We live in a world filled with chemicals. In fact, we’ve created a society in which there are roughly 80,000 industrial chemicals all around us. A figure this large deserves a moment to just pause and think about.
The unvarnished truth is that all of these chemicals haven’t been studied for safety. We don’t know what happens when they combine. We don’t know what happens when they get into our food or in our environment or on our skin.
What do we know? The Centers for Disease Control conducted a study that found levels of more than 100 toxic chemicals in the bodies of Americans. According to Physicians for Social Responsibility, many of these chemicals measured by CDC “can have serious health effects, even at low levels of exposure.”
It’s hard not to be exposed on a daily basis. There are chemicals in soap, makeup, deodorant, hair spray and other personal care products. There are chemicals in household cleaning products. More chemicals are in paint, lacquers, carpeting and even some of the materials used to build our houses. In fact, one doctor speculates that the air inside the average home is five times more toxic than the air pollution in the environment. This doesn’t even address chemicals in our clothing and residues in our food.
The point here is not to bash science or chemistry. We have already driven off the chemical cliff, and I submit that now is not the time to step on the gas. But, as Dennis Miller is fond of saying, that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.
All of this is rather depressing, isn’t it? “Fortunately” for us (and our children) there are many organizations that are more than happy to “screen” us for our depression. They have handy questionnaires based on the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which lists numerous “mental illnesses” that were voted into existence for inclusion by association members. Very official sounding but note carefully that no test tubes, fancy equipment or rigorous testing was used in this authoritative tome—just a simple “majority rules” show of hands. You can’t see a “mental illness” under a microscope, so we’re dealing here in opinion, not fact. Interestingly, psychiatrists freely admit this.
Due to the general nature of these screening questionnaires, the likelihood is that we’ll “pass” and be diagnosed as having some form of mental illness. (Mental health groups are fond of saying that a large chunk of us have some kind of “disorder” that can be labeled.) Then comes the treatment. More chemicals! And a whole lot of “side effects” that could include all kinds of nasty things—ironically, even depression and suicidal thoughts or suicide itself!
Are more chemicals really the answer to human behavior? Do we really need our government to fund elaborate screening procedures, like an Orwellian form of airport security, to decide which of us should be prescribed antidepressants?
Isn’t it just possible that what we eat and all of the toxic chemicals that we come in contact with have some impact on our “mental health”? Or are we to believe that there is no relation at all? Apparently, we can simply continue to eat fast food and empty-calorie junk food and ingest chemical toxins forever. If this has any relation to our physical or mental state, not to worry because the offered solution is simply more chemicals from the drugstore!
Is it just me, or does this seem like an Alfred E. Newman approach to some serious problems we as a society have made for ourselves? (For those of you too young to remember, Alfred was the iconic cover boy of Mad Magazine, who with his happy grin proclaimed, “What, me worry?”)
Fortunately, a growing number of people have realized that we need to protect our environment and our bodies and especially our children from this chemical proliferation. Meanwhile, the giant gears of big industry grind on, fronted by Madison Avenue ad campaigns and defended by armies of lawyers. There is fast food and empty-calorie snacks to sell. There are supermarket shelves of toxic cleaners and “beauty” products to move and truckloads of “conventionally grown” produce and meats. It’s the American Dream turned toxic nightmare.
Some of us “get it.” We are shopping at natural products stores and going out of our way to try and live as chemically free as possible. We seek out responsible companies that produce green, natural products, which won’t harm our world or us. And that’s not easy—especially when our scientist friends are hard at work introducing another 2,000 new chemicals each year!
At the end of the day, we’ve got to detoxify our bodies and our world in order to survive. You have to ask yourself, who wouldn’t agree to that?
Publisher
loading...
loading...
