What Are We Doing To Ourselves?
Over the past one hundred years our species has been engaged in a vast and
complicated chemistry experiment. Each and every one of us, along with our children,
our parents and our grandparents, have been a guinea pig in this experiment that
uses our bodies, our health, our wealth and our good will to test the proposition
that modern science can improve upon the foods and medicines of Nature.
Despite our culture's remarkable sophistication in medical technology that
keeps the seriously ill alive and extends lifespans, our overall health condition
has degenerated alarmingly and rapidly. Over the past 100 years our cancer mortality
has gone from 3 percent of all deaths to 20 percent of all deaths. Our incidence
of diabetes went from one-tenth of one percent of the population to almost 20 percent.
Heart disease went from being almost non-existent to killing more than 700,000 people
a year. At the same time, health care costs have risen until the U.S. now spends
twice as much on medicine and care per person per year than any other industrialized
nation in the world.
It's no coincidence that simultaneous with this health decline the perils
we face from our food, our medicine and our health choices have become a drumbeat
of alarming news reports. Here are a few representative examples.
 A study from the science journal, Public Health, described in 2004 how
the incidence of death from brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and
motor neurone disorders, was found to have tripled in nine Western countries, including
the U.S., during the period 1974 to 1997. The most likely causes researchers identified
were exposure to pesticides sprayed on crops, synthetic chemicals from the processed
foods that we consume, and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of our
modern lives.
Food seemed to be a major culprit for this toxicity because Japan, alone
among the ten countries studied, experienced no increase in brain disease mortality,
apparently a result of the Japanese diet being healthier than Western diets. Only
when Japanese citizens relocate to Western countries and consume those processed
foods do their disease rates exceed that of Japan as a whole.
In California, state environmental officials discovered that 60 percent
of the rivers and streams contained high levels of prozac, ritalin, and antibiotics.
How could such contamination possibly have happened? Because people had dumped their
excess prescription drugs into those bodies of water, or had flushed them directly,
or through bodily waste, into sewer and septic systems where the chemicals then
leached into ground water.
Blood testing of thousands of Americans has widened the scope of concern.
Medical researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found an average
of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other synthetic chemicals in the blood
and urine of nine volunteers who had no occupational or geographical connection
to these chemicals or where they are manufactured. More than half of these chemicals
are known to be responsible for birth defects, or cancer, or brain and nervous system
disorders in humans.
An even more extensive round of testing by the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, involving 2,400 adults and children, documented more than
200 synthetic chemical toxins in their bodies, with hundreds more chemicals suspected
to be present.
How did we become so toxic? What thrust us as a culture and as individuals
onto this slippery slope? How can we navigate our way back to a healthier and less
toxic future? These are some of the questions raised and answered in The Hundred
Year Lie.
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