Is The Environment Poisoning Us?
I was browsing through Facebook the other day when I came across an article that Greenpeace had published which was all about a mum and her two daughters that carried out a trial to see if eating organic food could reduce the amount of harmful pesticides in their bodies!!
The reason that the article caught my eye in the first place was because many moons ago I wrote the thesis for my Master of Science degree on a very similar subject. My thesis researched harmful poly-brominated bisphenol ethers found in Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), how these common household electrical items such as computers, laptops, tablets and televisions were recycled and how the banned chemicals found inside them are being absorbed daily into the human body.
My research discovered that they had found these banned substances in newborn babies, breast milk and were directly linked to learning difficulties and behavioural issues like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and that they are in all of us!
The details of my research quest are probably worthy of a few more blogs, but the key point being I know this stuff as I literally researched the subject and the science for years, the Greenpeace article brought all of this flooding back to me. So, I read the comments on the Facebook post and naively expected everyone to be praising Greenpeace for raising this issue, however I was astonished by the comments and ignorance of the nay-sayers.
For what it is ever worth on social media, I challenged the ignorance and signposted those nay saying Face booker’s to an article I read many years ago that was written by the scientists working for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). I particularly liked this article because the WWF scientists took bad blood from the European MEP’s in Strasbourg, tested it and found a staggering amount of pesticides in their blood.
The irony of the MEP’s bad blood was that these guys were the environmental representatives of their respective country’s and were and still are the decision and policy makers for our health!!
Because organic and natural farmers like our friends over at Burscough Community Farm do not use chemicals and pesticides, so the veg you get from these naturally farmed sources are both in season, chemical free and really good for you. Just the way nature intended.
Bioaccumulation
The big issue is not just that these chemicals are inside all of us, because we are born with them inside us. The issue, the big issue, the big health issue is that they bioaccumulate in our bodies! This means we are born with some chemicals and over our lifetimes those levels increase. Have you ever wondered why we get sick as we get older?
We ingest these chemicals through our food because they spray our food like fruit and veg with them. For those non veggies amongst us it might surprise you to learn that animals also bioaccumulate chemical through the food they eat, which is passed directly onto us when we eat them.
