The Problem
Paying The Price of Agricultural Abundance
How toxins get in our food.
One
of the ways modern agriculture increases production is by eliminating
competition in the form of insects and microbes. But there's a price. The
poisons we use on our "enemies" also poison us.
According to the National Cancer Institute, cancer incidence among children
under age 15 increased 32% between 1950 and 1985. In fact, researchers estimate
that up to 90% of cancer incidence is the result of exposure to environmental
toxins and poor clearance of those toxins.
Modern farmers now have a choice of some 50,000 pesticide formulas and about 700
different chemicals. And the agricultural industry is not solely to blame.
Homeowners are contributing their share of pesticides with around 70 million
pounds of the stuff being applied to U.S. lawns every year. In fact, the
forerunners of many of the compounds now used in home pesticides were chemical
weapons that were developed during World War II.
The bugs are winning!
And it's creating a vicious cycle. Insects and weeds have an amazing ability to
develop resistance to the stuff that we use to try to kill them. And the more
resistant they become, the more chemicals must be used. Some sources
estimate that farmers are spraying 2-5 times more than they were spraying 30
years ago.
Even so, the bugs are winning. According to Audubon magazine, despite the
heavy spraying, it is now estimated that there are over "535 insects, 210 weed
species, and 210 plant diseases that are resistant to at least one pesticide."
(This is exactly the same situation that we are beginning to see with
antibiotic-resistant microbes.)
Just over 25 years ago, Rachel Carson in her best-selling book, Silent Spring
predicted the situation that is confronting us now. Farmers today use four
times more pesticides than they did when Silent Spring was written.
Are tomatoes becoming our fabled "poison apples??
Let's look at just one food-tomatoes. Most commercial tomatoes start as
greenhouse seedlings fed with synthetic fertilizer. Next, they are transplanted
to a field that has been sprayed with methyl bromide. As the tomatoes
grow, they are sprayed every couple of weeks with fungicides and insecticides.
They may then be picked early and artificially ripened with ethylene oxide gas.
In an on-going FDA study called the Total Diet Study which analyzes
hundreds of foods each year for more than 100 different chemicals, tomatoes
were found to be full of potentially toxic "stuff," including chlorpyrifos,
dicloran, endosulfan, permethrin, diazinon, lindane, phosphamidon, PCBs, tri
(2-butoxy-ethyl), and, last but not least, DDT, which was banned in 1972.
Does this mean we should swear off tomatoes? Or stop eating commercially
grown agricultural products altogether? No. To do so would be not only
foolhardy, but would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There is much to say in favor of the abundance such chemicals have helped us
achieve. However, there are steps we all can take to minimize the potential
dangers that these chemicals present.
How to eliminate toxins from the body.
The first defense against chemical toxins is a diet high in organically grown
foods and low in industrially processed foods. The recent proliferation of
organic farms, health food stores and organic food sections in many
supermarkets have made alternatives to a toxic diet-while more
expensive-available to most parts of the country.
And remember this. The human body has an amazing ability to detoxify
itself. This ability, however, can be seriously compromised when the
internal organs-particularly the liver-are not in peak health.
To achieve and maintain optimal health, however, it is essential that each body
receives the correct nutrients in the correct proportions for its individual
metabolic needs. One of the most important of these nutrients for
detoxification are antioxidants like vitamins C and E.
That's why Biceutica's metabolic test was developed. It is an accurate,
scientific way to take a snapshot of an individual's most critical metabolic
markers to determine the status of nutritional health and the body's natural
ability to detoxify itself.
Test results are closely analyzed to determine where an individual may be
nutritionally deficient in general body system function. Based on this
analysis, and comparing it to the same individual's biometric data (height,
weight, age, gender, etc.), it is then possible to prescribe a custom
formulation of nutritional supplements designed to achieve and maintain optimal
systemic health and thus the body's natural ability to detoxify itself.