The world health organization states that “Health is complete physical, mental and social well being not merely the absence of disease and infirmity”.
So how does food fit with this? Food is the fuel that not only provides the energy to allow you to get around it also supplies the raw materials for your body to rebuild itself. Your cells are continually breaking down and are recycled to build new cells. How healthy your cells are depends a lot on the quality of food you take in to do the job.
The overwhelming evidence points to a mostly vegetarian diet as the way to feed your cells the best quality nutrients.
Two great books are the China Study by T Colin Campbell and The Prevention and Reversal of Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn MD.
These are the books that convinced me to become a vegetarian and I have been for over six months. It wasn’t a great chore overall and the food is so much more varied and tasty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQPFNy8I0i0&feature=player_detailpage
What kind of cells will french fries build for you as compared to a fresh salad.
Another very complete book to read is Conscious Health by Ron Garner. This book will give you reasons and directions to live a more complete and healthy life.
If you grow your own healthy food you not only provide yourself and family with the best possible food you reduce the drain on the resources of the planet and help to rebuild the soil.
This is truly what we all wish for our families and friends and to spread to everyone we can. You can lead the way just try it.
Chemical Body Burden
www.chemicalbodyburden.org/
A: Toxic chemicals, both naturally occurring and man-made, often get into the human body. We may inhale them, swallow them in contaminated food or water, or in some cases, absorb them through skin. A woman who is pregnant may pass them to her developing fetus through the placenta. The term ” body burden ” refers to the total amount of these chemicals that are present in the human body at a given point in time. Sometimes it is also useful to consider the body burden of a specific, single chemical, like, for example, lead, mercury, or dioxin.
Some chemicals or their breakdown products (metabolites) lodge in our bodies for only a short while before being excreted, but continuous exposure to such chemicals can create a “persistent” body burden. Arsenic, for example, is mostly excreted within 72 hours of exposure. Other chemicals, however, are not readily excreted and can remain for years in our blood, adipose (fat) tissue, semen, muscle, bone, brain tissue, or other organs. Chlorinated pesticides, such as DDT, can remain in the body for 50 years. Whether chemicals are quickly passing through or are stored in our bodies, body burden testing can reveal to us an individual’s unique chemical load and can highlight the kinds of chemicals we are exposed to as we live out each day of our lives. Of the approximately 80,000 chemicals that are used in the United States, we do not know how many can become a part of our chemical body burden, but we do know that several hundred of these chemicals have been measured in people’s bodies around the world.
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Q: Can the links between body burden and illness be proven?
A: Of the more than 80,000 chemicals in commerce, only a small percentage of them have ever been screened for even one potential health effect, such as cancer, reproductive toxicity, developmental toxicity, or impacts on the immune system. Among the approximately 15,000 tested, few have been studied enough to correctly estimate potential risks from exposure. Even when testing is done, each chemical is tested individually rather than in the combinations that one is exposed to in the real world. In reality, no one is ever exposed to a single chemical, but to a chemical soup, the ingredients of which may interact to cause unpredictable health effects.
The amount of data on body burdens available in the U.S. and the world is extremely limited, particularly compared to the voluminous data we have for chemical levels in air, water, soil, food, and wildlife. Most population-wide body burden data we do have covers only a limited number of chemicals.
Concerning the chemicals that have been measured, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that in several cases, public interventions have resulted in primary prevention, the lowering of the public’s exposure, and the lowering of body burdens. For example, the removal of lead from gasoline and the elimination of lead from most kinds of paint have resulted in a marked decline in the lead body burden of the general population in the United States. Since lead causes lowered IQ in exposed children, this reduction in body burdens is a hopeful sign.
The bad news is that there are still groups of children who remain at significant risk from impaired brain function because of elevated lead levels. Many of them live in urban environments where they are exposed to lead from numerous sources, including leaded paint in houses, old industrial facilities, and contaminated soil. For PCBs, current background levels cause neurodevelopmental deficits in children. For dioxin, the general U.S. public carries a current body burden near or above levels causing adverse effects in animal tests.
The study of disease rates and causes in humans is called epidemiology, the study of patterns of illness among groups of people. Because epidemiology is such a blunt instrument, it will almost never be able to tell us if a specific chemical causes a particular human disease or health effect. Since we regulate, and thereby reduce exposures, on a chemical-by-chemical basis, epidemiological studies will almost never succeed in producing primary prevention – the lowering of human exposures to environmental chemicals – because epidemiology cannot identify the specific chemical that is causing the disease.
Thus, definitive proof for a linkage between a specific disease and a specific toxic chemical is almost always lacking. Absent this, we can use data from laboratory and wildlife studies to make useful predictions about human health, and these predications are often borne out by current statistics about human birth defects, infertility, developmental delays, and increasing rates of certain cancers.
We know that phytochemicals in plants more in dark green leafy vegitables like kale, parsley, swiss chard, spinach and more are our ally’s in removing toxic chemicals from our bodies.
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