Can Toxins Cause MS?
From Factories To Our Bodies (Part 2)
It’s hard to “unsee” the problem of toxins once you learn how far reaching their impact is. After my previous blog, you’ve probably started identifying toxins in your home – often lurking in plain sight. We also discussed how toxins get into our bodies to disrupt human physiology, creating a massive public health problem.
While it can feel overwhelming to think about the giant scale of this problem, understanding how we got here is an important first step. So let’s talk about how man made toxins came to permeate every corner of modern life so that we can take steps to minimize harm to our bodies and planet.
How did we get here?
Synthetic man-made chemicals make modern life possible. They provide us with useful and durable products that natural products just can’t emulate. However, this convenience comes at a cost.
About eighty years ago, the addition of chemical compounds into products we use everyday was accelerated by chemical manufacturers. As a result, massive pollution of the environment ensued. This should not surprise us given that these compounds are intentionally designed to be long lasting, breaking down very slowly. This durability means that they seep into the environment and accumulate over time.
Synthetic man-made chemicals make modern life possible.
Eventually, these toxins, whether from the product itself or its manufacturing process, made their way into the environment and the human body. Unfortunately, no one had the foresight to predict the downstream effects of such an experiment.
The unprecedented impact of toxins on human health is now visible, correlating with the rise of many neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, to autoimmunity, inflammatory conditions, and food reactions. In fact, there’s specific data that toxins like VOC’s (volatile organic compounds), pesticides, and heavy metals are correlated with the onset and progression of autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis. While we don’t have a mountain of evidence to prove that toxins wreak havoc on the immune system, there IS enough data to spur us into action.
How big is the problem of toxins anyways?
The toxins I described in the morning routine in my last blog are just a few examples of what we encounter every day. The most recent CDC report showed that in a sample of almost 10,000 people, over 200 unique toxins turned up positive in EVERY single person. Shockingly, not one person tested negative for the hundreds of toxins tested.
Every single year, thousands of new chemical compounds are designed by scientists and placed into our modern convenience products. The vast majority of these chemical compounds undergo ZERO safety testing to ensure humans are not harmed. Also, because these chemical compounds are essentially invisible, most exposures happen silently and without our awareness – we can’t see or smell them. Therefore, the vast majority of toxic exposures go undetected.
Let’s take Roundup, the most common herbicide used worldwide in schools, parks, and homes. It is a perfect illustration of the current leaky safeguards in place: once human harm was proven after multiple lawsuits and payouts, it was finally listed as a carcinogen. Too bad you can still buy it at your neighborhood hardware store and use it in parks or your home garden! This goes to show that the burden is on us as consumers to protect ourselves and our families – not some government agency.
Now that we have shed light on the problem of toxins and how they can insidiously impact human health, we can take simple steps to get these chemicals out of our homes and bodies. Putting forth this effort is every bit worthwhile because it IS possible to significantly reduce our exposures.
In a future blog, I’ll talk about how you can protect yourself and your family to lower your body burden of toxins and get on the path to clean living
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Integrative & functional medicine for autoimmunity & inflammation
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