I often blog about the widespread negative effects of chemicals and pesticides. We live in a toxic soup, and the more people realize that, the more likely they will be to make changes. Ultimately, the more natural products and services you buy, the more those products and businesses will appear until one day (in my perfect world) we will be able to live without all these toxins!
Take a couple of recent studies (out of many) on pesticide exposure—as it turns out, prenatal exposure to pesticides is linked to lower IQ in children at age 7. And people exposed to pesticides near the workplace are at increased risk for developing Parkinson’s disease. Everywhere I look is another study to add to the mounds of evidence that the toxins we are regularly exposed to in everyday life are destroying us. Literally.
In the prenatal pesticide exposure study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, for every ten-fold increase in organophosphate pesticides detected during pregnancy, the child experienced a 5.5 point decrease in IQ score by age 7. The study found a correlation with prenatal exposure specifically, suggesting that there is a critical time period to which the baby in womb is susceptible.
In the Parkinson’s study, researchers found that exposure to the three commonly sprayed crop pesticides—ziram, maneb and paraquat—while at work was associated with a three-fold increase in risk of later developing Parksinson’s disease. Working near a field (not necessarily in direct contact with the pesticides, as they tend to drift up to several hundred meters from the fields) was enough to increase risk.
These are two small—yet significant—reasons to try to eat organic when possible, and to support your seven channels of elimination—colon, liver, lungs, lymph, kidneys, skin and blood—with regular cleansing and detoxification.