Health

We’ve already, flippantly, tossed around the word “toxin” and “toxic” and even called you a “toxic waste-dump.” Part of CDR, the first step to establishing life-long and long-life health, is the “D” for “Detox” short for “Detoxification”—the removal of the toxic substances from your body. So what are toxins?
Toxins are substances that inhibit or harm normal, healthy operation of your body.
A note: just because science hasn’t discovered that a substance is harmful, doesn’t mean that it’s not. At one time we didn’t know that the pesticide DDT was harmful—and not knowing didn’t make it harmless3. However, for now, we feel that biological and medical science has progressed sufficiently far to have fairly well classified most of the substances that are poisonous to human health. This includes broad groupings of chemical compounds, such as pesticides in general. If we can eliminate those from our bodies, and our future foods, we’ll be far better off.

Then we can work on avoiding the introduction of any new and unnecessary substances into our diet.
The following is a list of the toxins and toxic substances which are present in our environment. This list is not all-inclusive, but is meant to give you an idea of how pervasive the assault on our health really is. The shame is that much of the attack on our wellbeing is the product of economic greed and can be easily avoided with just a small hit to the profits of major corporations—but that’s the subject of a different book.
Common toxins and toxic substances:
1. Heavy metals: mercury, cadmium, arsenic, lead, iron and aluminum4
a. A more extensive list would include antimony, bismuth, cerium, chromium, cobalt, copper, gallium, gold, manganese, nickel, platinum, silver, tellurium, thallium, tin, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.
b. A few of these are necessary in trace amounts, such as manganese and zinc, but can quickly become toxic if present in excess… and, yes, even iron can be toxic in large amounts or in its improper form.
2. Chemicals: pesticides, preservatives, hormones, antibiotics, metabolic analogs such as artificial sweeteners, food dyes, and even additives to our drinking water mandated by our government such as chlorine and fluoride.
3. Biologicals: yeast, viruses, parasites, non-native bacteria.
4. Common foods and food additives that cause toxic reactions including allergies

The Concept of Toxic “Load”
Paracelsus (Born Phillip von Hohenheim in Switzerland, 1493-1541) is considered the father of modern toxicology5. He stated, "All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison…." This has been shortened, in modern times to “The dose makes the poison.”
While one might be quick to question this observation, Wikipedia relates in a footnote to their article on Paracelsus,
“January 26, 2007: Dr. Adrian Cohen was saddened, but not surprised, to hear about the 28-year-old woman who died earlier this month after drinking nearly two gallons of water to try to win a radio station contest. (Wash Times).”
Even water, when consumed in excess, can overwhelm the body’s ability to process it.
The flip-side of this, of course, is that some substances are always toxic, even in very small quantities. The acceptable amount of mercury present in the body is zero, period. The acceptable amount of lead in your blood is zero, period.
Yet, the United States government places the “acceptable” level of lead in your blood at 10 micrograms per deciliter: bear with us…
…that’s 10 billionths of a gram, a gram is 1/28th of an ounce—per 1/10th of a liter, about 3-1/3rd ounce—which calculates out to about three-one-hundred-millionths of an ounce of lead per ounce of blood—that’s a very small amount indeed…
…but, just to continue a very long sentence… dramatic decreases in IQ—a measure of intelligence—in five year old children is associated with an increase of lead from 1 to 10 micrograms per deciliter, a range entirely within the “acceptable” limits permitted by big brother6. A much longer sentence is the lifetime incarceration of the intellectual potential of
those children exposed to lead in their infancy. The same effect has been reported in adult exposure to lead.
Can anyone argue that there is “acceptable” exposure to this substance? We think not.
Thank you for your patience. This is the last technical tirade to which you will be subjected, at least for a few chapters. The point has to be made. Here we’ve discussed just one of the offending heavy metals, but there are many, as we’ve listed above, along with the other toxins and toxic substances. Hundreds of studies all demonstrate the toxicity of substances that have governmental “acceptable” limits.
YOU—You whose eyes are reading these pages—have to take responsibility for your health. YOU have to avoid the ingestion of toxins. After all, YOU have complete control. Not to exercise that control is analogous to not using your seat belt in your car. You may get along for a while, but it will catch up to you when you least expect it. Remember Charlie?
Now that’s the good news. Are you ready for the bad news? The effect of ALL the toxins you take in is cumulative. They add up.
Your body can “handle” and eliminate a certain amount of exposure to foreign substances. That’s the job of your immune system, liver and excretory functions. “Handling,” however, does not mean that toxins have no effect on you. When you have an “off” day—irritable, fatigued, difficulty thinking or concentrating, sensitivity to sound, like your spouse’s voice—you’re probably suffering from the cumulative effects of toxicity, even if you’ve not pushed yourself into a diagnosable disease state.
Imagine a bucket with a spout at the bottom. You can keep pouring sludge into the top, as long as the spout is open and sludge can flow out at the same or greater rate as you pour it in.
If sludge is added too quickly, the bucket will start to fill up and eventually overflow. This is our metaphor for disease, dysfunction and, ultimately, death.
As long as your body can deal with the cumulative levels of all the toxins and toxic substances in your body, you are within your “load” limit. This does not mean you’re healthy, but you can get by. But for how long? As soon as the amount of toxins exceeds your load limit, you “suddenly” get sick7.
One more visit to the bucket. The sludge itself will start to plug up the spout, slowing the rate at which the bucket—your body—can eliminate the sludge—toxins. Less metaphorically, the toxins you ingest can severely damage your immune system and lower the ability of your body to deal with the offending substances, lowering your load limit. The net effect is that your health goes into a downward spiral.
Few practitioners of traditional—allopathic—medicine will advise you to take a strong look at the package labels on the food you’re eating, avoid food dyes, eat organic food, advise that you drink chlorine-free water, or tell you to make any major dietary changes outside of “cutting down” on alcohol, tobacco, fat and cholesterol. But the medical community is another subject for yet another time8.
Why Now?
In recent years, there has been an explosion of cases of diabetes, ADD, ADHD, coronary disease, breast, colon, prostate and lung cancer, childhood asthma, and on and on and on.
Concurrent with this tsunami of disease is the bastardization of our food supply. More and more chemicals are being fed to us that were not part of our diet fifty years ago.
Here’s something to think about: our [the authors] mothers, now in their eighties, never had PMS—and didn’t know anyone who had PMS—when they were young women. Were they of healthier “stock,” or was it that in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, they were not as chemically “battered” as women (and men) are today?
Certainly there were offenses previously; Upton Sinclair details abuses at the beginning of the twentieth century in his classic The Jungle. But we had a few good decades with the advent of the Food and Drug Administration and benevolent regulation. This was before the bloodless coupe that put governmental control of our food supply into the hands of multi-national agribusiness. In 2001—the beginning of the 21st century—the new administration in Washington, doubled acceptable arsenic levels in our drinking water from those instituted by the previous occupant of the White House.
In China, cows are being fed so much antibiotic that their milk cannot be used to produce yogurt—the bacterial cultures won’t grow in it—and yet, for the sake of corporate profit , China is supplying increasing amounts of our food, as opposed to our feeding ourselves. Wasn’t the United States the “Food Basket” of the world at one time?
As of this writing, September 2007, dozens of food products from China, in the pet and human food chain, have been found to be tainted by poisons—the no-acceptable-limit kind of poisons. At this moment, while poultry cannot be imported from China for fear of bringing Bird Flu to this country, our current President shook hands with the President of China, all but sealing a deal that would allow American chickens to be shipped to China, processed there, and returned to the United States for sale in our supermarkets. Oh, there’s more—from the “add insult to

injury” department—this same administration is pressing to have “country of origin” labeling laws relaxed so that you’ll never know that your dinner had more frequent-flyer miles than you do.
One more issue: the food we eat is not as nutritious as it used to be. Here’s an example: Broccoli is a cruciferous vegetable; it’s supposed to contain lots of calcium. However, broccoli grown in calcium-depleted soil doesn’t have lots of calcium, but it still looks and tastes like broccoli. The same is true of any presumably mineral-rich vegetable or fruit. All minerals in plants come from the soil in which they’re grown. Mineral rich soil produces mineral-laden food, while veggies grown in soil that is poor in minerals still tastes bad to your kids, but isn’t worth the fight to get them to eat it.