Your body is a . . . landfill?

A couple of years ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a comprehensive study of the degree to which the bodies of Americans age six and older are contaminated by 148 specific toxic substances. There was some good news: Lead levels in children have dropped significantly. But the bad news stunned environmental health experts: Most Americans, but especially children, have dozens of pesticides and other toxic compounds in their bodies, many of them linked to health threats. A source of many of the toxins? Common, everyday,run of the mill household consumer products. There's no polite way of saying this: your body is a landfill, a dumping ground for a mind-boggling array of toxic chemicals. So is mine. So is your child's. (Sloan Barnett in Green Goes with Everything).

Puts things into a little different perspective doesn't it? If there are products out there that we can easily switch to in order to be healthier why not do it? You just have to know what to watch for, what to avoid. Why not decrease the load on your body?

One common item to avoid that most of us have probably already heard about: aspartame. Beth Greer states the following two facts in her book, Super Natural Home. They are quite startling :

There is a 41% increase in risk of being overweight for every can or bottle of diet soft drink a person consumes each day, according to Sharon P. Fowler, MPH, and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio.

Aspartame contains methanol, which the body breaks down into formaldehyde - the same substance used in the embalming process. In a living person it can cause cancer, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. According to Dr. Blaylock, "Drinking even one diet cola a day can cause formaldehyde buildup in cells, so that the amount of the toxin increases daily."

Wow!

Okay,so that's food-related, which is not routine for this blog. However, I wanted to include that since it is something so common and it relates directly to why this blog started originally: formaldehyde allergy. But, back to the consumer products that we use around the house every day - consumer products that could possibly have harmful chemicals in them. Let's talk about parabens and the products in which these chemicals can likely be found. Parabens will be the next post.