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Loading... Your Body's Environmental Chemical Burden: A Resource Guide to Understanding and Avoiding Toxinsby Cindy Klement
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WHAT ARE THE HEALTH CONSEQUENCES OF CONTINUED EXPOSURE TO ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMICALS THROUGHOUT A LIFETIME, BEGINNING IN THE WOMB? Scientists found an average of 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of newborns including pesticides, flame retardants, consumer product ingredients, and industrial pollutants. And that's just the beginning. Exposure to contaminants continues thereafter on a daily basis creating a "body burden" or, simply put, an accumulated slurry of chemicals stored in our bodies. WHAT ARE THESE CHEMICALS USED FOR IN INDUSTRY? HOW ARE WE EXPOSED? IN WHICH BODILY TISSUES ARE THEY STORED AND HOW DO THEY AFFECT OUR OVERALL HEALTH? Can we detoxify persistent pollutants? Better yet, is it possible to further avoid them? Referencing over 1500 published research papers highlighting the 25 most common chemicals affecting populations worldwide today, Your Body's Environmental Chemical Burden not only provides answers to these questions but includes a comprehensive resource guide containing information on how to limit and even avoid future exposure. This new book is "the go-to toxin reference for the 21st century -- something every home should have!" - Dr. Deanna Minich, four-time best-selling author No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)615.9Technology Medicine and health Pharmacology and therapeutics Toxicology; PoisonsRatingAverage:
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A lot of the conditions and diseases people now exhibit can be traced to these chemicals, and the book lists them for each chemical family. Family doctors, however, have little in the way of tools to make those determinations. Instead, conditions remain a mystery, or are blamed on the patient (especially women) – stress, anxiety, mental illness and such. But as time goes on, more and more evidence piles up, and the book summarizes and updates the damage from a handful of the more widespread manmade chemical compounds. They are everywhere and in everything. We produce them by the millions of pounds per year. There is no escaping them. Organic vegan all your life? Your body is totally corrupted with them.
Without going into each chemical analyzed, let me say the overall impression it leaves the reader with is disgust:
-Antarctica shows these industrial chemicals in pristine snows, thousands of miles from society.
-Pesticides accumulate even eight months after a home treatment, even showing up in breast milk.
-The UN claims 75% of cancers are now environmental, not genetic.
-Organic produce can be just as saturated with chemicals because plants draw from the saturated soil.
-Washington state apples still show high levels of arsenic, even though it banned using it decades ago.
-In the Canary Islands, organic milk tests showed PCBs 100% of the time, while processed milked had it “just” 69%.
-Free-range chickens and organic eggs showed higher concentrations of PCBs compared to indoor/caged birds because the outdoors is so saturated in chemicals. Plus, foraging birds eat more because they’re more active.
-Great Lakes (freshwater) fish are highly contaminated, to the point where pregnant women are warned not to consume more than five ounces in a month.
-The US government says no one should eat more than four (Gulf) shrimp in any month. There are five in a shrimp cocktail.
Some of the chemicals cause cancer as they build up in the body. Some are obesogens, and are a prime reason why people are getting fatter. Various chemicals compromise different organs, but they cannot easily be blamed, because many people absorb them with no apparent effects, (just as not every smoker dies of lung cancer). And some affect not only the person daring to breathe, but will show up as defects in their offspring, two generations later (e.g. bisphenol A, pesticides, cocaine).
The book contains nine chapters classifying problematic chemicals by their group, with conditions they cause, risks, damage, and resources like foods that can carry them out of the body. However. There is no index, so if you don’t know that Xylene is a volatile organic compound (VOC), there is no way to find it.
Also, this is a reference book; there are no people, no stories, no interviews and no heroes save the occasional doctor who invented a test or a diet.
While the book is well arranged and easy to work with, it also contains a lot of nonsense in its design. There are endless color photos decorating it, but they’re all stock photos that have no relevance to the chemical or the chapter. They add no information whatsoever. It makes the book look like a corporate brochure. There are no graphics indicating anything – not foods, not body parts, damage, timelines, epidemiology, pathways or origins. On the other hand, it is unexpectedly colorful.
The message, however, is critical. We have made the Earth unrecognizable to its inhabitants. Future anthropologists and paleontologists will be able to recognize snow core samples and soil samples from precisely this era by all the unnatural contents in them, according to Edward O. Wilson in Half Earth.
Not one of them is beneficial for lifeforms. They serve purposes like making plastic flexible, or making cloth less flammable, or adding a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to perfumes, soaps and creams. Or killing insects and plants. They can appear as unintended consequences in burning tobacco or in pesticide runoff - to the point where every chapter in the book has a warning to check fish advisories before eating anything that lives in water.
The book is simply the latest update in an ongoing undeclared war on all life, and its message needs spreading. It promotes awareness, and awareness seems to be in very short supply.
David Wineberg ( )