Chemicals within us, and is there a balance?

Just read an article on National Geographic’s web site (http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0610/feature4/index.html) by David Ewing Duncan who had himself tested for 320 chemicals that may be lurking in his body. There are not too many places that will do this type of testing, so he had the tests done in Canada. Turns out he had quite a few chemicals in him. Some he attributed to playing near a landfill when he was kid. But, the landfill was just upstream from a municipal water supply, so the likelihood that some chemicals leeched into the water is pretty high. We seem to pick up chemicals from just about everywhere and from everything. The most striking piece of data was the amount of a chemical used as a flame retardant, PBDE, found in his body. The doctor working with him was trying to figure out what Duncan might be exposed to on a regular basis that may be the source for this. Their best guess was frequently flying on commercial airlines. Flame retardant is used on the plastics and fabrics in planes. It also seems that this chemical has turned up in literally every place on Earth. It ends up in animals hundreds or thousands of miles from anything that may have been treated with it. What this story does not mention is the potential synergistic effects that chemicals can have on the body. This is talked about quite a bit in a book called “The Hundred-Year Lie” by Randall Fitzgerald. No one really knows what happens when several of these chemicals accumulate in your body and decide to have a big party. Think the government or some food or drug agency is testing this stuff? Not a chance. They don’t even test most of the chemicals as it is, much less for how they may interact with each other.

Today there was also a news story (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=52253) that the World Health Organization was going to begin spraying DDT indoors in areas of constant and high malaria infestation. It is not classified as an epidemic, but there does seem to be a high number of cases. Here we have a situation where we have a known toxic chemical that can cause health problems for humans, but, it seems to be about the only option to rid the area of malaria. Malaria can wreak quite a bit of havoc itself, so is treating the area with DDT a good compromise? Many people feel that if DDT is applied correctly it will rid the mosquitoes, thus stopping the spread of malaria while not causing any health problems in humans or other animals. Hopefully they are correct. Is the potential for health risks down the road worth the benefit of ridding an area of a killing disease like malaria? What about the use of the flame retardant? How many lives are saved each year because something didn’t go up in flames? Is that worth the price of potentially numerous health related issues later on?

“Organic” – the new catch phrase

There seems to be a lot more “organic” food available at the grocery stores lately. “Organic” is the new “low-fat” or “sugar-free”. The food vendors certainly have caught on to the evolving trend from consumers that are seeking out an alternative to synthesized artificially flavored pesticide laced foods. While it is encouraging to see this trend in America, we as consumers need to be careful in distinguishing between the true organic foods out there and the marketing gimmicks disguised as “organic” just to sell more junk. You can even buy organic food items at Wal-Mart now. Let’s see what “organic” is really about. According to the site soilassociation.org, organic farming has 3 main features: 1) it severely restricts the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, 2) organic farmers rely on developing healthy, fertile soil and growing a mixture of crops, 3) animals are raised without the routine use of drugs, antibiotics and wormers. The USDA.gov web site has some guidelines for the organic labeling. If an item has the “USDA ORGANIC” label on it, it has been certified to be at least 95 percent organic. If the product says “made with organic ingredients” on the front label then it contains at least 70 percent organic ingredients. If the product contains less than 70 percent organic ingredients, it will list the specific organic ingredients on the side panel of the item. Only the term “organic” is certified. Words like “natural” apply only to labeling meat and poultry as defined by the federal Agriculture Department. In their case, natural means no artificial or synthetic ingredients, including added hormones, and minimally processed. But “natural” really means nothing for the rest of the foods we buy. Just about every food item has some form of something natural in it somewhere. It has nothing to do with it being organic. A web site worth checking into as a consumer is Organic Consumers Association (organicconsumers.org). They keep an eye on the organic industry and help decipher some of the confusion. There is another certification organization called “Certified Naturally Grown’ (naturallygrown.org). It is a non-profit alternative certification program tailored for small-scale, direct-market organic farmers. The CNG certification standards are based on the USDA Organic Standards, but CNG is not accredited by or affiliated with the USDA. CNG helps with small farmers earning less than $5000 a year who cannot afford the high USDA Organic certification fees and mounds of paperwork. It can be said that the CNG organization holds more true to the organic standards than the USDA. The USDA Organic certified farms tend to be more of the “factory farm” types. These are often owned by large corporations, who many would argue are driven more by profits than consumer and environmental health. CNG certified farmers tend to be smaller, locally owned farms. Their produce will probably be purchased at farmers markets or small specialty grocery stores. For now, the organic world is still very much “buyer beware”.

The food you are eating is only as good as the dirt it growed in

(http://www.newstarget.com/020072.html)
You are trying to eat healthy, making sure to buy plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. After all, if you are eating your fruits and vegetables, you are getting most of your vitamins and minerals, right? Well, maybe not. Here is something that I just learned: plants can make vitamins, but not minerals. The only way that plants get minerals in them is to absorb them from the soil they grow in. So, if you buy some kale thinking that you are getting a good supply of calcium (since that what we are told), you really are only getting as much calcium as the kale could absorb from the soil. Maybe you aren’t getting any calcium from it. With modern “factory-farming” practices, chances are that most of the commercially grown produce contains very little of the minerals that they are claimed to have. It is not the plants’ fault; they cannot pass along those vital minerals if they are already depleted from the soil. How do those minerals get there, anyway? Oddly enough, it is the natural disasters like rivers flooding, tsunamis and volcanoes erupting that replenish the soil with these life giving minerals. Even though these natural occurrences cause great devastation to land, property, humans and animals, they result in replenished fertile soil for many years. When humans had to live with nature, they learned to accept this. Before our development of modern technology and ingenuity, humans knew to not build their houses on riverbanks and coastal beaches. They knew that ever few years they would get flooded. We now think that we can build where ever we want and can control nature. We think we can keep her rivers and oceans at bay. Well, we have learned time and time again that we cannot. There is a natural order and cycle to this world. We can try to circumvent this natural order with modern synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to yield plentiful crops year after year, but they come with a price. A part of this price is food that looks great, but is devoid of vital life-giving nutrients.