Archived News of the Week

Eschew Obfuscation

I attended a spectacularly disturbing conference last weekend entitled "Treating patients in a toxic world: Exploring the effects of environmental toxicity and clinical tools for detoxification." I came away mind-boggled, enlightened and depressed yet strangely invigorated at the same time, as if I had been told that I had cancer, but that this newly discovered cutting edge treatment could cure me. So, put me in a Home for the Addlepated but I came away knowing I had a lot of personal tweaking of my lazy if not benumbed psyche to do around the issue of pollution/chemicals. One of the presenters mentioned "The Well-Informed Futility Syndrome" which comes from... " the issues over which we believe we have little or no control. They fill us with such unbearable grief or unbearable guilt that we just have to turn away from the problem. We change the subject, we turn the page." Sandra Steingraber, activist, author and ecologist. Let me share some of this information with you and let's see where you stand within the Futility/Activism spectrum.

First of all, never forget this: Genetics loads the gun, but environment pulls the trigger. This is why it is so important to keep ourselves as chemically clean as possible, as over exposure to chemicals is a serious trigger puller. There can be no chronic diseases without chronic chemical exposure. I don't mean to depress you. (But on the other hand, why should I be the only one?) Here are some sobering statistics about how bad it actually is:

Fracking is so much worse than we have been lead to believe. Produced Water which is what the refuse water from fracking is called is a huge carcinogen and there is hexavalent chromium in it which is used for lubrication by the gas and oil industry, which is worse than bad. This water, which is spewed out at the rate of millions of gallons per day in the fracking procedure, goes back into our lands, our waterways, and it does so forever. After your apathy and futility let go, start fighting it when you can. Vote "NO" when you can. Filtration of our home drinking water is now a necessity, not an option. There is no reasonable way we can be assured anymore that our municipal or well waters are pure enough to drink.

Mercury Amalgams: How many "silver fillings" are too many? Research has shown that less than 1 (.8 for adults and .6 for children) mercury amalgam filling is too much for our bodies. "The smoking tooth" is a famous photo of an amalgam filled tooth emitting mercury vapor or "smoking" long after the filling had been put in. I had a patient once, years ago, with MS, progressing pretty rapidly, too, who refused to believe me when I said that she might be able to stop this progression if she removed all of her "silver fillings". She didn't, she moved to Hawaii and I hear that her MS is very bad. Get your amalgams removed - at most quadrant by quadrant - by a biological dentist who knows what s/he's doing.

Fish: What kind should we eat and how often? Bad news: No fish is safe now, not even wild-caught Alaskan salmon. It all has too much mercury. Researchers suggest only 2 servings per month of wild-caught Alaskan Salmon, unless you can get something called "Kodiak chum" which I have never heard of, then you can eat it 2 times a week.

What about Farmed Salmon? Nope. It is filled with PCB's (polychlorinated biphenyls) which get stored in fat and can cause endocrine disruption, neurological disorders and cancer, especially non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Yes, even farmed fish with an organic label, or chicken with an organic label is suspect, since the PCB's are now living in the ground thus infecting everything, including the chickens rummaging around a storybook organic farm.

For help with elimination of PCB's we need things like rice bran, chlorophyll, chlorella and green leafies, broccoli, plus green tea. We also need to increase glutathione, silymarin, NAC, all of which increase the sulfation in the Phase II detoxification of the liver. This is where all these nasty chemicals get stuck and rather than going to the kidneys and bowel to be excreted, make a detour through the skin (rashes, skin cancers, psoriasis, eczema), brain (depression, anxiety) or they might just choose to tear down your immune system.

Then there is cadmium in tobacco, car exhaust and all shellfish. Sweating helps to eliminate cadmium, as does increased dietary zinc and calcium.

There is arsenic in chicken. Yes, even organic chicken. And in shellfish and seaweeds, like hijiki which has been taken off the shelves in Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand, the UK. Luckily arsenic is easy to detox through the urine with things like B12, SAM-e and selenium.

There is lead in lipstick but mostly in the darker shades, like "L'Oreal Colour Riche True Red'" and "Cover Girl Incredifull Lipcolor, 'Maximum Red.'" Stick to the 50's style pinks or the certified organics and you will probably be fine. Cosmetics or skin lotions and creams without an organic certification are dangerous and cause breast cancer. Would you get yourself a pint of fracking "produced water" and rub it all over your skin? Well, that's what you are doing when you use creams full of parabens, soaps with triclosan and toothpaste with sodium lauryl sulfate. Or products with petrochemicals, styrene, toluene and xylene.

Get rid of anything with phthalates (most plastics) and Bisphenol A (most canned things). I have found that Eden is BPA-free as far as cans go. Chemicals like these are also considered to be Obesogens. They make you fat. Treatments for petrochemical toxins may include probiotics, glycine, saunas, boosting glutathione, and just improving detox pathways in general with liver boosters. At this point with the environment the way it is, we must all become good excretors, constantly reducing our total toxic load, because no way, no how, will we be able to avoid the chemicals.

A study done on babies feeding on breast milk only  i.e. no other foods, showed just a few obese babies. But, how could there have been ANY obese babies? Unless it was the Obesogens coming out through Mom's breast milk. You know, if we stop buying things with dangerous chemicals, that's like talking to the manufacturers with our pocketbooks and they will listen. Go to a website www.safecosmetics.org and they will tell you which companies are safe to use. I have already done this and here are few of the safe companies, those which you will no doubt recognize from browsing the shelves at WF's: Alba botanicals, Aubry Organic, Pangea Organics, Toms of Maine, Weleda and Hugo Naturals plus many more.

Your glass of wine or your shot of tequila at night is considered to be a solvent in chemical language and it suppresses glutathione levels. Interesting study done with this in mind: Four groups of people, men and women, time frame, 30 days. Group one drank 3/12 oz. cans of beer a day, Group two drank 3/5oz glasses of wine a day, Group three drank 3/1.5 oz. of spirits a day and those in Group 4 were abstinent. Abstinence showed the least reduction in glutathione levels (which is good) and spirits showed the most.

Non-organic wines contain a fungicide called vinclozolin which alters DNA, creates infertility in men, mammary tumors in both men and women, kidney disease and immune abnormalities and does so for 4 generations. Great, Great Grandpa hoisted a few? Great, Great Grandson will still be realizing the effects of his drinking, which I think is an interesting theory to pursue regarding inherited alcoholic tendencies.

Regarding Room Sprays, my personal bête noir: "The best smell is no smell" unless it is absolutely pure like unadulterated essential oils which I seem to tolerate just fine. That orange stuff that people spray in their bathrooms? Please. Or perfumes? Even worse. Kids who smell dryer sheets (like Bounce, which can make me run screaming from a room) can "have seizures after exposures to dryer sheets and adults pass out around air fresheners." You want to watch me turn red, get woozy and run out of the room like a crazy person? Put me in a room with those air freshener plug ins. They all contain VOC's, or volatile organic compounds which are neurologically damaging and are also "correlated with increased earaches and diarrhea in infants, and increased depressions and headaches in mothers." Arch Environ Health, 10/2003.

The treatment for VOC's is to preserve glutathione status and make sure you are taking enough magnesium. Magnesium deficiency is rampant in my practice and in me and is caused by our highly toxic environment. I suggest you take magnesium to bowel tolerance. When you get signs of diarrhea, cut back by one pill.

"We're in a giant car going towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they are going to sit." David Suzuki, environmental activist.

The thing that worries me a lot is the "Brown Cloud" coming straight at us from Asia. We are downwind from Asia, so it blows right over the Pacific right into our back yard. NBC News through the Associated Press had a headline entitled "Brown Clouds dim Asia, threaten world's food supplies: Thick brown clouds of soot, particles and chemicals stretching from the Persian Gulf to Asia threaten health and food supplies in the world, the UN reported Thursday, citing what it called the newest threat to the global environment." China is now closing certain freeways because it is too smoggy to drive on them. They are selling travel tickets only to unpolluted areas in the mountains, as they don't want tourists to see all the smog, the masked citizens and experience the stinging eyes. Then there are the gazillion gallons of radioactive water from Fukushima being dumped daily into the Pacific and reaching our shores as I write this. By 2050, the primary cause of death on earth will be pollution.

Your survival kit starts with two things: Yes, go ahead and watch TV for two weeks in your bathrobe if you need to, which is Part I - or depression and apathy - of the Well-Informed Futility Syndrome, but then, Part II, get off the couch and become active in causes. Activism overrides Futility. So, start where you are, use what you have and do what you can. Most of all, start with YOU.

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