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Are You Toxic?
Excerpt From the book, “Detoxify or Die” by Sherry A. Rogers:
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Part 3
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“The secret to good health is in getting
your body so chemically unloaded and nutrient primed, that
it heals itself.” |
In Your Body
What do teeth have to do with body pollution? Mercury in
our dental fillings has caused Parkinson's disease, while cadmium
and arsenic
from porcelain tooth restorations have caused osteoporosis. And
currently physicians are concerned that a tally of the mercury preservative
(thiomerasol) in most infant immunizations leaves the infant at
three
months with a total mercury dose exceeding the "permissible" limit
for an entire year.
Methylacrylates from the dental bonding glues or adhesives (as you'll
see in the next chapters) have caused sudden heart attacks, and the
phenols used to sterilize root canals have caused serious migraines.
Silicone from breast implants have caused auto-immune disorders like
lupus, as well as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. Titanium
from hip replacements or absorbed from cosmetics have caused cardiac
arrhythmia. Heavy metals in hair dyes have damaged kidneys leading
to renal dialysis or death by cancer, while coal tars in prescription
and over-the-counter psoriasis creams are related to the very chemicals
that scientists use one dose of to cause cancers in experimental
mice.
Pesticides: The Most Pervasive and Potent Polluting Poisons
After over 30 years in medicine, I can safely say that I believe
the number one culprit that has damaged the largest number of people
has to be pesticides. Indoors and outdoors they are inescapable:
used on lawns, commercial crops, for roadside weed control, and even
via aerial spraying for such lunacy as West Nile virus. In foods
they are inescapable, as it is difficult to find a food that does
not have pesticide residues, even organic ones. Apples are sprayed
approximately 14 times a season, animals are dipped or sprayed and
their grain and other feed are grown with pesticides and herbicides.
Their water supply contains runoff from pesticided fields. And once
produce is ready for market, transportation usually requires fungicides
to keep it from rotting in transit. To prevent it from becoming infested,
shipments are often blanketed with vermicides to kill the rats or
insecticides to keep the flies and other bugs off.
Indoors we can barely escape them as they are used not as needed,
but pesticide schedules are decided on a contract basis in institutions,
schools, businesses, churches, restaurants, and factories. They are
on our textiles and furnishings, clothes and in our cosmetics, toiletries,
papers, office supplies, and plastics.
Invariably, among the most damaged people that I have had the privilege
of caring for over the last three decades, have been those with unsuspected
pesticide exposures in their younger years. Many grew up as children
of parents enlisted in the armed services who lived in barracks and
other housing which were routinely pesticided with chlordane, an
insecticide that has a thirty-year half-life. With a 30-year half-life,
it basically never goes away, since there is invariably continual
low-level exposure from numerous sources, re-boosting you to more
toxic levels. Chlordane was only outlawed a few years ago. Other
pesticide victims were brought up on a farm, but the vast majority
had another source.
The higher up on the food chain
you go, the more ubiquitous environmental toxins, like pesticides,
are concentrated in the organism. Meats, fish and fowl contain
many times more pollutants than a plant-based diet.
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They recall vividly as the spray truck came down their streets when
they were children. They would all joyously run outside to jump and
play in the spray from the truck. Or they would chase the spray truck
on their bicycles, laughing with innocence while vigorously inhaling
the fumes. This DOT must have an incubation of 20 to 40 years, because
that's the period of time that it took for them to develop devastating
and confounding illnesses that baffled all physicians.
Many of them had sought 20 plus physicians with not even as much
as a diagnosis. These folks had "dead-end" neurologic disease
labels like MS (multiple sclerosis), ALS, Parkinson's disease, mysterious
neuropathies, or "incurable" chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia,
depression, or cancer. Other innocent pesticide victims merely lived
in the South and had exposures to monthly roach or termite pesticides,
lived in homes or apartments that were routinely sprayed or went
to bed nestling their heads in the flea collars of the family pets.
Sometimes they merely worked in buildings that were routinely sprayed
in the evening or on weekends, unbeknown to the workers.
Pesticides are so potent a trigger for a multitude of diseases that
when researchers need 500 rats with devastating Parkinson's disease
for experiments, how do you think they accomplish that? They merely
give rats one dose of a common organic pesticide to cause Parkinson's
disease in them! Scientists use the same recipe to create cancer
in rats for research. They give them one dose of a pesticide or related
chemical.
In addition to the plastics that are such great environmental endocrine
disrupters or hormone mimics, there's one more important class. The
organochlorides pesticides are even more damaging to the endocrine
or glandular system, as well as to the immune system and detoxification
systems. Organochloride pesticides are a category of pesticides that
include more than 15,000 chlorinated compounds (chemicals that contain
one or more chlorine molecules).
Organochloride pesticides include the herbicide (weed killer) atrazine,
one of the most commonly used pesticide for corn, and other grains,
fruits and vegetables. Organochloride pesticides also include DDT,
chlordane (the major pesticide used in army housing as well as for
residential housing, and partially banned a few years ago), lindane
(the main ingredient in children's prescription head lice remedy),
dieldrin and many other pesticides, as well as industrial chemical
spin-offs like PCBs and dioxins (ubiquitous chemicals that are also
extremely potent cancer triggers).
DDT was only partially banned by the U.S. decades
ago because it was not only a blatant carcinogen, but persists
or stockpiles
in the environment as well as in our bodies. However, African
nations have brought it back in full force as a weapon against
malaria. Scientists have tracked DDT-containing clouds that eventually
rain out over U.S. soils and waters.
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You might remind me that DDT was banned in the U.S. decades ago,
because it was found to be a potent cause of cancer and found to
stay or persist in the environment once it was released. But we still
make it and sell it to other countries, many of them third world.
The problem is that many of them supply our foods. And its use is
becoming more pronounced. As the Wall Street Journal showed us in
2001, African nations, attempting to eradicate malaria, produce huge
clouds of DDT that actually rain out over the United States. In essence,
organochloride pesticides, even those most carcinogenic and banned
decades ago, are unavoidable in our environments and since they are
not totally detoxified, are pervasive in the human body. Unfortunately,
they are also among the most potent causes of cancer, other chronic
diseases and organ malfunctions.
The body is unable to completely metabolize, detoxify and permanently
get rid of many parts of these pesticides. Yet for the parts of these
compounds that are successfully detoxified by the body, the biological
half-lives of these substances are not days, not months, but years.
This leads to a slow steady accumulation, with the unknown additive
affects from the totality or combination of multiple compounds being
dangerously synergistic (Hoyer, Chang). In other words, they do not
have an additive dangerous effect, but an exponential potency. In
terms of danger to you, 1 + 1 does not equal 2, but more like 10.
Volumes of toxicology books and scientific reports verify that these
are not the simple, harmless, easily metabolized substances that
those with a vested interest (manufacturers) would have us believe.
In fact, there are no absolute tests that can inexpensively identify
all pesticides, phthalates, and other environmental chemicals or
their metabolites once they are inside the human body. And no wonder
chlorinated pesticides are so dangerous when simple chlorine compounds
themselves contribute to a host of "untreatable" diseases
such as chronic fatigue syndrome (Dunstan), and are implicated in
increasing cancer rates, especially bladder and rectal. Organochloride
pesticides have been found to be one of the many risk factors in
getting breast cancer (Hoyer). That should not surprise anyone since
researchers for decades have used as little as one dose
of a pesticide to create experimental animals with various cancers,
immune deficiencies,
nerve damage, intestinal disease, neurologic diseases like Parkinson's
disease, and more. Clearly, pesticides are some of the most dangerously
and
silently potent chemicals
that man has synthesized.
When it comes to the cumulative effect of environmental
toxins in the body, they are synergistically exponential.
1 + 1 does
not equal 2, but more like 10.
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And as far as laboratory tests go for pesticides, the obvious value
for the "normal level" of pesticides in the body is zero.
But because there are probably no "clean", pesticide-free
animals, fish, or humans left on the face of the earth, zero is no
longer the norm (Turusov, W.H.O.). Instead, laboratory values are
reported as "population average", a relative comparison
to what everybody else has. For as you'll see, EPA studies of everyday
folks in their own homes show disease-provoking levels of common
chemicals in their fat samples and breath analysis constantly.
Last of all, remember that pesticides are designed to kill living
organisms. Sure we use small amounts to kill small critters that
normally have a very short life span. But remember, at the same time,
we are stockpiling the very same lethal chemicals. Now even children
have higher rates of pesticide-induced cancers (Reynolds, Meinert,
Leiss, Pogoda, Davis, Zahm, Daniels). And we more than make up for
the low dose by tanking up over a period of 20 to 50 years before
symptoms emerge. Clearly we are a dangerously and pervasively polluted
people.
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