Body Detox Diets For Your Body Burden
Article by Michelle Spencer
If you’re still not sure about the benefits of a healthy detox diet, you might be interested in the rest of this article. Recently a number of American research organizations sponsored a fascinating and disturbing study. The Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, the Environmental Working Group and a research institute known as Commonweal wanted to discover the ‘body burden’ – the load of toxic chemicals – that affects each of our bodies. So they recruited a high-profile group of volunteers, including journalist Bill Moyers, who agreed to be tested for a wide range of environmental pollutants.
The results, as reported by environmentalist Alexandra Rome in an article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 28 March 2004, were deeply troubling. Rome, herself a participant in the study, discovered that her body had measurable levels of eighty-six toxic chemicals, including twenty seven different versions ofpolychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins. This last finding was especially disturbing) considering that the manufacture of PCBs was banned in the United Stares in 1976.
Even more upsetting to Rome was the realization that she had been tested for only 210 of the more than 80,000 chemicals licensed for commercial use. Clearly, Rome wrote, she – and the rest of us – have stored far more manufactured chemicals than these test results revealed.
Moreover, since most of these chemicals have come into use only within the last seventy five years, we actually know very little about how they affect us. As a result, Rome added with more than a touch of sarcasm, our bodies have become “part of a vast chemistry experiment”. So if you’re not undergoing a full body detox every couple of months, you may want to reconsider your diet a little.
As Rome went on to explain in her article, the number of industrial chemicals licensed for commercial use in America is growing rapidly each year. In addition to the 80,000 already licensed, an additional 2,000 new synthetic chemicals make their way into the marketplace there each year. Thus, in 1998, US industries produced 6.5 trillion pounds of some 9,000 different chemicals. But in 2000, major U.S. companies released 7.1 billion pounds of 650 chemicals into our environment – a figure that doesn’t even take into account the additional activities of small companies. Although the quantities are not the same, the picture is broadly the same in the UK.
Rome was particularly shocked at her own test results because she’d spent her life working on environmental and health issues. Such heightened awareness, she’d thought, should have protected her from environmental dangers. No such luck.
‘I had secretly harbored the hope that I would find I didn’t have much of the bad stuff in me,’ she wrote in her San Francisco Chronicle account. ‘After all, I have been privileged to live a “clean” life. I haven’t worked in factories or lived in heavily industrial areas; I’ve had access to good, organic food; I’m well educated and knowledgeable about the dangers of pesticides.’
However, Rome wrote, ‘we are all in this chemical soup together. Chemicals in our environment don’t discriminate’.
In her moving, first-person article, Rome went on to detail her own history of autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, a rare cardiac syndrome, and a breast condition generally considered a precursor to breast cancer. Getting her ‘body burden’ test results made her wonder how environmental toxins had affected her health – and how they might affect the health other children.
Once you know about the body burden, you see signs everywhere of the numerous toxins we’re exposed to every day. For example, here are thirteen heavy metals to which we have daily exposure: lead, mercury, cadmium, cobalt, antinomy, barium, beryllium, cesium, molybdenum, platinum, thallium, tungsten and uranium. In addition, we come into daily contact with the cotinine in tobacco smoke, at least six different types of pesticides, and seven different types of plastic whose molecules migrate into our food.
On my blog, BodyDetoxDietTips.com, I have identified the most prevalent toxic invaders and showed how to eliminate them from our lives.
About the Author
Have you ever wondered if there really is any benefit to a detox diet? The article above should hopefully convince you that there are a lot more toxins and poisonous chemicals in our environment that we are lead to believe. To find out more about body detox plans, visit BodyDetoxDietTips.com today.
