I wanted to share some thoughts with you about something important that may or may not have been on your radar…

The subject I am eluding to is toxicity. Specifically, your environmental toxicity. Ok. I can hear the yawn and subsequent click as you hit the delete button from your email cache. But wait hold on! This is important!

Now you may be immediately getting mental pictures recalling news media images of the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the Chernobyl incident in the 80’s. These were indeed significant events and did have immeasurable effects on local life both human and otherwise.

However, the toxicity with which I am referring occurs on a much more subtle and local level. For example… the food you eat, the air you breath, the water you drink, and the creams, lotions and hair products you use.

Small but consistent daily doses of these chemicals contribute to what is referred to as your toxic load. They are ingested, inhaled, or topically applied and absorbed by your body. The body has 75 trillion cells that have to work overtime to process these chemicals and rid your body of them.

There is no point in naming each of these chemicals as they are vast in number and often (but not always) found on the labels of the products we use. You know which ones I am referring to…the seemingly endless list of small un-pronounceable hieroglyphics on the labels of many packaged products we use.

You don’t have to be biochemist to know that something called BENZYL ACETATE or a-TERPINEOL shouldn’t be in or on our bodies.

Many of these products have been “tested” and are “safe” in certain EPA approved amounts. I use quotation marks because I know the limitations inherently present when testing chemicals for safety.

One limitation is that they are often tested for safety in only short time periods unlike the lifetime of exposure that actually occurs.

Another limitation is that these chemicals are only tested in isolation and not with the many combinations of chemicals that exist in our daily lives.

Collectively, they contribute to our toxic load which is the sum of foreign chemicals we are exposed to not just on a daily or weekly basis, but for our entire existence…even before we were born.

Your liver, kidneys, sweat glands, and lungs are the exit signs for these chemicals.

The question is to what extent do these chemicals cause havoc while they are in our bodies?

It is also important to think of to what threshold of daily exposure occurs before our own physiology is disrupted. For example, What is our liver not processing correctly when it is busy breaking down our friend a-TERPINEOL.

For now, I simply wanted to introduce the issue and potentially spark some interest. In Part II of Know What You Put In Your Body, I’ll provide some starter recommendations for decreasing your toxic load.