Reducing The Chemical Load On Your Body

As one of the major components of trying to achieve a better level of health, reducing the chemical stress load on our bodies should hold a place of high importance on our list of strategies. And while it may seem easy enough to do that in some circumstances, such as simply opting not to smoke a cigarette or inhale dangerous chemicals, it may be more challenging to avoid some of the less obvious sources of chemical stress. More than 80,000 synthetic chemicals surround you every day. Synthetic chemicals are in your air, food, water, and in most of the products you use — many going straight into your body, even before birth. Directly, your body’s cells interact with about 200 industrial chemicals every day. Ninety percent of food is chemically processed today with flavorants, colorants, texturants, and preservatives — and typically loaded with sugar and high fructose corn syrup. The average woman in the US uses 12 personal care products a day, containing 168 different chemicals. Cosmetics manufacturers don’t have to disclose the ingredients in their products. The vast majority contains chemicals either known to be toxic, suspected to be toxic, or whose effects are unknown because there’s been no testing. Between processing, agricultural chemicals and toxic sludge, you can understand how a multitude of chemicals can accumulate in your body to damage your health over time. The various ways that these chemicals can manifest poor health in your body would give us a list of possible symptoms too long to list here. Therefore, the best strategy would be to learn to identify where these chemicals are hiding so as to reduce your risk of exposure in the first place.

A good place to start would be by reading ingredient labels of every food you’re considering putting inside your body. As a general rule of thumb, the longer the list of ingredients, the higher the potential that there will be added chemicals such as preservatives and artificial colors. Take a look at the ingredient lists of some of the foods in your pantry right now. How many have ingredients that are more than a dozen letters long, that you’ve never heard of, or have no idea how to pronounce? Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)? Propyl paraben? Tartrazine (yellow #5)? If these additives don’t occur naturally in the foods we eat that haven’t been “chemically enhanced” (like an apple), should we really be putting them into our bodies? A brief tour online will easily give you listings of all the different names that monosodium glutamate (MSG) can be disguised as on a label. Autolyzed yeast extract, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and “spices” can all mean that msg has been added to the product. As much as the producers of artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame, sucralose) want you to believe that their products are “derived from natural sources”, they are still chemically altered substances. Toxic effects have already been shown to occur in the first two. As far as the third, if you’re currently using it on a regular basis, then you’ve basically volunteered as a human guinea pig to help determine if there are any long-term side effects from ingesting it since there are no such studies to support that level of safety.

These are just a few examples of possible sources of chemical stress to our bodies, and just in the foods we eat. One recent assessment by the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark found that even small amounts of chemicals when combined can amplify each other’s adverse effects. You have multiple types of chemicals in your body at any one time. Neglecting to consider their interactions is like a physician prescribing a drug without asking you what other drugs you’re taking. The bottom line is that we need to limit the amount of chemical burden we are putting on our organs, especially our gastrointestinal tract, liver and kidneys since they bear the initial brunt of the chemical onslaught. Right along with that is to start fortifying the diet with REAL foods, especially vegetables and fruits which are abundant in healthy phytochemicals and nutrients that can help minimize the damage from years of poor choices. So start spending more time in the produce section of the grocery store and less among the aisles of packages, boxes and cans.