Important study about harmful chemicals

Do read this.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008067309_toxicsmell23m0.html

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Here's a quick historic/science/economics lesson that everyone needs to understand because globally we are getting into a horrible situation and people don't even realize it is happening, or why.

Up until the industrial revolution humans had to use natural materials in everything. Let me use the example of dye to color fabric. Everyone had to collect bugs, bark, plants, flowers, minerals and other materials (such as a certain sea shell to provide purple, which due to its rareness became "the color of royalty") in order to give fabric or anything else any color. During the industrial revolution people discovered how to use chemicals, man made chemicals, to do the same thing. When you collect something that is rare to do something everyone needs to do (color fabric) it is very expensive and limiting. When you invent a chemical that can be cheaply made and used, it becomes available and affordable worldwide. So, for example, one of the first things traders provided American Indians was fabric colored with chemicals, the same way the settlers used on their own clothes. Everyone thought it was a great idea, and it was. Now, think of everything else that is like dyes going from natural to chemical. Fragrance is another area where it is no longer made from the actual flowers, but a synthetic chemical. Food additives for taste and freshness used to be natural (sugar, salt, vinegar) but are now all chemicals. Again, this is a "good thing" in the sense of making a commodity more widely available and affordable to everyone. Now think about cleansers. They used to be based on natural substances such as fat, oil, lye, and ashes. Even the cleansers are now all chemicals.

So now do the math. Everything we use is saturated and enabled with chemicals that take the place of what were natural substances. And it's not just a "natural vs artificial chemical" problem, but it is dosage related, and THAT is the real problem. In the 1800's if everything else you did was based on low dosages of natural materials, but now you started wearing cotton that is colored with a chemical dye, no problem. The people got low dosages of chemicals in limited areas. But gradually chemicals have become the basis of every substance, increasing the dosage within that object AND multiplying a person's exposure by one hundred fold. Here is what I mean. Natural dyes tend not to be as intense as chemical dyes. So when you use a natural compound you are somewhat limited in your exposure because it's a weaker substance. When a chemist invents a substitute though, there is no built in dosage control. So a dull red piece of naturally colored fabric is forced to have a much lower amount of the natural dye in it than a chemically treated fabric, which becomes saturated with the chemical. So that is one way to understand that chemicals, even if they "mimic" the natural are genuinely different and more risky because they are not dosage controlled.

Here's a food example just to help with the concept. People used to never drink fruit juice (except wine), they would eat the fruit. So a person was lucky and well off if they had say an apple or an orange a day. But how many oranges do you think must be squeezed in order to make a small, to say nothing of a large, glass of orange juice? (This is why it's so fattening to drink juice and not so good for your kids. It is MUCH better to have your kid eat an apple than always drink the apple juice, for example). That's another subject but I know it helps you to understand what I mean by dosage of intensity. So just like an orange can be eaten, or three or four oranges can be "drank" in one sitting, natural substances are by their nature more dilute than chemical imitations or replacements.

So now do the math. If in a period of one hundred years humans have gone from replacing virtually every everyday substance in their lives with chemical based ones instead of natural, you have increased your exposure to each chemical on a per unit basis and you cannot escape chemical use because it is in everything. This is terrible and trust me, it is behind many of the ailments people complain about today. It's no one's "fault" so don't be dumb and run for lawyers because it was a "necessary" step in progress. Remember, people didn't live much beyond their fifties or sixties one hundred years ago, in general, and so improving, even chemically, the health and cleanliness of their lives in one or two areas meant prosperity and a longer life could be achieved. The problem is that 1) now people live longer and are exposed to chemicals even in the womb and through their whole lives 2) there are a hundred fold more types of chemical exposures because it's in everything everywhere and 3) humans do not have the time to "evolve" and "natural select" a bodily response (if it would be even possible), so many more sensitivities and reactions are to be expected since the human race can't evolve "tolerance" to say some cancer causing additive since that would take like ten thousand years or so to do it.

So instead of worrying about climate change you better worry about this problem. We need to get people who are not extreme on either side of the issue to inventory every chemical and examine the full range of implications and options for its usage. SAFETY STUDIES MEAN NOTHING in this regard. Safety studies only test one chemical on one person or animal. I'm talking about the fact that humans now live within and pee out of them hundreds of chemicals coming at them from every direction constantly so that basically humans are getting hundreds of doses of chemicals (each of which, like the fabric to the early settlers) may be harmless if that were the only thing, but now it combines with hundreds of others in daily exposure AND it continues to circulate in the environment both during their manufacture, their disposal in garbage AND through human bodily functions. It is a global crisis and it has been building for decades now. Universities and researchers ought to develop the "chemical additive profile" that the vast majority of humans are exposed to and divide up among themselves studying the implications and where the dosage and intensity can be mitigated. Pollution specialists need to also focus more on the every day chemicals instead of only the famous toxic dump and waste remedial processes. Consumers need to just be aware that there are no longer real rose petals in even "rose scented," and there are no pine needles in "pine fresh"... it is all chemicals that mimic the fragrance but are not the same chemical composition and even if they were, they are exponentially intensive AND they are contained and transported (like in an aerosol) by other chemicals.

I could write much more but I think everyone gets the point. It's a mess, I'm not going to lie to you and say this is a minor problem or that it will be easy to fix (and if people will even be able to stand to focus on more 'bad news' and get consensus that it must be remedied). But you can start to do things in your own household now that I've filled you in on what is going on. That's one reason I'm such a glass fan. But even that would need looking into because we can no longer be sure what enters into the manufacturing process. But you manage your odds because, for example, if there's no color decoration on the glass I know I'm not dealing with a color dye substance, nor a plastic issue, etc. So you can minimize your exposures. I've written about this before, how I use old fashion soap where I can, and not chemical laden cleansers, even using tea bags in water for cleaning surface. But someone somewhere has got to get on top of this problem. Hmm.