Sunshine and Light

How Far are you Willing to Go?

Along the lines of "The Omnivore's Dilemma", "Fast Food Nation" and other books that guarantee you will never eat again, I read "The Hundred Year Lie". It's a book that delves into how toxic our bodies have become thanks not only to farming methods, but also because of household chemicals, medicines and their misuse, widespread use of plastics, fluoridated and chlorinated water, and vaccines. And as with a lot of books of this type, it's both appalling and informative. But the flip side of this is...how far are you willing to go to detox.

The basic premise is that the rise of synthetic chemicals in every facet of our lives has increased our body burden - the number of chemicals that are residing in your liver and fat cells - and caused side effects that aren't always measurable in the lab. The reason it's so difficult to pinpoint these side effects is because it's hard to find the exact blend of chemicals any one person can be exposed to. So while an individual chemical alone may be relatively inert, in concert with other chemicals, it can lead to an increase in a whole host of medical problems. Which are then treated with more chemicals, which cause more side effects, which require more chemicals....

So to the "how far are you willing to go" part. Obviously the best thing you can do to decrease your body burden is to decrease your exposure. And that's where decision making comes in.

• Vaccines - Carriers of poisons or socially responsible thing to do?
• Rid yourself of plastics as much as possible - rotsa ruck raggy. Even rice comes in a plastic bag. And there aren't tons of glass food storage options out there.
• Rid yourself of household cleaners - er. yeah. There are natural household cleaners that you can make, the question is the tradeoff between time and health. Some of you aren't even using household cleaners (ahem) but the rest of you need to add recipes to the cleaning time.
• Eat Organic and Macrobiotic - actually this is sort of interesting. The author references Weston A Price early in his book, then at the end encourages a Macrobiotic diet. Weston Price is a big believer (from what little reading I've done) that animal products are perfectly healthy if they're organic. Macrobiotic diets eschew animal products at all. But in fairness, what they do have in common is that both discourage eating processed foods as the source of many of our health problems.

For all I'm sort of heckling the above, I'm not disagreeing that a lot of it would be a good thing. But the issues with doing all of these things are time, money, and availability. Oh and the vaccine thing runs afoul of the law. Eating organic/macrobiotic and ridding yourself of toxic household cleaners eliminates a lot of those convenience items that we like in a world where both partners may be working outside the home. And the non-plastic thing, well... I just read an article about how plastic baby bottles made by several leading manufacturers are leaching dangerous levels of chemicals known to harm animals. To which my question is...what are my options? Are there still glass baby bottles out there? And in a more general way, while a few things are in cardboard boxes, the vast majority of packaged items in the grocery store come in plastic.

So overall, definitely a good read, definitely great things to consider. But it's tough to keep up to the level of changes you would have to make to make a significant decrease in the body burden.

One final thought - a tiny thing in the book that made me laugh. He talks about going to the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida to detox. And he mentions some big stars who have gone as well. Including Mick Fleetwood. Wait, what?! Wasn't that guy the king of recreational drugs? What did they do, replace all of his blood and organs with those of a newborn? (snarkfest is over now.)

Now if anyone needs me, I'll be out back planting my organic garden.

Labels: Books

posted by MyHusbandRules @ 12:01 PM