Education
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008I have started a group that’s purpose is to develop an educational package that can be used to inform the general public on why organic food is so important. If anyone is interested, you can join us at yahoo groups. We are the organic meetup group in Gurnee. We are slowly growing and trying to find a meeting time that works for everyone.
People really are not informed about what we put into our environment everyday. Yet this is the last piece of the puzzle. Genetics, diet, exercise only contributes to about 50% of known causes of many diseases. What’s the other 50%? Could it be what we breathe, eat, and touch on a daily basis?
Do you know that the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) in 2007 estimated that there are 80,000 synthetic chemicals in use in the United States; another
1,000 or more are added each year? Complete toxicological screening data are available for just 7 percent of these chemicals. About 16,000 of these are marketed in the US. So that means about 35% of these marketed pesticides do not have sufficient information. That 35% is 5,600 pesticides of which 90% have never been tested for their effect on humans. Yet these chemicals are used on our food.
Eating 12 of the most contaminated fruits and vegetables per day exposes you to 20 different pesticides. Eating 12 least contaminated exposes you to 2 different pesticides according to Environmental Working Group. Do you know there are pesticides that you can not rinse off your fruits and vegetables? There are pesticides that are not water soluble or that are within the fruit and vegetable because it was absorbed by the root system. Our organic foods of tomorrow will be our conventional food of today. More than a dozen pesticides that were widely used have been banned, restricted, or voluntarily withdrawn by manufacturers since 1996 since a federal law required them to meet safety standards. Each year more pesticides are banned or restricted after they have been introduced into our environment. Check out the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’ toxic fact sheet (www.atsdr.cdc.gov/) on Chlordane. Search for some other pesticides that are being used today. My favorite line is “available information is inadequate to definitely state whether”. Shouldn’t we know if something is going to cause cancer or other illnesses before we launch it into our environment? Especially when some of these remain in the soil for 20 years and can be absorbed inside the fruits and vegetables?
Pesticides in our body mimic estrogen. Could this be why there are countless studies that showed higher rates of breast cancer in farmers’ wives? Could this be why breast cancer seems to be on the rise as our environment becomes more and more polluted? Do you know that our children are developing right now and the toxins that are stored in their fat cells are with them for life? Do you know that studies show that a woman with breast cancer has breast tissue that is 60%-80% more toxic than a woman’s healthy breast tissue? A study done on 10 babies born in summer of 2004 found that they had 287 chemicals in the blood from the umbilical cord. Organochlorine pesticides was one of the chemicals found, Chlordane which I mentioned above belongs to this class.
I focused the above on pesticides which is one small part of the food contamination problem. There are many chemicals that come from many other sources. Let’s clean up our food supply. Vote with your dollars. Buy organic when possible. If you cannot buy everything organic then for health’s sake buy what you and your family eats most often as organic. Educate yourself and others. Write your government officials. Let’s push to make sure they are safe before using them. Not ban them after they are proven not safe. Get involved. One lady found out they were spraying her community for mosquitoes with a highly toxic chemical and got them to stop. Instead they use a safer method that kills them when they are larvae. Don’t sit back and think someone else will do something.