Body Burden
The best way to detoxify is to stop putting toxic things into the body and depend upon its own mechanisms.
Andrew Weil
Toxic People
I think we would all agree the world is a toxic place. There are over 85,000 chemicals in the marketplace, and we come in contact with them in one way or another every day.
There is no such thing as a pristine environment. Toxins are in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. They are in the homes we live in and the offices where we work. They are present in our children’s schools. They are prevalent in our personal care and cleaning products.
Decades of research and countless studies have contributed to our understanding that we carry a burden of toxic chemicals in our bodies, our Body Burden. When engaged in conversation on this subject many people think that such small amounts of these chemicals could do no harm. When we talk about parts per million or parts per billion our mind says, that is so small how could it be harmful. What most people don’t recognize is that many pharmaceutical drugs are effective at these very small levels. We must also ask: what are the interactions of all these toxins, and how does this affect us after decades of absorbing and sequestering them in our bodies?
It has been nearly 40 years since September 22, 1980, and the Time Magazine cover story entitled “The Poisoning of America” was published. Pollution is something we have all been aware of for a long time. It’s not a new problem, but has it gotten better or worse? It’s gotten worse, exponentially worse.
It has been said every 5 years there are 10,000 new chemicals in the marketplace that wasn’t here 5 years ago. That equates to over 5 new chemicals per day!
Most people are of the opinion that these chemicals are thoroughly tested before they are released into our environment when actually less than one percent have been tested for toxicity to humans.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has mandated safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use, the burden on the EPA is so high that it has succeeded in banning or restricting only a small amount of substances, and often only in specific applications. These include asbestos, dioxin, polychlorinated biphenyls, hexavalent chromium, and chlorofluorocarbons.
In 2010, at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health, Lisa Jackson, then the administrator of the EPA, put our current, hyper-toxic era into sharp perspective: "A child born in America today will grow up exposed to more chemicals than any other generation in our history."
Our Body Burden, the “Pollution in People”
The term body burden was first coined in the early 2000s. It is defined as the total amount of a chemical present in a human's or animal's body, typically a radioactive element or other toxic substance. This can include anything from dangerous metals like lead or mercury to pesticides and herbicides, unsafe food additives, and bisphenol A’s, (BPA’s) from plastics just to name a few.
Dr. Leo Trasande, assistant director of the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, states, “We are in an epidemic of environmentally mediated disease among American children today. Rates of asthma, childhood cancers, birth defects, and developmental disorders have exponentially increased, and it can’t be explained by changes in the human genome. So, what has changed? All the chemicals we’re being exposed to.”
As stated by Dr. Sanjay Gupta on a recent CNN documentary entitled Toxic America, “A growing number of studies are finding hundreds of toxic chemicals in mothers' and subsequently their babies' bodies when they are born…”
In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a comprehensive study that suggests more than 33% of diseases affecting children under the age of five are caused by environmental exposures, and that by preventing these exposures, as many as four million children’s lives a year worldwide could be saved.
Our environment has changed very rapidly. We do not live in the same environment that we did 100 years, 50 years or even 10 years ago. Yet, biologically we change very slowly. Therein lies the problem. The inability to adapt to a more toxic environment takes its toll on our bodies resulting in a multitude of chronic health issues.
We monitor the pollution in our air, our water, and even our fish. It's time to start looking at the pollution in our bodies and take steps to minimize our exposure and absorption of toxic substances.
Although we as individuals may not have a big say in the chemicals in our environment, we do have control over those which we may ingest, breathe or absorb. Self Care Awakening, “Be Healthy by Choice,” looks at ways we can help reduce our individual body burden of toxic chemicals for a healthier life. Becoming aware of the problem is the first step the second is to take action for healthier choices.
This topic will be the focus of our next Healthy by Choice broadcast. The class will discuss steps we all can implement to reduce our body burden and how the Nikken Wellness Home provides the tools to accomplish this.
Please join us and invite guests for Body Burden Matters on Tuesday, February 25th at 9 pm Eastern, 6 pm Pacific. Together we can all help anyone Be Healthy by Choice. To Join the broadcast click this link and follow the prompts www.theroyalalliance.com/live see you on Tuesday.