The Poisons Within
Toxins from the outside worldâin our food, water, air, homes and workplacesâare known as
environmental toxins.
Our bodies also manufacture a sea of internal toxins as a result of normal metabolism, which our bodies must eliminate in order to stay healthy. Few people realize that their own bodies can be a source of dangerous toxinsâmostly in the digestive system, but also from allergic reactions, stress and other sources. Internal toxins are being generated at unprecedented rates as a result of modern diets, lifestyles and medical treatments. Just like an automobile produces exhaust, your body produces these toxins naturally and is designed to handle them; however, if abnormal amounts of toxins are produced or your ability to deal with them is impaired, you become sick.
Understanding the body's natural abilities to cleanse itself and how these abilities can be supported by diet, exercise and other means is important. By learning how to support your detoxification systems, you can reverse the effects of toxic overload; as toxic load decreases, cell function improves and disease often disappears.
Not all toxins, however, affect all people in the same manner. Just as each of us has unique needs for nutrients, each of us also has unique tolerances and susceptibilities to toxins. Toxin levels that can put one person into overload might not be particularly serious or even noticeable for someone else. Genetic predisposition, nutritional status, stress levels and lifestyle all influence toxin levels. Because currently we have no way to predict the effects that specific toxins (or combinations) have on any individual, the solution is to minimize exposure to all toxins and to take steps to support the body's detoxification mechanisms.
A Buildup of External Toxins
Chronic exposure to small amounts of seemingly harmless toxins presents a problem more dangerous than people realize. Even in trace amounts, toxins can build up and overload our cells, causing malfunction. The average American is building up (bioaccumulating) between three and five hundred manmade chemicals, most of which did not exist prior to World War II and have never before been in human tissue. Therefore, the combined toxic effects of these chemicals are impossible to calculate.
Physicians rarely consider toxic buildup as a primary cause of disease and rarely test for toxic underlying problems. In fact, about the only time the medical community will cite toxicity as a primary cause of disease is when somebody dies or becomes obviously ill from massive toxic exposure, such as a chemical spill. Subtle and gradual toxic exposures typically go undetected, which explains how people suffering from toxic overload can go to their doctors repeatedly (with persistent, if vague, complaints of “not feeling quite right”) and never receive a correct diagnosis.
When people finally do become sick from their bioaccumu-lated toxins, following the path of their illness back to the myriad toxic sources is nearly impossible. If these toxins weren't so insidious and if they made us sick or killed us quicker and more straightforwardly, we would understand more readily the need to avoid them. Instead, we expose ourselves unknowingly and we lay the groundwork for massive cellular malfunction, little by little. Combine these external toxins with those generated inside the body, and the eventual result is toxic overload.
A chilling example: Environmental and dietary toxins bioaccumulate in a mother's fatty tissues throughout her life. When she starts nursing, her toxin-loaded fatty tissues produce cancer-causing breast milk. In his 1987 book
Diet for
a New America,
John Robbins notes that the milk of most American mothers is so contaminated with chemicals (PCBs, dioxins and various pesticides) that “it would be subject to confiscation and destruction by the FDA were it to be sold across state lines.” Robbins also says “the EPA has concluded that the average American breast-fed infant ingests nine times the permissible level of dieldrin, one of the most potent of all cancer-causing agents known to modern science.” Fortunately, dieldrin, which was used on crops, has now been removed from the market, but the average mother's milk (while still far better than infant formula) remains contaminated with numerous toxic chemicals.
No One Is Safe
At present, toxic chemicals can be found in trace amounts in the tissues of virtually everyone in Americaâincluding you. These chemicals include: plastics such as styrene (disposable Styrofoam cups), 1,4-dichlorobenzene (mothballs, deodorizers), sodium lauryl sulfate (synthetic detergent from soaps, shampoos, toothpastes), pesticides, PCBs, dioxins, phthalates (plastics), formaldehyde (plywood, particleboard, permanent-press clothing), prescription drugs and organic solvents. No place on earthâand no modern homeâis free from man-made toxic contamination. Molecules of the pesticide DDT, for example, blanket the entire planet.
Henry Schroeder, M.D., a former professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and author of
The Poisons Around
Us,
wrote that “five toxic trace metals: antimony, beryllium, cadmium, lead, and mercury are involved in at least half the deaths in the U.S. and much of the disabling disease.” In all, more than one hundred thousand chemicals are now in commercial use, at least 25 percent of which are known to be hazardous; many others have never been tested at all!
Even when chemicals are tested for safety, studies are virtually always short-term and tested individually; few have examined the long-term effects of chemicals, or how they react in the body in combination with each other. Yet these long-term, combined effects are the reality of living in America today. In other words, the testing programs are flawed. Adverse effects are not necessarily observed in small groups of animals, nor do experimental animals necessarily react to toxins the same as humans. Ultimately, any chemical that is not normal and natural to our bodies puts a load on our detoxification systems and may damage cell function.
Most people make little effort to avoid toxins because officially established tolerances presume that toxin levels are within safe limits. Unless you make special choices, you constantly eat foods with trace toxins, you constantly drink water with trace toxins, you constantly use personal products with trace toxins, and you constantly breathe toxic air. By the end of each day, these toxic contaminants often reach a substantial cumulative total. EPA scientists found that
the total toxic
residues in our daily diet can exceed 500 percent of the recommended
daily maximum, even if each individual food is
within “safe” limits!
A Poison Gas Chamber of Her Very Own
Several years ago, a young married couple from Chicago asked me to help their three-year-old daughter, Anne, who was experiencing seizures. Anne had been examined by at least a dozen specialists, but their only recommendations were anti-seizure medications that made Anne sick, yet failed to stop the seizures. The desperate parents called me, a complete stranger two thousand miles away. They begged me for help, even though I am not a physician.
Because there is only one disease, I knew that Anne's problem was malfunctioning cells. But why were they malfunctioning? Although I asked many questions about Anne's history, nothing seemed unusual about her birth, background or development. She had been breast-fed (a good thing; even though breast milk is toxic, it is still preferable to the alternatives), and her diet was actually better than average. In fact, she had been remarkably healthy ever since birthâuntil the seizures started.
I began to ask questions about her environment. As it turned out, during most of her young life, Anne had been sleeping in a crib in her parents' bedroom. When she outgrew the crib, her parents decided she should have her own bedroom, and they refurbished a room. Knowing that brand-new room furnishings can be quite toxic, I focused on environmental toxins as the probable cause of the little girl's problems. I learned that before the onset of the seizures, Anne's new bedroom had been given a fresh coat of paint and was furnished with new wall-to-wall carpeting, a new television set and new furniture, including a new bed and mattress. In fact, that new bedroom had just about every amenity that any set of loving parents could give to their beloved daughter, but it was also a poison gas chamber! The new paint, carpet, mattress, television and furniture (constructed of particleboard, which contains formaldehyde) were all giving off toxic gases. You recognize the typical “new paint smell,” that “new carpet smell” and that “new furniture smell.” They are all toxic, especially when they are brand-new, at which time they emit higher concentrations of chemicals. Shut anybody inside a bedroom like little Anne's for eight or ten hours a night, and the person is exposed to a lot of toxins.
Anne was in toxic overload, and her seizures were the result. Often, in a case like this, when you remove the source of the toxins, you cure the disease. Instead, Anne's physicians had prescribed antiseizure medications, which added to her toxic overload, making her sicker. I suggested an experiment to Anne's parents: Close off the toxic bedroom and allow Anne to sleep in another room for a few weeks. The result: The seizures stopped, and Anne returned to being a normal and healthy child.
Fight Back with Foods
Why isn't our society taking more action to protect us from toxins? Why don't our physicians routinely warn us about toxins and check for them? One explanation lies in a 1988 report issued by the National Academy of Sciences titled,
Role
of the Primary Care Physician in Occupational Environmental
Medicine,
which concluded that while toxic environmental chemicals play an increasingly important role in modern chronic diseases, almost all physicians are ignorant about the degree to which low-level toxins affect health.
One of the most direct sources of our toxic exposures is the foods we eat. A meal that looks, smells and tastes good is a wonderful thing, but you owe your body more. You need to make sure your food is free of toxins and filled with nutrients that support your body's natural ability to detoxify.
You need to
find out what is in your food, where your food came from and
how your food has been altered from the way nature provided.
One of the best ways to minimize the toxins is to buy organic foods. Organic is a method of growing and producing food free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides, artificial ripening agents, preservatives, genetic modification and radiation. The term “organic” applies to more than fruits, vegetables and grains; organically grown animals are fed organic feed and are produced without the customary use of antibiotics, hormones or other supplemental medications. Organic foods may be more expensive and somewhat more difficult to obtain, but they almost always contain fewer toxins and better nutrition. Read labels; the U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved organic certification and the label should bear the logo. Unless a product clearly says that it is organic, it almost certainly is not. If you live in an urban area, organic foods purchased at local farmers' markets are most likely the freshest, most nutritious, least toxic foods you can obtain. Despite that, almost 90 percent of the food dollars spent in America today are spent on toxic, processed foods that are not organic. To make matters worse, we eat almost no fresh food, limiting the nutrients available to help us detoxify all the bad stuff we constantly take in.
Feeding into Behavior Problems
Several years ago, a grandmother came up to me at a break in one of my workshops and asked what to do about her psychotic four-year-old grandson, Gerald. She described the boy's fits of uncontrollable anger and said that he would strike out at everyone and everything in his path. Gerald had been taken to a number of medical centers and examined by numerous physicians, who only offered powerful tranquilizers to calm the psychotic behavior. As is often the case, the prescribed drugs did not solve the problem; they just compounded it. The drugs made Gerald sick and lethargic, but did not eliminate his terrifying behavior.
The boy faced an uncertain future. That Gerald could ever be able to attend a regular school or hold a regular job seemed unlikely. I asked Gerald's grandmother many questions but was unable to find any obvious explanation for his psychotic behavior. One thing I learned about Gerald was that he drank a lot of milk and apple juice. Walking back to the podium to continue my presentation, I told the grandmother that while I honestly did not know what was wrong with her grandson, I did know that both milk and apple juice contain a lot of toxic chemical residues. Regardless of what was wrong, feeding him toxins was certainly not going to help him improve. I recommended a simple experiment: Stop feeding Gerald milk and apple juice.
About six months later, I was speaking at a meeting and, out of the corner of my eye, I spied Gerald's grandmother running toward me with an enthusiasm and a rate of speed that was almost alarming. She breathlessly exclaimed great news about the health of her grandson. Milk and apple juice were completely eliminated from the boy's diet, and he made a miraculous recovery. The psychotic behavior disappeared, and Gerald has been well ever since.
How the removal of milk and apple juice (two presumably healthful foods) from a boy's diet could make such a difference is hard to imagine. We have no way, however, to know exactly how much damage the toxins in our food are causing. Too many factors are involved, and each person's biochemistry is unique. Some people, like this little boy, can be more sensitive to certain toxins, such as the ad exec David may have been to mercury. The solution, regardless of individual biochemistry, is to choose a diet that is low in toxins. A diet should consist of organic, fresh, whole/raw/unprocessed foods, pure water and avoidance of heavily processed/cooked foods.