Toxins! Part I
Environmental toxins are an area of medicine that very little attention is given to. We are living in a toxic world on a toxic planet. Due to the industrialization of our planet there is practically no place on earth that has remained pristine. Measurable levels of toxins have been found hundreds of feet down in ice burgs in the artic circle, isolated areas of the Caribbean sea, desolate regions of great body’s of desert and area’s not attainable or serviced by roadways such as the great lakes region by the Canadian boarder.
How do environmental toxins find there way into such isolation? Great clouds of toxins exhumed by incinerators, power plants, and actions of pesticide control can be carried by wind currents and cloud masses across the globe. They seep from the soil into our lakes and rivers and get carried downstream to other towns and larger bodies of water.
When these actions take place on a daily basis there is a build up of environmental toxic sludge that accumulates providing our environment with a sustained release toxic pill that is guaranteed to affect future generations at an ever catastrophic rate.
Environmental toxins come in the form of plastics, pesticides, heavy metals, insecticides, herbicides, and volatile hydrocarbons. Such toxins find there way to us commonly through an avenue called out gassing. Out gassing is essentially these volatile chemicals exuding themselves from the objects they have been used to create or which they permeate. This gives credence to the statement that nothing is inert or dead.
Sources of these chemical surround us, inside and out, all of the time. From the water we drink from the pipes or plastic bottles that the water comes through; the carpets in our houses and paint on the walls; aluminum in baking powder, salt and sugar; heavy metals in the foods that we eat, the mercury fillings in our mouths; cadmium in the batteries in our laptops and cell phones as well as the cigarettes we may choose to smoke; aluminum in our deodorants, the fluoride in our toothpaste; plastics and hydrocarbons from the mattresses and pillows that we sleep on; trichloroethylene from our dry cleaned clothes; pesticides in our lawn and on our produce; the plastic wrap that used to package our foods and the Styrofoam that holds our coffee and tea; plastics in computers, stereos, car’s and appliances; exhaust on the roadways as well as the heated up roadways from hot weather and heavy traffic.
A naysayer towards the practice of environmental toxicity might say that the body can handle a toxin without a problem because they come from each source in such small amounts. This might be true if we were receiving toxins from minimal sources, but as you can see from above, toxins abound. Are bodies have not been created to have the ability to metabolize these toxins, nor have our body’s modified themselves through evolutionary channels. As the body encounters a toxin, if it cannot metabolize the toxin through the liver or the kidney’s, it stores it in areas such as fat cells, and major organs such as the liver, spleen, heart, thyroid and kidneys. Without proper detoxification our bodies will continue to store these chemicals and heavy metals until the bioaccumulation compromises our physiological and psychological health and leads to chronic disease.
Studies have shown that most of us have between 400 and 800 chemical residues stored in our cells. EPA studies reveal that 100% of people tested have dioxins, PCB’s, dichlorobenzene, and xylene in their fat cells. One particular study had shown that 89% of people where burdened by carcinogenic benzene and 93% by another carcinogen, percholoethylene, measured in their exhaled breath. These numbers should be sufficient evidence to any doubter that environmental toxicity is of epidemic proportions.
Toxic overload can be the cause of almost all of the prevalent health imbalances of today. Headaches; skin conditions; allergies; inflammatory and autoimmune diseases such as cancers, lupus, arteriosclerosis and arthritis; chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia; hormone disruptions and imbalances such as endometriosis, PMS, and thyroiditis, infertility; cardiac conditions such as elevated blood pressure, heart disease, arrhythmias, sudden heart attacks; behavioral conditions such as ADD and ADHD; neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis, ALS, and Parkinson’s disease; depression; neuropathy’s; the list is endless.