We have spoken of the problems of food allergy and chemical susceptibility as the two main components of environmental disease. This is technically correct, but in actuality these two problems are usually found together, tightly interlinked in the history of each chronically ill individual. One of the major ways in which these two elements interlock is in the chemical pollution of our food supply.
It is no secret that our food is now treated with synthetic chemicals of every sort. Some of these chemicals have been deliberately added, to impart color, flavor, or longer shelf life. These deliberately added substances are called additives. In addition, numerous chemicals accidentally enter the food supply as residues of pesticides, fertilizers, or environmental pollutants. These are called food contaminants.
Together, food additives and food contaminants have become a major source of the problem of chemical susceptibility in most Western countries, since everyone must eat, and most food now comes from the giant agribusiness conglomerates. These giant corporations are mainly concerned with maximizing profit, even if the health consequences for the population are negative. What is more, these companies are often closely linked to chemical companies and thus have a built-in bias in favor of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.1
For any person who wants to avoid environmentally induced illness, it is necessary to understand the sources of such chemical contamination of the food supply. These chemicals can either cause, or help perpetuate, chronic illnesses of all sorts. However, their presence can be detected, and they themselves can be avoided, by methods which are explained later in this book.
I have already described how the role of chemical pesticides was discovered in the case of William Petersen, the man who found that he could eat unsprayed apples from an abandoned orchard, while commercial apples from a store gave him a headache. The principles discovered in this case were soon extended to many other food-allergy patients. It was determined that in some cases they were actually reacting only to chemical contaminants. Usually, however, patients with the chemical susceptibility problem also had the food allergy problem, and vice versa. Some patients appeared to react to commercial food in the winter, but to a much lesser degree in the warmer months. This was because in the cold months they were often cooped up in their houses and exposed to the cumulative effects of indoor air pollution (Chap. 6). The combination of food allergies, contaminated food, and such indoor pollutants greatly heightened their symptoms and made their winters miserable. Not infrequently their winter maladies, environmental in origin, masqueraded as colds or flus. In other cases, they did have genuine infections, but these were accentuated by allergic problems.
The variety of problems is endless, since environmental disease is above all things an individual problem. There is no single cause for all people, nor a single solution. Usually the disease is a result of the interaction between an individual, with his particular bodily makeup, and his environment. Certain exposures, however, stand out as most troublesome for the greatest number of patients. Of the food additives and contaminants, some of the most troublesome are residues of pesticide sprays which find their way into almost everything the average person eats.
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