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 Environmental Stressors
What can we do about chemical stress in our environment? It is absolutely an epidemic. We have some telling research in the last ten years regarding chemical toxicity that is prevalent in our environment.
We’re going to give you some really good strategies to help you eliminate toxins, not only from your environment, but then eventually eliminate them from your body. Some common sources of toxins, most people know about these sources. I’m going to give you the top 3 or 4 sources that are going to be most common in your life and then I’m going to give you some hidden sources as well.
Food
First one is obviously food. In our environment, unfortunately a lot of the foods that are grown now days are genetically modified. You can see at the health food store the packaging on the food will say “non-gmo” and that’s genetically modified organisms these are actually becoming less and less.
Unfortunately genetically modified foods in our body can cause a lot of problems, so we want to stay away from any genetically modified organisms. The nice thing about having a garden at home is you can obviously ration pesticides and herbicides.
So other things with food to be aware of that the FDA allows approximately 14 thousand different chemical additives to be basically introduced into all our food supplies. So read your labels, if you cannot pronounce it, do not eat it. Here is a short list of things to avoid in our food:
- Stay away from nitrates. We find these a lot in meats, especially lunch meats.
- High fructose corn syrup as a very nasty toxin
- MSG
- Trans Fats
- Food coloring and dyes
- Fish containing mercury or heavy metals
The average American in one year time will consume up to 150 pounds of chemical additives. Your body, your kidneys, your liver and all these organs of detoxification having to deal with this onset of chemicals. This is just from food by the way.
Water
The next big source of toxins in our environment is our drinking water. Toxins are also the water we bathe with. Our water, unfortunately, has a lot of chemical toxicity in the form of chloride and chlorine and also fluoride. Fluoride, when it gets into our system it interferes with our thyroid gland function and it actually binds to these thyroid gland receptors, these receptors, where our normal thyroid hormones were supposed to go. These become bogged down by fluoride and that sends a signal back to the thyroid gland slowing down the thyroid function. If you have a thyroid issue, or know of anyone who does, you know it affects weight gain.
Fluoride also affects our energy levels, you know, it’s just really a nasty, vicious cycle and we’re breathing in the chemical gases when we have a hot shower. There are filtration mechanisms you can put on your showerhead to help filter out some of this stuff.
As far as your drinking water goes I recommend getting spring water and ensuring that you’re getting it in a glass jar. They have glass jars that are up to one gallon. In the glass is very important because the glass does not leech the chemicals that are in our plastics. Plastics have a chemical called xeno estrogens that they’re basically synthetic estrogens that come into our body and increase our prevalence of having cancers and other toxicity. So when we have this ability to go get water, if we’re getting it from the store, make sure the container it’s stored in is glass.
If you have the ability to go to, you can go to an online store and see if you can get and at home distiller. These distillers are fairly inexpensive, usually under 200 dollars. I know we’ve had our distiller for over ten years. It basically boils off all the toxic organisms that may be left in the water. And all the gases boil off too, so you are left with pretty pure water.
Air
We all know about our outdoor air and our indoor air. Living here in Ohio and for about 4 months out of the year a lot of us keep our houses closed for the winter time. We don’t open a window; we don’t crack a door and unfortunately a lot of the toxins inside our homes in the form of cleaning products, in the form of our carpeting.
Our carpeting holds formaldehyde and other chemicals. A lot of the cabinetry, the stains, paints and glass- those all have toxic chemicals that are basically volatile. They basically evaporate off very slowly and can accumulate to toxic levels if we don’t open up our windows and allow some circulation of outdoor air in thru our indoor air.
The indoor air, as we know has about 2 and a half times more cancer causing chemicals than outdoor air so its very important to allow some circulation in thru our home rather than keeping them air tight and sealed. Not a very healthy scenario.
Outdoor air is pretty toxic as well. We’re seeing that up to 4.6 million people a year are dying from the direct chemicals that are being spilled into our environment either thru dumping into our public sewage system or these factories allowing them to be dumped into our air. The EPA estimates over hundreds of millions of pounds of these chemicals being dumped on an annual basis, so anything we can do on our part to be more environmentally friendly we want to do from recycling to using light bulbs that are less toxic, we just want to look into everything we can do to go green. And there are a lot of really good resources we can look at to help you facilitate that process.
Hidden Sources
The following sources are also toxins to be aware of and avoid:
- Teflon coated cookware
- Toothpaste is full of fluoride and conditioners that are toxic
- Makeup, it is estimated that women will absorb five pounds of chemicals through their skin a year through makeup and moisturizers
- Shampoos and conditioners have parabens
- Deodorants that have parabens and aluminum
A few plant based, non-toxic companies to get the products you need:
- Toms of Maine
- Earth Science
- Whole Foods brands
- Burt’s Bees
Some other sources of toxins we also have to understand, prescription drugs, you know prescription drugs and over the counter drugs they really when taken correctly are causing some severe side effects. Actually two or three years ago in JAMA we had an article showing that prescription drugs taken correctly are the third leading cause of death in North America. And mainly because we are all internally all of our chemistry is different so we can’t put a chemical in one person and expect it to react the same way as if we put it in someone else, so we really want to be aware of prescription drugs and altering our lifestyle a lot of times could help somebody correct the underlying cause of their problem instead of covering up the effect with medication, so we really want to be aware of prescription drugs.
Vaccines such as the flu vaccine, we really want to be aware of mercury used as an attenuating agent. Attenuating agents in vaccines are chemicals that they put to weaken the virus. They don’t want to put a strong virus and inject it directly into us, so what they want to do is weaken it in some way, shape or form, so they use chemicals that they call attenuating agents.
Some other things that you can do in addition to stopping future toxicities in our body we can actually get rid of the toxins that are already residing in our bodies and I’m going to give you the top 3 or 4 things we can do to help our bodies purge these toxins and a lot of them are very difficult to purge and require a multifaceted approach, so one of the things that we look at is doing a detox.
Detoxify the Body
Essentially there are hundreds of detoxes out there, but detoxes essentially work on improving the main function of the liver and the kidneys, which these guys are your big detoxifiers. So liver and kidney detoxes work really well and then the other thing that will aide in detoxification is exercise. Your skin, other than your liver and your kidneys, your skin is one of the huge organs of detoxification, so when we get sweat to come out thru our pores, a lot of times the toxins that are sitting on the skin get pushed out with the sweat. So we want to definitely rinse off after we exercise. We don’t want that sweat to sit there, we don’t want the toxins to sit on our skin so we want to rinse it off and clean the toxins off of our skin.
Regular Exercise
Exercise also pumps our lymphatic system. Our lymphatic system does not have a pump like the heart does. Our lymphatic system gets pumped and circulated by movement and exercise. So lymphatics eventually are filtrations of our blood. They filter out all the toxins in our blood, so we want to move the lymphatics and purge these toxins from our lymphatic so again, so again, exercise is fantastic for detoxing the skin, for detoxing the lymphatic system, and exercise also improves the detoxification thru our lungs.
Breathe
Anytime we inhale deeply and exhale, we’re exhaling a lot of toxins thru our lungs. It’s one of the ways the toxins get out and also its one of the ways these by products from our cells, the garbage from our cells- all the stuff gets out thru our lungs, so its better obviously to exercise in a well ventilated area. If you can exercise outdoors, even better. So those are our main organs of detoxification. Exercise and detoxes are fantastic.
Regular Chiropractic Care
Last but not least I want to mention Chiropractic. Chiropractic care, there are many techniques out there that will actually help the body detox metals and other toxins from the body, so there’s specific chiropractic adjustments that will improve your body’s detoxification. The other thing that chiropractic care does is that it enhances and improves nerve supply and blood supply to the organs that we mentioned, so if the liver for instance does not have a healthy strong blood flow and nerve flow a chiropractic adjustment could restore blood flow and nerve flow to the kidneys. When you improve blood flow and nerve flow you improve function. So if we improve the function of our liver, our lungs, our kidneys thru a good regular chiropractic adjustment, what we’ll see is we’ll have an improved chance of thoroughly detoxing.
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