Al Gore recently won a Nobel Prize for his documentary on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth". Since then, there has been much debate over whether or not Mr. Gore deserved this accolade and thus rekindled the debate over global warming in general. This seems to be the point of movie in the first place, to focus our attention on climate change and what we can do about it. Now if only someone equally famous would put together a documentary on how synthetic chemicals are killing us and the planet.
The effects of carbon emissions from our insatiable appetite for energy may be melting the polar ice caps and endangering the polar bears, but Perchlorate in our ground water is compromising the healthy function of thyroid in both man and beast. Increasingly prescribed over the decades, synthetic hormones have also found their way into our lakes, streams and drinking water and already there are populations of frogs found with both male and female organs.
Though banned more than 30 years ago, DDT can still be found in the breast milk of women all over the globe.Since the Second World War, over 80,000 new synthetic chemicals have been manufactured and released into our environment, with 1,500 new chemicals introduced every year. We were promised that "chemistry" would make our lives better and to the degree of making our lives easier this may have been true. But with this increase in synthetic chemical compounds come all sorts of problems with adverse interactions and unknown synergistic effects. It's becoming increasingly difficult to isolate any one chemical in the body to find harmful effects. We are all walking test tubes with hundreds of toxins interacting in our liver, fat stores and active blood stream.
Autism rates have soared more than 800% and still researchers have yet to identify the cause. Skin cancer rates continue to increase even though sales of sunscreen were nearly nonexistent fifty years ago. The medical research community continues to look for single smoking guns. A drug that cures cancer or a toxin that causes it. None of it is that simple. With research showing one out of three people in the U.S. will develop cancer in their lifetime, do we really think that global warming is our biggest concern?
Most would agree there is a need save energy and cut green house gases. But there is also a need to connect the dots and see how we are poisoning ourselves and the planet. Eating healthy, fresh foods that are free of pesticides, chemical fertilizers and preservatives has shown to reduce the risks of developing cancer. Cleaning with a little "elbow grease" instead of "Scrub Free", and purchasing natural products for our homes can begin to reduce the amounts of toxins we bathe in and breathe. By choosing products free of synthetic chemicals we can begin to reduce the number of them released into our environment. This may do more for us and the planet in the long run than any synthetic chemical or drug ever could.
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