Our 21st century silent epidemic:
What’s really making us sick, tired, and overweight?
Our bodies can’t metabolize the constant, daily bombardment of environmental toxins
“Chemicals have replaced bacteria and viruses as the main threat to human health. . . . The diseases we’re beginning to see as the major causes of death in the latter part of this century and into the 21st century are diseases of chemical origin.”
—Rick Irvin, a toxicologist at Texas A&M University
The human body is designed to filter and eliminate toxic waste mainly through the liver and kidneys. However, our body was never meant to metabolize the synthetic chemicals and poisons we are exposed to every single day. As a result, these chemicals and poisons remain in the body, contributing to our chemical “body burden.” Many of the toxins are stored in our fat cells—the bodies attempt to keep them away from our vital organs—so we continue to get fatter and fatter. Additionally, we finally reach a tipping point of chemical exposure, which weakens our immune system and can trigger our genetic susceptibility to an illness or disease.
The relationship between our “body burden” and “toxic synergy”
“[Toxic] synergies may provide an explanation for the many great mystery illnesses of the late twentieth century—chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, and multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome.”
—The Hundred Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health Randall Fitzgerald, 2006
Scientists are beginning to recognize the role of toxic synergy, which results when two or more toxic chemicals interact in the human body in such a way that their total effect is much worse than their individual effects. And since we all have a body burden of hundreds of chemicals stored in our bodies since childhood, the potential toxic synergy among these poisons is mind-boggling. So all the government’s traditional risk analysis calculations about what kind and how much of a chemical substance in products, food, water, medicine, etc. are safe for humans becomes meaningless. This is what makes toxic synergy so scary for scientists and government regulators. The scientists don’t know, the government regulators don’t know, and the doctors don’t know.
Where have all the nutrients gone?
“What we humans consume for food has undergone more profound change in the past century than in the previous one hundred thousand years, yet genetically we have the same bodies and nutritional needs. That discrepancy between who we are and what we put in our bodies has sown the seeds for our current epidemics of illness and disease.”
—The Hundred Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health Randall Fitzgerald, 2006
It is estimated that during the twentieth century, 85% of the ninety-one nutrients essential to human health have been removed from the crop soils in North America by fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and acid rain (Earth Summit report, 1992). Processing food removes most of the nutrients that remain. What is worse, food manufactures then add preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, thickeners, artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, and on and on, which when we consume these foods, contributes to our “body burden” of synthetic chemical exposure.
So what does this mean to your health?
Prolonged chemical exposure and the subsequent build up of toxins in our body ("body burden"), combined with nutritional deficiency, can result in multiple health problems and, frequently, weight gain.
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