QUOTE (Rachel--24 @ Sep 11 2007, 04:00 PM)

Foods high in sulfur are natural chelators of heavy metals such as mercury. Usually people who have problems with heavy metals will experience some reactions to these foods...as they move the metals around.
It doesn't happen to me anymore because I'm taking things which bind with mobilized metals and removes them from the body before they can get redistributed.
Thank you, Rachel -- I never could figure out why onions started bothering me about 25 years ago -- your explanation makes perfect sense! What things are you taking? Are they available at health-food stores, or do they require a prescription? Do they remove all minerals from your body (as intravenous chelation therapy does), or just the heavy metals?
By the way,
anyone who is sensitive to onions may also be bothered by the odorizer that's added to natural gas (which is what you actually smell when there's a gas leak). A week or so after the dentist packed a root-canal with amalgam, I was hit by a panic attack that just didn't go away. I chalked it up to stress, but noticed that it got worse whenever I ate onions. Seven years later, I had my house converted to all-electric (in hopes of helping my sinuses), and suddenly realized that the panic attack was over -- except when I ate onions. I had heard the gas odorizer referred to as "onion gas," so I phoned the chemist at the gas company. He told me that onions taste and smell like onions because they contain a group of closely-related chemicals, and "onion gas" is another member of that same chemical family (though he didn't know whether it actually occurs in onions).
I had all of my amalgam removed a couple of years after that (again, in hopes of helping my sinuses). Onions don't bother me nearly as much now, but I still can't eat them in large quantities or on a regular basis.
I cook with lots of finely-chopped celery in place of onions, and a little celery seed in place of garlic -- they don't taste like onions or garlic, of course, but they perk up the dish in a similar way.
Even though eggs also contain sulfur, I've never noticed any "onion" problems from eating them.