GOOD NEWS #1
My Before & After Results Don't Lie

An excerpt from The Hundred-Year Lie

"Ninety miles north of San Francisco in Lake County, where I've lived for six years, residents take some comfort and pride in having the cleanest air and purest water of any county in the state of California. We are encircled by mountain ranges and the primary industries are tourism, hot springs resorts, Indian casinos, and wine grape vineyards.

The Mendocino National Forest covers the entire northern half of the county and Clear Lake, the largest body of water in the state, sprawls over the central portion. When I moved here there were only seven traffic lights and 65,000 residents in a geographical area the size of the state of Rhode Island.

To measure how contaminated with chemical toxins I've become despite my relatively pristine and remote surroundings and to test whether detox strategies for removing synthetic chemicals actually work, I became a guinea pig in an experiment that I helped to devise.

Eight vials of blood and a urine sample were drawn out of me at a hospital and sent by overnight express to the Accu-Chem Laboratory in Dallas, a toxicology facility with the capability of measuring minute amounts of hundreds of synthetic chemicals in the human body.

A similar 'bio-monitoring' experiment was done two years earlier on five San Francisco Bay area residents whose blood was tested by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York to seek traces of chemicals commonly found in consumer goods and the environment.

Each test subject had an average of 55 chemicals in their body known to be toxic to the human reproductive system and an average of 62 chemicals toxic to the nervous system. This was considered to be within the 'normal' levels of a body burden that we all carry.

Body burden tests have been described as a type of thermometer that gives us a reading on our body's chemical fever. My interest in being tested wasn't so much in finding out how many synthetic toxins had taken up residence in me -- there were bound to be hundreds -- but rather to learn which toxins had contaminated me at levels higher than the lab's average for other people. I also wanted to measure the extent to which I could reverse this process by leaching the toxins out of body tissues and blood using a natural foods detox regimen.

Results from the initial round of testing showed numerous toxins in my blood at abnormally elevated levels. These included the pesticides DDE, HCB, and Mirex, along with arsenic, a heavy metal that could have come from drinking water or seafood.

The most puzzling to me was DDE, a breakdown component of DDT, a toxic pesticide banned in the U.S. for the past three decades. Apparently DDE still commonly shows up in imported fruits and vegetables and it's known to persist for years as a contaminant in soils previously sprayed with DDT. Mirex also persists in the environment even though this fire retardant and fire ant killer was taken out of commercial use over a decade ago.

With these body contaminant chemicals as my target, next I needed a supportive environment within which to test a detoxification strategy. A friend strongly recommended the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida for its program designed to detoxify the body and rejuvenate the immune system.

The founder of Hippocrates, Ann Wigmore, a Lithuanian who emigrated to Boston, had been diagnosed with colon cancer and then had her legs crushed in an auto accident during the 1950s. She instinctively began chewing on common lawn grass and credited the juice with healing both her cancer and the leg injuries. Later she settled on wheatgrass juice as the most nutritious and medicinal 'living food' and that became the therapeutic centerpiece of the Hippocrates program. (The Optimum Health Institutes in San Diego and Austin also incorporate many of her ideas.)

. . .

On my last day at Hippocrates a nurse drew eight vials of blood and sent it off with a urine sample to the Accu-Chem Laboratory in Dallas for my second round of body burden testing. A week later the results were mailed to me and I scheduled a phone consultation with Accu-Chem's CEO, Dr. John Laseter, so he could analyze my scores.

"Your detox had an impact," Laseter announced. "Your total chemical load dropped out of the picture."

Pesticides that had been detected at higher than average levels the first time were now negligible in my blood. But several compounds such as arsenic had almost doubled in concentration. Counter-intuitively, it turns out this was good news because it meant the chemicals stored in body fat were being secreted into my bloodstream for an eventual cleansing by my liver.

By far the greater concentrations of chemicals are stored in our body fat. Laseter explained to me how the ratio of chemical molecules between blood and fat is about 1 to 200 or more, depending on the type of chemical and the area of fat in the body. That means having four parts per billion of DDE pesticide in my blood reflected 800 or more parts per billion in my body fat. My detox had leached the pesticides from fat and blood faster than the heavy metals, so the higher levels of arsenic showing up in the second blood test indicated an ongoing detox of fat cells.

This revelation about body fat contaminations contrasted with blood indicators made me realize how the widespread chemical blood testing conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give us just a narrow picture of how truly polluted we have become. As our society has gotten more obese, we have been absorbing ever greater concentrations of synthetic chemicals. The fatter we become the more we are transformed into chemical timebombs.

As if that wasn't disturbing enough Laseter added another insight that further complicates our dilemma. "The human body is like a sponge for chemicals. We bio-accumulate them in our fat. But once the chemicals enter the body they metabolize. You may ingest one or two compounds and you may end up with five or six more because your body metabolizes and creates new compounds."

As one of the world's leading experts in the field of biochemistry, with more than 100 peer reviewed scientific papers to his credit, Laseter is a cautious scientist whose words are carefully chosen. He was the first U.S. scientist to lecture before the entire European Union Parliament on the perils we face from our chemical body burdens and for 10 years he served on the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. So when he uses the word 'scary,' as he did in conversation with me, to describe the challenges we confront from synthetic chemicals, it's time to shake off complacency and take urgent notice.

"Life has been here evolving on this planet in a mix of chemicals for four-and-a-half billion years," Laseter observed. "It's only in the last three or so generations of our species that we've introduced tens of thousands of new synthetic chemical compounds for us to absorb. In time maybe we can adapt to what we've created. But the more mixes we introduce and the more synergies we create, the more we will stress our physiology. There is a big risk involved. If you think about it, this starts to get really scary."

Where do we even begin to start in trying to protect ourselves? To that question Laseter had a ready answer. We can't blame authorities or institutions within the economy or government, or engage in finger-pointing of any sort, except perhaps while standing in front of a mirror. "It comes down to personal accountability," he told me. "We are responsible for ourselves."

As the evidence in this book demonstrate, our collective living habits and beliefs are in fact directly responsible for all others."

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