say that readers will think twice in the future when they see or hear the word “aluminum.” When they see children with autism, friends with multiple sclerosis (MS), or parents with Parkinson’s or whose minds are lost in an Alzheimer’s fog, they will think, “Oh, that’s the aluminum.” And when readers hear that well over 50% of American children suffer from chronic conditions (for example, atopic conditions like allergies, eczema, and asthma; behavioral and learning difficulties; or diabetes) or that the CDC (conservatively) estimates that one in 36 eight-year-olds overall—and one in 23 eight-year-old boys—has the form of toxicity diagnosed as an autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—versus the already high autism rate of one in 150 two decades ago—a little voice may whisper, “That’s the vaccines.” As Exley reminds us in the chapter titled “Tell Me Again Why There Is Aluminum in Vaccines,” most of the vaccines on the childhood schedule in the U.S. contain aluminum adjuvants, intentionally included to stimulate the body’s response to the antigen. Government judgments as to “safe” levels are not based on science. Moreover, those who say that the “small” amount of aluminum in childhood vaccines is not enough to cause developmental disorders and other health problems fail to account for the accumulation of aluminum (the full “bodily burden”) from the many sources to which we are exposed.
The chapter titled “Camelford—Anatomy of a Government Cover-up” provides, in excruciating detail, a real-life example of mass poisoning through water contamination with aluminum and illustrates the lengths to which governments (through typical hack and compromised “expert panels”) will go to keep evidence and results from the public. A 1988 incident in Cornwall, England poisoned 20,000 people who drank tap water containing 600 mg/L of aluminum over a period of several weeks. Notwithstanding his reputation as the world’s (and the UK’s) premier expert on aluminum, no one contacted Exley for his assistance, but when he heard about the problem, he reached out to local authorities himself and provided expert advice to the appointed panel of “experts.” However, the panel failed to take him up on his offer to assist them in drafting the section of their report on aluminum’s environmental toxicology, likely as the result of intervention by representatives of the Aluminum Federation. The final report, not published until 2005, contained none of the information Exley had provided and did not consider aluminum’s possible ill effects, concluding, “it is not anticipated that the increased exposure to aluminum would have caused, or would be expected to cause, delayed or persistent harm to those who were adults or toddlers at the time of the incident.”
Exley includes in the book the letter he wrote to the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), cosigned by more than 50 aluminum scientists from around the world, citing the Camelford report’s inadequacies. The letter stated:
It is our contention that the conclusions by the subgroup concerning aluminum have been drawn from an entirely inadequate data base both with respect to the literature that has been reviewed and cited in the report and the water quality analyses provided by SWWA. In relation to the former, it would have been welcomed if the subgroup had pointed out that the United Kingdom government through for example the research councils, etc. have not funded any independent research on aluminum and health in the last decade, if not longer, and that this inexplicable breakdown in research funding might have contributed to the difficulties in reviewing the toxicological consequences of the poisoning of the Camelford public water supply by aluminum.
Shortly after the release of the draft report, Exley recounts, he was contacted by an environmental toxicologist whose 44-year-old wife, Carole Cross, had died after exposure to the Camelford drinking water and who wanted a post-mortem on her brain. Exley arranged for an examination by one of the world’s leading neuropathologists, who concluded that Cross had died from an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s. When compared with four other brain tissues from the Oxford brain bank, only her tissue measured a very high level of aluminum. Exley published the findings in 2006 (after rejection by Lancet) in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. Ultimately, the local city council funded another important study on the aluminum content of sixty human brains.
The Cross findings also led to a coroner’s inquest. The inquest, while unable to link the aluminum in Cross’s brain tissue directly with the Camelford poisoning (and, therefore, providing no therapeutic intervention to other Camelford victims), resulted in a narrative verdict that made it clear that the evidence pointed toward a role of aluminum in her death. This set an important precedent by concluding for the first (and probably the last) time in a court of law that aluminum was likely guilty of causing Alzheimer’s disease. Exley concludes:
If the death of Carole Cross achieved nothing else, the opportunity to carry out our sixty human brain study was a landmark moment in our research and research generally on aluminum in human neurological disease. It has been a catalyst for change and one that now sees aluminum in brain tissue at the proverbial heart of a number of neurodegenerative diseases.
Serendipity or divine intervention? You decide. At any rate, Exley doubts that such a study could be published in today’s post-Covid climate of suppression of independent medical research. Even back then, an aluminum industry representative attempted unsuccessfully to prevent the release of another paper on the 60-brain study, and the recommendation for further research went unfulfilled.
In a chapter on politics, Exley describes the increasing influence of scientific journal advertisers on content and the sacrifice of scientific freedom at the hands of the “editorial Mafiosi” at high-prestige journals like Nature and Science. These gatekeepers rarely submit serious independent papers for peer review, and where peer review does happen, “peers” tend to review for subject matter rather than science. Those familiar with vaccine research will not be surprised to hear that “disciples of the aluminum industry” have infiltrated all the mechanisms underlying the basic process of science, including sitting on grant-giving bodies and influencing what research is published and where. Any research funded by the industry is designed as a smokescreen to divert attention away from the devastating effects of and real issues involving this toxic element. Such research may appear to be conducted by independent university groups but actually is funded by the likes of the International Aluminum Institute and written by non-experts or shills not subject to peer review. Compromised authors—bought off by industry insiders—reach unfounded conclusions and fail to disclose conflicts of interest, while formerly respected journals publish the results. This is the name of the game. To his credit (and potential detriment), Exley names and dates and includes examples of his letters of protestation regarding this type of conduct.
Gaining an understanding of the aluminum industry through this scientist’s detailed account of his painstaking devotion to the truth in the face of intentional scientific deception may lead some to conclude, “If we were deceived about the toxicity of the aluminum that surrounds us, perhaps we have been deceived in other matters as well.” Without a doubt, Exley’s tale provides a useful framework for understanding the larger scientific “rackets” to which we have become subject.
For each of us, the realization of the power and extent of Mr. Global’s reach and the potentially life-threatening consequences for our families and other loved ones comes through personal experience. In 2023, who among us does not know and love someone directly affected by Alzheimer’s, autism, cancer, Parkinson’s, or MS? It is to be hoped that the education Exley provides in this book and in his many papers will lead to a breakthrough—one that will make him known far and wide as the person who led us finally to say, “enough of this poison,” rather than the individual who, in his own words, can be found in a Google search under “Christopher Exley Quack.” His crucial 2018 paper titled “Aluminum in Brain Tissue in Autism,” co-authored with three other scientists, has been downloaded over a million times. He also maintains a SubStack where he answers questions and provides updates on developing research into aluminum.
If, after reading this book, you don’t fall in love with Dr. Exley and wish to support his further research, you have no heart. And if you don’t want to do everything you can to get aluminum out of your life and the lives of those you love, you need to check your brain function and, perhaps, start choosing your drinking water accordingly.