Wellness for Life: Handling Environmental Stress, Part III

Today we deal with Part III, chemical/environmental stress. This comes in the form of anything unnatural to the body: manmade additives and preservatives found in foods, medications, recreational drugs, steroids and antibiotics given to animals, plastic and metallic cookware, fire retardants in clothing, etc. This kind of chemical overload also can be found in fragrances, nail polish, lotions, cosmetics, pesticides, “sick” buildings, even chlorine in tap water and swimming pools.

Environmental toxins include electromagnetic energy that bombards our bodies daily, including satellites, radar, cell phones, high tension power lines, microwaves, televisions, computers, and iPods (yes, sorry).

As Kevin Trudeau writes in “Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About,” we are putting more toxins into and onto our bodies every day. What does this mean for our health? Chemical stressors are one of the reasons that allergies are at an all-time high; why asthma and diabetes are becoming epidemics; and why we’re seeing alarming rates of obesity even in children. A lot of these conditions are caused by the fact that chemicals don’t break down properly in the body. Food that has been processed or engineered for color, looks, size, and/or taste not only doesn’t have the whole nutrients that organic products have, the body can’t break it down without added stress on the system.

Also, if we are not taking care of the body by eating balanced, whole foods, drinking enough pure water, and getting enough exercise that makes us sweat, then we are not properly flushing these toxins from our systems. They are stored in fat tissue, and create stress in the body that leads to dis-ease, and then symptoms.

Research on environmental pollutants shows that diet as well as exposure to chemical pollutants can have health consequences years and even decades later — and can even be passed to succeeding generations. Studies reveal that chemicals like monosodium glutamate (aka hydrolyzed vegetable protein) and aspartame are intensely poisonous to our bodies. In fact, aspartame was actually developed as an ant poison (see www.dorway.com).

Symptoms are our friends (see Part I of this series). If we address the symptom only, the underlying cause is still unaddressed and will create future problems. However, if we make lifestyle choices to eliminate the stressors that are causing the problem, then we are going to have the best chance of destressing our bodies.

Here are some tips for reducing the chemical and environmental toxins in your life.

• Medications can save your life or keep you on two feet. But you need to understand why and what you are putting into your body. Ask your health professionals, what is this drug really doing? Are there lifestyle changes that would work as well or better?
• Become a label reader for whatever you ingest. A rule of thumb is, if you can’t pronounce or understand the big words on it, don’t put it in your body.
• Eat organic foods where you can to maximize your body’s ability to process and utilize the nutrients.
• Understand that processed and canned foods that have preservatives are difficult for the body to process.
• Homogenization, pasteurization, and radiation of products before they go out on shelf denatures the foods’ natural proteins and flora and alters their biochemical structures. If you must consume dairy, be sure you are adding probiotics into your diet.
• Look for viable alternatives to any medication or manmade substitute when dealing with illness or disease in the body.
• Drink water that has been filtered and is free of ammonia, chlorine, and fluoride — chemicals toxic to the body. Think about it: A container of any of these would have skull and crossbones on it, so why are we putting them into our systems?
• Plastics leach dioxins into the foods stored in them. This includes water, frozen and microwaved foods, as well as plastic wrap and covers. Glass is your best option for cooking and storage. Throw away old plastic containers, especially ones used for microwaving.

We know that the cause of all disease in the body is physical, emotional, or chemical stress. So it becomes prudent to address the sources or causes of stress, and not just the symptoms, in order to create that balance in our body that expresses as wellness.