Category: Resyndicated

How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life

(DrFrankLipman – Mark Hyman) The slow insidious displacement of home cooked and communally shared family meals by the industrial food system has fattened our nation and weakened our family ties.

In 1900, 2 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home and one in five breakfasts is from McDonald’s. Most family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved “food.” More meals are eaten in the minivan than the kitchen.

Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. They are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke and 66 percent less like to smoke marijuana. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. In a study on household routines and obesity in U.S. preschool-aged children, it was shown that kids as young as four have a lower risk of obesity if they eat regular family dinners, have enough sleep, and don’t watch TV on weekdays.

We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking on the Food Network than actually preparing their own meals. In his series, “Food Revolution,” Jamie Oliver showed us how we have raised a generation of Americans who can’t recognize a single vegetable or fruit, and don’t know how to cook.

The family dinner has been hijacked by the food industry. The transformations of the American home and meal outlined above did not happen by accident. Broccoli, peaches, almonds, kidney beans and other whole foods don’t need a food ingredient label or bar code, but for some reason these foods — the foods we co-evolved with over millennia — had to be “improved” by Food Science. As a result, the processed-food industry and industrial agriculture has changed our diet, decade by decade, not by accident but by intention.

That we need nutritionists and doctors to teach us how to eat is a sad reflection of the state of society. These are things our grandparents knew without thinking twice about them. What foods to eat, how to prepare them, and an understanding of why you should share them in family and community have been embedded in cultural traditions since the dawn of human society.

One hundred years ago all we ate was local, organic food; grass-fed, real, whole food. There were no fast-food restaurants, there was no junk food, there was no frozen food — there was just what your mother or grandmother made. Most meals were eaten at home. In the modern age that tradition, that knowledge, is being lost.

The sustainability of our planet, our health, and our food supply are inextricably linked. The ecology of eating — the importance of what you put on your fork — has never been more critical to our survival as a nation or as a species. The earth will survive our self-destruction. But we may not.

Common sense and scientific research lead us to the conclusion that if we want healthy bodies we must put the right raw materials in them: real; whole, local; fresh; unadulterated; unprocessed; and chemical-, hormone- and antibiotic-free food. There is no role for foreign molecules such as trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, or for industrially developed and processed food that interferes with our biology at every level.

That is why I believe the most important and the most powerful tool you have to change your health and the world is your fork. Imagine an experiment — let’s call it a celebration: We call upon the people of the world to join together and celebrate food for one week. For one week or even one day, we all eat breakfast and dinner at home with our families or friends. For one week we all eat only real, whole, fresh food. Imagine for a moment the power of the fork to change the world.

The extraordinary thing is that we have the ability to move large corporations and create social change by our collective choices. We can reclaim the family dinner, reviving and renewing it. Doing so will help us learn how to find and prepare real food quickly and simply, teach our children by example how to connect, build security, safety and social skills, meal after meal, day after day, year after year.

Here are some tips that will help you take back the family dinner in your home starting today

1. Reclaim Your Kitchen

Throw away any foods with high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats or sugar or fat as the first or second ingredient on the label. Fill your shelves with real fresh, whole, local foods when possible. And join a community support agriculture network to get a cheaper supply of fresh vegetables weekly or frequent farmers markets.

2. Reinstate the Family Dinner

Read Laurie David’s “The Family Dinner“. She suggests the following guidelines: Make a set dinnertime, no phones or texting during dinner, everyone eats the same meal, no television, only filtered or tap water, invite friends and family, everyone clean up together.

3. Eat Together

No matter how modest the meal, create a special place to sit down together, and set the table with care and respect. Savor the ritual of the table. Mealtime is a time for empathy and generosity, a time to nourish and communicate.

4. Learn How to Cook and Shop

You can make this a family activity, and it does not need to take a ton of time. Keep meals quick and simple.

5. Plant a Garden

This is the most nutritious, tastiest, environmentally friendly food you will ever eat.

6. Conserve, Compost and Recycle

Bring your own shopping bags to the market, recycle your paper, cans, bottles and plastic and start a compost bucket (and find where in your community you can share you goodies).

7. Invest in Food

As Alice Waters says, food is precious. We should treat it that way. Americans currently spend less than10 percent of their income on food, while most European’s spend about 20 percent of their income on food. We will be more nourished by good food than by more stuff. And we will save ourselves much money and costs over our lifetime.

Food Addiction: Could It Explain Why 70 Percent of Americans Are Fat?

(DrFrankLipman – Mark Hyman, M.D.) Our government and food industry both encourage more “personal responsibility” when it comes to battling the obesity epidemic and its associated diseases. They say people should exercise more selfcontrol, make better choices, avoid overeating, and reduce their intake of sugar-sweetened drinks and processed food. We are led to believe that there is no good food or bad food, that it’s all a matter of balance. This sounds good in theory, except for one thing….

New discoveries in science prove that industrially processed, sugar-, fat- and salt-laden food — food that is made in a plant rather than grown on a plant, as Michael Pollan would say — is biologically addictive.

Imagine a foot-high pile of broccoli, or a giant bowel of apple slices. Do you know anyone who would binge broccoli or apples? On other hand, imagine a mountain of potato chips or a whole bag of cookies, or a pint of ice cream. Those are easy to imagining vanishing in an unconscious, reptilian brain eating frenzy. Broccoli is not addictive, but cookies, chips, or soda absolutely can become addictive drugs.

The “just say no” approach to drug addiction hasn’t fared too well, and it won’t work for our industrial food addiction, either. Tell a cocaine or heroin addict or an alcoholic to “just say no” after that first snort, shot, or drink. It’s not that simple. There are specific biological mechanisms that drive addictive behavior. Nobody chooses to be a heroin addict, cokehead, or drunk. Nobody chooses to be fat, either. The behaviors arise out of primitive neurochemical reward centers in the brain that override normal willpower and overwhelm our ordinary biological signals that control hunger. Consider:

  • Why do cigarette smokers continue to smoke even though they know smoking will give them cancer and heart disease?
  • Why do less than 20 percent of alcoholics successfully quit drinking?
  • Why do most addicts continue to use cocaine and heroin despite their lives being destroyed?
  • Why does quitting caffeine lead to irritability and headaches?

It is because these substances are all biologically addictive.

Why is it so hard for obese people to lose weight despite the social stigma and health consequences such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and even cancer, even though they have an intense desire to lose weight? It is not because they want to be fat. It is because certain types of food are addictive.

Food made of sugar, fat, and salt can be addictive. Especially when combined in secret ways that the food industry will not share or make public. We are biologically wired to crave these foods and eat as much of them as possible. We all know about cravings, but what does the science tell us about food and addiction, and what are the legal and policy implications if a certain food is, in fact, addictive?

The Science and Nature of Food Addiction

Let’s examine the research and the similarities between high-sugar, energy-dense, fatty and salty processed and junk food and cocaine, heroin, and nicotine. We’ll start by reviewing the diagnostic criteria for substance dependence or addiction found in the bible of psychiatric diagnosis, the DSM-IV, and look at how that relates to food addiction:

  • Substance is taken in larger amount and for longer period than intended (a classic symptom in people who habitually overeat).
  • Persistent desire or repeated unsuccessful attempts to quit. (Consider the repeated attempts at diet so many overweight people go through.)
  • Much time/activity is spent to obtain, use, or recover. (Those repeated attempts to lose weight take time.)
    Important social, occupational, or recreational activities given up or reduced. (I see this in many patients who are overweight or obese.)
  • Use continues despite knowledge of adverse consequences (e.g., failure to fulfill role obligation, use when physically hazardous). (Anyone who is sick and fat wants to lose weight, but without help few are capable of making the dietary changes that would lead to this outcome.)
  • Tolerance (marked increase in amount; marked decrease in effect). (In other words you have to keep eating more and more just to feel “normal” or not experience withdrawal.)
  • Characteristic withdrawal symptoms; substance taken to relieve withdrawal. (Many people undergo a “healing crisis” that has many of the same symptoms as withdrawal when removing certain foods from their diet.)

Few of us are free from this addictive pattern. If you examine your own behavior and relationship with sugar, in particular, you will likely find that your behavior around sugar and the biological effects of overconsumption of sugar match up perfectly. Many of the criteria above are likely to apply to you.

Researchers from Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity validated a “food addiction” scale.(i) Here are a few of the points on the scale that are used to determine if you have a food addiction. Does any of this sound familiar? If it does, you may be an “industrial food addict.”

  1. I find that when I start eating certain foods, I end up eating much more than I had planned.
  2. Not eating certain types of food or cutting down on certain types of food is something I worry about.
  3. I spend a lot of time feeling sluggish or lethargic from overeating.
  4. There have been times when I consumed certain foods so often or in such large quantities that I spent time dealing with negative feelings from overeating instead of working, spending time with my family or friends, or engaging in other important activities or recreational activities that I enjoy.
  5. I kept consuming the same types of food or the same amount of food even though I was having emotional and/or physical problems.
  6. Over time, I have found that I need to eat more and more to get the feeling I want, such as reduced negative emotions or increased pleasure.
  7. I have had withdrawal symptoms when I cut down or stopped eating certain foods, including physical symptoms, agitation, or anxiety. (Please do not include withdrawal symptoms caused by cutting down on caffeinated beverages such as soda pop, coffee, tea, energy drinks, etc.)
  8. My behavior with respect to food and eating causes significant distress.
  9. I experience significant problems in my ability to function effectively (daily routine, job/school, social activities, family activities, health difficulties) because of food and eating.

Based on these criteria and others, many of us, including most obese children, are “addicted” to industrial food.

Here are some of the scientific findings confirming that food can, indeed, be addictive(ii):

  1. Sugar stimulates the brain’s reward centers through the neurotransmitter dopamine, exactly like other addictive drugs.
  2. Brain imagining (PET scans) shows that high-sugar and high-fat foods work just like heroin, opium, or morphine in the brain.(iii)
  3. Brain imaging (PET scans) shows that obese people and drug addicts have lower numbers of dopamine receptors, making them more likely to crave things that boost dopamine.
  4. Foods high in fat and sweets stimulate the release of the body’s own opioids (chemicals like morphine) in the brain.
  5. Drugs we use to block the brain’s receptors for heroin and morphine (naltrexone) also reduce the consumption and preference for sweet, high-fat foods in both normal weight and obese binge eaters.
  6. People (and rats) develop a tolerance to sugar — they need more and more of the substance to satisfy themselves — just like they do for drugs of abuse like alcohol or heroin.
  7. Obese individuals continue to eat large amounts of unhealthy foods despite severe social and personal negative consequences, just like addicts or alcoholics.
  8. Animals and humans experience “withdrawal” when suddenly cut off from sugar, just like addicts detoxifying from drugs.
  9. Just like drugs, after an initial period of “enjoyment” of the food, the user no longer consumes them to get high but to feel normal.

Remember the movie Super Size Me, where Morgan Spurlock ate three super-sized meals from McDonald’s every day? What struck me about that film was not that he gained 30 pounds or that his cholesterol went up, or even that he got a fatty liver. What was surprising was the portrait it painted of the addictive quality of the food he ate. At the beginning of the movie, when he ate his first supersized meal, he threw it up, just like a teenager who drinks too much alcohol at his first party. By the end of the movie, he only felt “well” when he ate that junk food. The rest of the time he felt depressed, exhausted, anxious, and irritable and lost his sex drive, just like an addict or smoker withdrawing from his drug. The food was clearly addictive.

This problems with food addiction are compounded by the fact that food manufacturers refuse to release any internal data on how they put ingredients together to maximize consumption of their food products, despite requests from researchers. In his book The End of Overeating, David Kessler, M.D., the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, describes the science of how food is made into drugs by the creation of hyperpalatable foods that lead to neuro-chemical addiction.

This binging leads to profound physiological consequences that drive up calorie consumption and lead to weight gain. In a Harvard study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, overweight adolescents consumed an extra 500 calories a day when allowed to eat junk food as compared to days when they weren’t allowed to eat junk food. They ate more because the food triggered cravings and addiction. Like an alcoholic after the first drink, once these kids started eating processed food full of the sugar, fat, and salt that triggered their brain’s reward centers, they couldn’t stop. They were like rats in a cage.(iv)

Stop and think about this for one minute. If you were to eat 500 more calories in a day, that would equal 182,500 calories a year. Let’s see, if you have to eat an extra 3,500 calories to gain one pound, that’s a yearly weight gain of 52 pounds!

If high-sugar, high-fat, calorie-rich, nutrient-poor, processed, fast, junk food is indeed addictive, what does that mean? How should that influence our approach to obesity? What implications does it have for government policies and regulation? Are there legal implications? If we are allowing and even promoting addictive substances in our children’s diets, how should we handle that?

I can assure you, Big Food isn’t going to make any changes voluntarily. They would rather ignore this science. They have three mantras about food.

  1. It’s all about choice. Choosing what you eat is about personal responsibility. Government regulation controlling how you market food or what foods you can eat leads to a nanny state, food “fascists,” and interference with our civil liberties.
  2. There are no good foods and bad foods. It’s all about amount. So no specific foods can be blamed for the obesity epidemic.
  3. Focus on education about exercise not diet. As long as you burn off those calories, it shouldn’t matter what you eat.

Unfortunately, this is little more than propaganda from an industry interested in profit, not in nourishing the nation.

Do We Really Have a Choice About What We Eat?

The biggest sham in food industry strategy and government food policy is advocating and emphasizing individual choice and personal responsibility to solve our obesity and chronic disease epidemic. We are told that if people just didn’t eat so much, exercised more, and took care of themselves, we would be fine. We don’t need to change our policies or environment. We don’t want the government telling us what to do. We want free choice.

But are your choices free, or is Big Food driving behavior through insidious marketing techniques?

The reality is that many people live in food deserts where they can’t buy an apple or carrot, or live in communities that have no sidewalks or where it is unsafe to be out walking. We blame the fat person. But how can we blame a two-year-old for being fat? How much choice does he or she have?

We live in toxic food environment, a nutritional wasteland. School lunchrooms and vending machines overflow with junk food and “sports drinks.” Most of us don’t even know what we’re eating. Fifty percent of meals are eaten outside the home, and most home-cooked meals are simply microwavable industrial food. Restaurants and chains provide no clear menu labeling. Did you know that a single order of Outback Steakhouse cheese fries is 2,900 calories, or that a Starbucks venti mocha latte is 508 calories?

Environmental factors (like advertising, lack of menu labeling, and others) and the addictive properties of “industrial food,” when added together, override our normal biological or psychological control mechanisms. To pretend that changing this is beyond the scope of government responsibility or that creating policy to help manage such environmental factors would lead to a “nanny state” is simply an excuse for Big Food to continue its unethical practices. Here are some ways we can change our food environment:

  • Build the real cost of industrial food into the price. Include its impact on health care costs and lost productivity.
  • Subsidize the production of fruits and vegetables. 80 percent of government subsidies presently go to soy and corn, which are used to create much of the junk food we consume. We need to rethink subsidies and provide more for smaller farmers and a broader array of fruits and vegetables.
  • Incentivize supermarkets to open in poor communities. Poverty and obesity go hand in hand. One reason is the food deserts we see around the nation. Poor people have a right to high-quality food, too. We need to create ways to provide it to them.
  • End food marketing to children. 50 other countries worldwide have done this, why haven’t we?
  • Change the school lunchroom. The national school lunch program in its present form is a travesty. Unless we want the next generation to be fatter and sicker than we are, we need better nutrition education and better food in our schools.
  • Build community support programs with a new workforce of community health workers. These people would be able to support individuals in making better food choices.

We can alter the default conditions in the environment that foster and promote addictive behavior.(v) It’s simply a matter of public and political will. If we don’t, we will face an ongoing epidemic of obesity and illness across the nation. For more information on how we can manage the food crisis in this country, see the diet and nutrition section of drhyman.com.

To your good health,


Sources:

  1. Gearhardt, A.N., Corbin, W.R., and K.D. 2009. Brownell. Preliminary validation of the Yale Food Addiction Scale. Appetite. 52(2): 430-436.
  2. Colantuoni, C., Schwenker, J., McCarthy, P., et al. 2001. Excessive sugar intake alters binding to dopamine and mu-opioid receptors in the brain. Neuroreport. 12(16): 3549-3552.
  3. Volkow, N.D., Wang, G.J., Fowler, J.S., et al. 2002. “Nonhedonic” food motivation in humans involves dopamine in the dorsal striatum and methylphenidate amplifies this effect. Synapse. 44(3): 175-180.
  4. Ebbeling CB, Sinclair KB, Pereira MA, Garcia-Lago E, Feldman HA, Ludwig DS. Compensation for energy intake from fast food among overweight and lean adolescents. JAMA. 2004 Jun 16;291(23):2828-2833.
  5. Brownell, K.D., Kersh, R., Ludwig. D.S., et al. 2010. Personal responsibility and obesity: A constructive approach to a controversial issue. Health Aff (Millwood). 29(3): 379-387.

Greening Yourself

(DrFrankLipman – Mariel Hemingway) What does it mean to be green? For Kermit the frog it was the mere fact that he was green in color. For me, it means that I eat a lot of green foods and that I love the earth. I adore nature because it informs me how I feel about the world. Nature is my connection to God. Mother nature is the earth and the earth is my home– and that thrills me. But I didn’t get here by thinking green… I got here by becoming aware of who I am inside.  I am ecologically aware because it is the natural place for me to be, because of the path that I have taken towards health and self-awareness.

Does the fact that we buy more “green” products make us more ecologically conscious or does it just mean that we feel better about the fact that some of the “stuff” that we are now buying is recyclable, renewable, and a little less bad for our environment? Perhaps both. Yet, buying more things even if they are green, doesn’t make waste and unconscious behavior towards the planet go away. It just makes us have a better feeling about what we are buying.

How can we become ecologically conscious or aware of our planet? Not only by the kind of goods that we buy, but also by making an effort to buy less because we are aware of the gifts we already have, and our attitude toward ourselves is more important than what we can obtain from the outside. Lessen the carbon footprint and cherish the world we live in.

In becoming truly thoughtful in what we buy we will feed our souls far more than the idea of changing the goods we consume. Don’t get me wrong, I love that there are products in the marketplace that are made and produced with our environment in mind (and we need to support them), but that is not what helps human beings become more mindful of themselves and their environment.

We need a shift in consciousness that guides us towards a loving intention for ourselves first that really speaks to how we as individuals show up in the world. Our economy is making it easier for us to do this anyway. There is less security for many to feel comfortable with the kind of unconscious hoarding of things we engaged in the last 2 to 3 decades.

Instead of focusing on what is happening outside our lives, it feels to me like a time to ask ourselves how do we live on a personal level? How do we affect the immediate environment we live in? How do we feel in our body? The first step to becoming green is to shift our focus from what we are doing on the outside and ask the question how do I occur and feel in my body?  I love to discuss what it means to step into our environment as a conscious person. I like this kind of inquiry because it is what I ask of myself everyday.

The first step towards greening yourself is to inquire about how you feel in your inner self. How do you feel in your day-to-day life? How does your body feel when you take a walk, swim, jog, stretch, or do yoga or any kind of movement? Or have you let yourself fall away from moving your body? When you don’t move your body it is as though you are not tilling the soil of your garden. If you don’t move the soil, oxygenate it, water it and nourish it with the proper nutrients your plants become stagnant and they don’t flourish. So you can see how your first environment is your physical state. Eco-consciousness begins right where you are. Green yourself and then understand that who you are is the first step into becoming aware of the earth you live on.

Your first environment is your body and your awareness of how that feels is based on what you eat, how you move and if you take time for the ritual of observing yourself in Silence. In caring for your body in this way is how you begin to care for you. When you care for you, you are caring for the first and most important environment you have. It is the beginning of self-love. Self-love is self-awareness of how you show up in your world.

I truly believe that if a person becomes attuned to how their body is cared for, the idea of NOT caring for your actual outside environment becomes absurd. When you care for you, then you naturally care for the world you are living in, because that is your home, your temple. If you love who you are then you become an ecologically conscious person because it simply makes sense. It is the natural progression to come from self-awareness to environmental awareness.

When your body thrives energetically by feeding it well with locally grown and organic foods and your home becomes a haven for your creative and personal peace, then it is natural to want to make sure the bigger environment is cared for.  It is making choices that serve your humanity. You then want to visit farmers markets, you want to recycle and consume less because buying more holds little interest for you anymore. What you already have becomes sacred, especially your time. It becomes uninteresting to you to waste time searching for things that don’t love you the way you can love yourself.

When a person is engaged in the solace and beauty in their lives they are less likely to want to buy things mindlessly. I have had periods in my life when shopping was a way to get outside myself, to distract from the places where I didn’t feel good about who I was. If I bought something whether clothes, gadgets, or whatever, I was distracted from the reality of how I was feeling inside. I like to shop, my goodness I am healthy woman, but it is not something that I do obsessively any longer. I do it as fun or necessary and I do it with joy, not as a way to fill up a hole inside where I don’t feel complete.

When I began to feel better about the me that I am, I began to need fewer things. I am feeling so much more in tune with a greater consumption of self-acceptance that I don’t need more stuff – green or otherwise – to enhance who I am. As I am on the journey of my own self-acceptance, I am becoming more loving of everyone and everything around me. It is cliché, but it is said that you can’t love until you find love of self first, and it is true for me.

After you become aware of your body then you can’t help but become aware of your work, habits and home. When you are at work, are you at ease? How do you feel in your home, in your personal sacred space? Or does it even feel sacred at all? What does your bedroom feel like? Is it a peaceful place of rest or is it a place that has lost all definition and you don’t even know why you sleep there?  Is it too hard to get past the piled books, clothes, and things that disguise it? Is it a place for lovemaking, sleep, and meditation or has it become your office, your TV room or your storage bin? Is your kitchen a place that one wants to hang out in because the food and smells that come from it invite family closeness and a sense of comfort and well-being?

These are the questions to ask yourself about your personal environment. Get in tune with how you feel here in your life, in your body, and then you will have an easeful segue-way into the world and be naturally eco conscious.

When you make a choice to change your home you want it to reflect who you are, then you will buy necessary products that are healthy. You will want to use non toxic paints and carpets and you will think ‘wow If I change my kitchen countertops I might want to use a wood that is from trees that fell naturally in the forest’. You may want to put solar panels on your roof because you care that your home is filled with clean pure air and energy that serves this incredible being that you are.

Becoming “green” and environmentally aware is about loving yourself and then wanting your body to be housed gloriously in a healthy environment. And of course that means you become a better spouse, parent, and partner, because you are more able to care for others through the conscious choices you are making for yourself.

And of course this leads you to being aware of the desire for a healthier planet…hence you have become an ecologically conscious and GREEN human Being!

Lead Toxicity Causes a Host of Surprisingly Unpleasant Health Conditions

(NaturalNews – Carolanne Wright) “As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to “fill ‘er up with ethyl,” they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later,” reports Mother Jones in “America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead.” As it turns out, contact with lead can give rise to aggressive and delinquent behavior, not to mention learning disabilities and lower IQ scores. When leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s, an interesting phenomena occurred: the crime rate substantially and consistently dropped. All the same, exposure to the heavy metal hasn’t disappeared completely as it still hides in the most ordinary of places – and, predictably, continues to bring about a spectrum of health and behavioral disorders.

The link between lead and criminality

Kim N. Dietrich, director of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, believes that lead can “miswire” developing brains in children, affecting areas of judgement, impulse control and anticipation of consequences – which ultimately can provoke aggressive behavior. In the late 1970s, Dietrich and a team of other investigators began to study some 300 pregnant women who lived in Cincinnati neighborhoods (usually the inner city) that were known for high numbers of lead poisoning cases. According to Chemical and Engineering News:

“From the time they were born until they were six-and-a-half years old, the young participants had their blood-lead levels measured 23 times. The average childhood concentration for the whole group was 13 µg/dL. Now adults in their 30s, the subjects are having their brains scanned and behaviors analyzed. And the results are eerie. As of 2008, 250 members of the lead study had been arrested a total of 800 times. The participants’ average blood-lead levels during childhood also correlated with their arrest rate.”

A modern health threat

Today we may not give much thought to lead exposure, thanks to the protective measures set in place over the years by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Unfortunately, despite these efforts, the heavy metal is still present within our daily lives, silently obstructing the mental and physical health of children and adults alike.

“… getting a dangerous dose is more common today than you realize – thanks to sources you’d never expect, such as ceramic dishes, art supplies, and even vegetables grown in city gardens. And although average blood lead levels are way down, new research shows that even low amounts can be harmful,” states Johns Hopkins University professor Ellen Silbergeld, PhD, in “Lead dangers still lurk in unexpected places.”

Even small amounts of lead (4 ug/dl) in the blood can double the risk of a fatal heart attack or stroke. The same level can also encourage memory loss. Since lead is stored in the bones, when we have periods of high bone turnover (after a fracture, at menopause or during pregnancy), the metal is released into the blood, resulting in high blood pressure and kidney problems.

Hunting and fishing, home renovations, cosmetics, and even faucet fixtures are often sources of exposure. To learn how to protect yourself, have a look at these recommendations.

Sources for this article include:
http://www.motherjones.com
http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i5/Crimes-Lead.html
https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/lead/
http://www.nbcnews.com
http://science.naturalnews.com

Phthalates in Food: 7 Ways to Reduce Your Exposure

(DrFrankLipman – Maia James) You probably know that some plastic toys—like the now infamous rubber ducky—contain the hormone-disrupting, birth-defect-causing, probably-carcinogenic plasticizers known as phthalates. You may have even heard that this group of chemicals is also found in the fragrance of your favorite personal care products.

Most of my clients are surprised to learn, though, that the single largest source of phthalate exposure comes from our food and water supply—and this is not just true for people eating microwaved meals from plastic trays. Almost all of us have phthalates in our systems, and a recent study showed that when fasting, people’s phthalate levels dropped by five to ten times within the first 24 hours without food. This is not to say we should stop eating–but we should get phthalates out of what we eat!

Until phthalates are banned for good (a girl can dream), we can take matters into our own hands in several ways.  Here’s how:

  1. Avoid putting your food in or on plastic. Even BPA- or phthalate-free plastic may leach harmful chemicals, and it’s impossible to know for sure which containers, wraps, or baggies may contain phthalates without testing. Opt for glass food storage containers, and choose bottles and sippy cups that are made of stainless steel, silicone, or glass. Try zippered cloth bags instead of plastic food storage bags, and try to source meats and cheeses that come wrapped in paper whenever possible.

  2. If you must use plastic, keep it out of the microwave and dishwasher. When plastic is heated, it leaches more chemicals, and phthalates are no exception. Even the hot water of the dishwasher causes plastic to degrade and release toxins, so if you do use plastic food-storage containers, replace them often.

  3. Eat more plants. People who eat diets rich in plant foods—fruits, vegetables, beans, grains, nuts, and seeds—have lower levels of phthalates in their blood than do people who eat more animal foods. Substituting out just a few meat- and dairy-heavy meals a week with vegan ones can lower your family’s phthalate levels. If you’re worried about protein, try beans. For fats, add nuts or avocado. For calcium, choose kale or collard greens.

  4. Eat organic and grass-fed produce, meat, and dairy. Phthalates are used in pesticides and herbicides, neither of which is permitted on certified organic produce. Pesticide-treated animal feeds are not allowed in organic meat and dairy production. Ideally, you’ll eat dairy and meat from grass-fed cows, pigs, and chickens, since phthalates may contaminate animal feed stored in plastic containers (even if that feed is organic).

  5. Choose low-fat meat and dairy. I don’t love giving this advice, because I generally am not a fan of low-fat dairy products, always opting for whole milk and full-fat yogurt for my family. Unfortunately, foods that are higher in fat are particularly prone to chemical leaching. Most farms use plastic tubing to milk their cows, which likely introduces phthalates at the start of the production process, and the chemicals then hang out in the fattiest part of the milk. In light of this, you (and I!) might want to consider buying lower fat cheeses or taking the skin off of chicken.

  6. Invest in a water filter. If your water supply is tainted by industrial waste, phthalates may show up in your drinking glass. Granular activated carbon filters should remove DEHP, which is the type of phthalate used in water pipes. A nano-filtration system is more expensive but possibly even more effective way to filter out phthalates.

  7. Avoid processed foods. Phthalate contamination is yet another reason to stick to whole foods as much as possible. The more opportunity your food has had to come in contact with plastic throughout the production process, the greater the chance that it will be tainted with phthalates.