Never Be Sick Again (24 page)

The truth about fluoride is gradually being revealed; a number of large-scale studies suggest that fluoride does not prevent and may even cause dental problems. Fluoride bioaccumulates in the body and has been shown to damage teeth, bones, kidneys, muscles, nerves, genes and immune function. In fact, fluoride toxicity is causing diseases such as dental and skeletal fluorosis. Dental fluorosis is a malformation of tooth enamel characterized by brittleness and discoloration, ultimately damaging the health of the teeth. Dentists tell people that fluorosis is “merely” a cosmetic problem. In reality, fluorosis is a sign of systemic fluoride poisoning. More than one out of five U.S. schoolchildren now have some degree of dental fluorosis, and X rays of children with dental fluorosis often show bone abnormalities (skeletal fluorosis) elsewhere in the body. Skeletal fluorosis weakens bones in a manner similar to osteoporosis. Early stages usually are misdiagnosed as arthritis, and advanced stages usually are misdiagnosed as osteoporosis. The minimum crippling fluoride dosage (the dosage that can cause skeletal fluorosis) is 5 milligrams per day for twenty to forty years, according to the National Academies for the Advancement of Science, yet Americans living in fluoridated areas average up to 6.6 milligrams per day!

Fluoride is a powerful enzyme poison that fundamentally damages cell function, thereby causing disease and death. Mortality rates are higher in fluoridated communities. A 1978 study in the
New England Journal of Medicine
found that: “This pattern of a higher crude death rate in the cities with fluoridated water supplies was apparent for all categories of death except for those by accidental means and suicide.” According to Dr. William Marcus, a senior scientist at the EPA, fluoride is the only substance known to cause bone cancer, and bone cancer rates are 80 to 600 percent higher in communities with fluoridated water. Similarly, new research connects fluoride intake to Alzheimer's disease by implicating a reaction that happens between aluminum and low-dose fluoride. Most home water filters do not remove this toxin. You need to use reverse osmosis or buy bottled water that does not contain fluoride.

Another toxin in our drinking water is arsenic. Arsenic, a contaminant in the chemicals used to fluoridate water, is known to cause cancer and to damage the digestive, cardiovascular, neurological, reproductive and immune systems. Aluminum salt (alum) is added to water to “purify” it by helping to settle and remove particulate and organic matter. A study in the
Journal of Epidemiology
found that the risk of developing Alzheimer's is increased in individuals who drink water with high aluminum concentrations.

Foods That Tamper with Destiny

No discussion of food toxins would be complete without mention of the potential for poisoning the entire population with genetically modified foods. Genetic engineering is the process of disrupting the genetic blueprints of living organisms by inserting genetic information from other organisms to obtain some “desirable characteristic,” such as resistance to herbicides or insects. These foods are novel and totally unnatural, and we have no idea what the future health consequences may be, yet avoiding genetically modified foods is difficult.

Insertion of genes into genetic material is not a precise process. It is all too easy to obtain unintended results that lower nutritional content, create harmful allergens or lead to the creation of unique toxins. The effects of these toxins may not become known for years, while irreparable harm is being done. The best way to avoid these foods is to eat organically produced foods. (More on this subject in chapter 9, on the genetic pathway.)

Beware of the Air in Your Home

We have already discussed how toxic your food pantry and cupboards may be, but your home—while it may be your castle—may be more like a toxic waste dump. In fact, our greatest exposure to volatile organic compounds occurs in the home. Toxicity from indoor air pollution affects most Americans' health to some degree and produces a wide variety of symptoms, including anxiety, depression, fatigue, headaches, poor concentration and mental acuity, and bodily aches and pains. When people complain of these symptoms to their doctor, however, indoor pollutants are almost never suggested as a probable (or even possible) cause.

Learn to recognize toxins in your home.
Seemingly benign
items can produce dangerous toxins that pollute your indoor
air,
such as the off-gasses of mattresses, pillows, televisions, clothes, furniture, carpets and tap water. Toxins from these sources expose us to even higher concentrations than outdoor air pollution. In fact, the level of indoor pollutants in your home may be hundreds of times greater than outside air. Because most Americans spend about 90 percent of their time indoors, this toxic load can substantially contribute to toxic overload, resulting in disease.

As mentioned earlier, I used to suffer from an extreme case of multiple chemical sensitivities, and I was easily incapacitated by exposure to even minute quantities of toxins in my own home. I was able to restore my health only after years of minimizing toxins and improving my nutrition. One of the most profound things I learned from my illness is that all of us are chemically sensitive in varying degrees. This experience led me to research how the fumes from cleansing agents, air fresheners, fragrances and body care products injure our delicate detoxification mechanisms and use up the body's nutrient reserves that are required to operate these systems and prevent toxic damage.

There are multiple sources of indoor pollutants: new carpets, new paint, household cleansers, furniture, mattresses, copy machines, printers, electronic equipment, dry cleaning, newspapers and magazines. Anything you can smell that is not a natural smell is probably toxic. The longer you breathe it, and the more concentrated it is, the more damage it inflicts. Indoor air is a health risk because of the combined effects of multiple toxic sources concentrated in a confined space.

Few people know better the incredible amount of damage that can be done by indoor air pollution than Sally, a young newlywed. Sally was truly “brought” to my office. Her husband had to carry her from their car. She did not have enough energy to walk or even to hold her head up straight while seated. Sally was suffering from acute chronic fatigue, a condition that physicians are not trained to recognize or understand. She and her husband had already spent many thousands of dollars on consultations with physicians and diagnostic tests. Unable to find anything “physically wrong,” Sally's doctors referred her to a psychiatrist.

Of course, Sally was not crazy, but she was very sick. Her cells were malfunctioning so badly that she had become totally disabled. The couple's responses to my questions, in addition to my own experience with chemical sensitivity, allowed me to understand what was wrong. First (like most of us), Sally had frequently been given antibiotics throughout her life. (Antibiotics cause fundamental and damaging changes to human physiology.) This intake resulted in a heightened susceptibility to environmental toxins. I asked many questions about Sally's medical history, diet, lifestyle and environment before focusing on the toxin pathway as the most important factor.

Sally was a writer, and her husband had converted their oversize laundry room into an office for her. Also in that room was a gas-fired water heater. Natural gas appliances release toxic gases, including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and small amounts of the natural gas itself. With insufficient ventilation, the gases became concentrated, and poor Sally was breathing them all day long. She began to suffer from sore throats, eye irritations, respiratory problems, headaches and, eventually, chronic fatigue.

I recommended they install an electric hot water heater. Sally's worst symptoms immediately were alleviated, although significant damage had already been done (both by the gases and the antibiotics). Her health was restored eventually after she worked to reverse the damage through improved diet and nutritional supplementation.

One of the great joys in my life is to watch someone like Sally go from being sick and disabled, with little to look forward to, to smiling once again and enjoying life. I am saddened to think how many people remain sick because their physicians do not understand the toxin pathway and have no idea how to help them. In fact, physicians who prescribe antibiotics and other medications often create susceptibility to such problems in the first place.

Gas-fired appliances (hot water heaters, ovens, stoves, furnaces, fireplaces or clothes dryers) diffuse toxic gases into the surrounding air. If you have such appliances, try to keep them out of your living space and put furnaces, clothes dryers and water heaters in a garage, shed or breezeway along with stored volatiles such as paints and cleaning fluids. A gas stove, because it is in your living space, should be replaced or at least very well ventilated. In my own recovery process, I had to convert from a gas to an electric water heater because I had become so sensitive to these toxins.

Giving off toxic gasses is an especially common problem with products when they are new. At one of my seminars, a woman named Diane raised her hand and explained that she was suffering from splitting headaches. After hearing the story about Sally, Diane realized that her headaches coincided with the purchase of a new car; she suspected a connection. Her new car was off-gassing toxins, producing the “new car” smell. Diane's family had two cars, so I suggested that she drive the older car until the odor subsided. Her headaches went away. Some highly sensitive people retrofit their cars with safer materials.

Consider the risk of new products: a new carpet, a freshly painted room, a new TV set, a new mattress. New products give off high levels of toxic chemicals. With the passage of time, the volume of toxic chemicals being off-gassed drops dramatically. Often you can accelerate the off-gassing process simply by applying heat. For example, the chemicals contained in a new car's plastics, adhesives and seating materials pollute the interior air of the car. During the first few months, try to leave a new car parked in the hot sun with the windows up to bake out the toxins. Air it out regularly, and be sure to air it out before and while you drive.

The risk of new paint is something my friend Jim discovered when he went from being generally in good spirits to suffering the worst depression of his life. Actually, he felt suicidal. I immediately tried to isolate the cause of Jim's malfunctioning cells. I discovered that Jim just had the interior of his house painted; paint off-gasses neurotoxins that can affect moods and mental function. New paint takes at least two months to reach reasonable levels of safety for most people (depending on biochemical individuality), which is why it is best to paint only one room at a time and to close freshly painted rooms off as much as possible while they are off-gassing.
Absolutely do not sleep in a freshly painted room!
A good idea is to schedule painting just before leaving on a vacation. Jim stayed at his son's house for several weeks, and his problem was solved.

Another example of toxic off-gassing was brought to my attention when a woman suffering flulike symptoms came to me for help. Ellen Marie had “caught the flu” around Christmas time the previous year and still was not well. Her physicians were dumbfounded, as anyone would be if they focused only on mitigating her symptoms.

I discovered that Ellen Marie had moved into a newly constructed luxury home four months prior to coming down with “the flu.” Her new home was constructed with particleboard, which off-gasses formaldehyde—a highly toxic and carcinogenic chemical. Plywood also will off-gas formaldehyde, but far less of it. (Some new man-made building materials no longer contain formaldehyde, but the substitutes used, such as iso-cyanates, are also toxic.) This poor woman was suffering from subtle and constant formaldehyde poisoning. Her symptoms included immune suppression, respiratory problems, coughing, throat irritation, headaches, insomnia, nausea and fatigue. I suggested to Ellen Marie that she sell her new home and move to a safer environment. She chose not to move and she remained ill.
Always select building materials and furniture that are made
from real wood or at least plywood, but not particleboard.

Inventory Your Home's Hazards

Do you have carpets in your home and, if so, from what are those carpets made? Carpets made from synthetic fibers (plastics such as nylon, acrylic or polyester), especially when new, off-gas large amounts of toxins. Carpets are among the most significant contributors to the toxicity of indoor air. The plastic fibers used to make carpets are very thin, thus creating an enormous amount of surface area from which off-gassing can occur. Chemicals used in the adhesive backing and those in the foam padding underlayer also off-gas. Carpets are treated with toxic soil and stain repellents, moisture repellents, mothproofing and other finishes. These chemicals are effective for their intended purposes, but toxic—an important consideration if you are looking for new floor coverings or considering a move into a newly carpeted space.
That “new
carpet smell” is toxic, and the best solution is to use carpets
made only of natural fibers
(wool is a good choice, though make sure it is not treated with toxic mothproofing chemicals). Hardwood or tile floors with natural-fiber area rugs are good alternatives.

How about the air quality in your bedroom, which you typically breathe for eight consecutive hours every day? What is the composition of your mattress? We spend one-third of our lives in bed, and spending most of that time immediately next to even mildly toxic chemicals can take a huge toll. Most mattresses today are made of synthetic materials (polyester, polyurethane, treated with dyes, flame retardants, etc.), which can off-gas for years and poison you while you are sleeping. Fortunately, 100 percent natural mattresses are available. Also, with a doctor's prescription you can obtain mattresses manufactured without toxic flame retardants that otherwise are required by law. At the very least, if you purchase a standard mattress, put it in the garage and allow it to off-gas for a few months before sleeping on it. Also, enclose the mattress with a thin polyethylene drop cloth or a tightly woven barrier-cloth that limits the amount of toxins you breathe nightly. Also, use pillows made from natural materials, such as down.