When one feels like total shit all of the time, one tends to self medicate. Legal or not, prescription drugs take their toll, and society needs to understand that there is little difference between illegal and prescription drug addiction. Just because my pills come in tamper proof bottle with my name on them does not mean that it's actually in my best interest to take that stuff. Legal drugs actually kill more people per year than illicit drugs, and that says something about our society's medical practices.
While I admit that prescription drugs are definitely a contributing factor to my health issues, I don't believe that they are responsible for all of them. I am not denying that Big Pharma is putting profit in front of health to keep us sick and sell us cures, in fact I strongly agree-- but I'll save that for another post.
If it's not the meds, than what is it? Perhaps the answer is the most simple, and obvious one. We've all heard that saying "you are what you eat". It's a scientifically accurate notion, and I don't think anyone could raise a logical argument that claims we are not compromised of the matter that we consume. We are products of our environment, and that environment is perpetually growing ever more toxic. In the time it will have taken you to read this blog, approximately 666 acres of rain forest will have been demolished or degraded. You may be wondering how I arrived at that figure: Simple math, using estimates from credible sources in my bookmarks:
anon@sketchbox:~$ curl https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-daily-destruction/|grep "acres"
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- 0:00:02 --:--:-- 0<p>Pinning down exact numbers is nearly impossible, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that. Along with this loss and degradation, we are losing some 135 plant, animal and insect species every day—or some 50,000 species a year—as the forests fall.<br />
100 78408 0 78408 0 0 31646 0 --:--:-- 0:00:02 --:--:-- 31641
anon@sketchbox:~$ # Scientific American estimates we lose 80,000 acres per day while degrading another 80,000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 80000 + 80000
160000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 160000 / 24 / 10
666Six-hundred and sixty six acres every six minutes sound devilish indeed. The next logical question is why are we doing that? We know that the rain forest and oceans create the majority of the oxygen that we breath, so it would appear to be in our best interests (if survival really is the point of life) to conserve and protect these precious ecosystems. So why are we doing the opposite? The surprising answer is that 70% of all deforestation is the result of the global animal agriculture culture. Most of that land is used to either graze cattle or grow grain to feed cattle. The majority of crops that are grown on this planet are fed to cattle, not humans.
Deforestation is not the only negative impact that our meat obsessed lifestyles have on Mother Earth. Agricultural pollution is an increasingly problematic phenomenon that only gets worse as the human populations grows. Pesticides and fertilizer tend to seep into our groundwater, or run off into the ocean. This both changes the pH of and pollutes freshwater aquatic ecosystems, drinking water, and the oceans.
For example, along the US Southern coastline, there is a "dead zone" that's been growing for decades now. The farm runoff enters the ocean, increasing the acidity and introducing toxins into the water. This stuff is so toxic that it kills practically everything that it comes in contact with. Even before BP blew up the Deepwater Horizon rig and essentially murdered the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, which used to be the most productive ecosystem in the world, aquatic life was suffering along the coastline.
Off topic, but worth mentioning is that the Deepwater Horizon spill was handled extremely poorly. Rather than actually clean up the oil using effective, natural methods like spreading hay bails over the water to soak up and remove the oil, BP chose the "out of site, out of mind" approach. It's actually worse than it sounds. A chemical dispersant that has been banned in Great Britain for over a decade called "CoreExit" was dumped into the ocean, to dissolve the oil into the ocean.
Typically, oil and water do not mix, which makes it (relatively) easy to clean these spills up. Somewhere along the line, BP decided it was more economically convenient to disperse, rather than actually remove the oil. The toxic chemical dispersant was sprayed from airplanes, and dumped deep under the ocean, near the leaking well. The people of Louisiana suffered terrible health effects as their environment became more toxic than ever. CoreExit rained down upon the Southern coastline, and possibly traveled much farther than that. The long term effects have been devastating. Shrimp born without eyes, fish born with lesions on their skin, dolphins with lung disease... it goes on and on.
This is just another of the countless horrors that stem from corporate greed, which brings me back to cattle agriculture. When I was very young, I was diagnosed with an allergy to milk. From age 3-10 I did not consume dairy products. I would eat pizza without cheese, drink soy milk, and use dairy products like butter very sparingly. One day when I was 9 or 10 years old, I got tired of being allergic to milk, and ate some pizza during school lunch. I didn't notice any allergic reaction, so I figured I'd outgrown the allergy and could now consume dairy again. I was always a skinny, scrawny kid, and due to the false notion that drinking milk is vital to producing strong bones, I started drinking a whole lot more of it, to make up for all the years I went without it.
In retrospect, when I began drinking milk is when I started to develop some problems. I was actually getting fat for a couple years, and this is something that I didn't think was possible because I had always been underweight. I had anxiety by the time I was 12, and depression by age 13. Coming from an upper middle class family, we always bought organic food. Most of the milk I drank back than was "organic" milk from grass fed cows. While this milk certainly tastes better and appears more humanely produced than milk from factory farms, the reality is that it's actually less sustainable and worse for the environment than grain fed, factory farmed milk. This is because grass fed cows require a hell of a lot more land to graze than their caged counterparts at the slaughter houses. With population growing rapidly, and with 70% of our farm lands growing food for cattle, it makes me wonder... is there any sustainable, humane way to raise enough meat to support a population expected to hit 9 billion by 2050?
If the environmental toll is not enough to dis-way you from eating dairy, than perhaps the effects that cow's milk has on our own bodies will. Despite relentless campaigns to promote the health benefits of milk (Got Milk, anyone?) , science is beginning to tell us that milk is actually bad for your health.
"A large observational cohort study[1] in Sweden found that women consuming more than 3 glasses of milk a day had almost twice the mortality over 20 years compared to those women consuming less than one glass a day. In addition, the high milk-drinkers did not have improved bone health. In fact, they had more fractures, particularly hip fractures."
- In observational studies both across countries and within single populations, higher dairy intake has been linked to increased risk of prostate cancer (cited in [2]).
- Observational cohort studies have shown higher dairy intake is linked to higher ovarian cancer risk (cited in [2]).
- Cow’s milk protein may play a role in triggering type 1 diabetes through a process called molecular mimicry[3].
- Across countries, populations that consume more dairy have higher rates of multiple sclerosis[4].
- In interventional animal experiments and human studies, dairy protein has been shown to increase IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor-1) levels. Increased levels of IGF-1 has now been implicated in several cancers[5].
- In interventional animal experiments[6] and human experiments[7], dairy protein has been shown to promote increased cholesterol levels (in the human studies and animal studies) and atherosclerosis (in the animal studies).
- The primary milk protein (casein) promotes cancer initiated by a carcinogen in experimental animal studies[8].
- D-galactose has been found to be pro-inflammatory and actually is given to create animal models of aging[1].
- Higher milk intake is linked to acne[9].
- Milk intake has been implicated in constipation[10] and ear infections (cited in [2]).
- Milk is perhaps the most common self-reported food allergen in the world[11].
- Much of the world’s population cannot adequately digest milk due to lactose intolerance.
(Source: http://nutritionstudies.org/12-frightening-facts-milk/)
With all of this new evidence emerging that shows milk is actually terrible for your health, perhaps it is time for humanity to phase out dairy completely. I've been drinking almond milk and trying to avoid meat for a couple weeks now, and I can honestly say that I feel much better. I felt like so much shit that I no longer felt like writing, and it had been a while since I wrote a blog post. My cognitive functionality seems to be getting better, as have my allergies. Last week I scored 130 on an IQ test, which is ten points higher than I scored a couple years ago. I am writing better code and learning new things faster, and this is only after a couple weeks of cutting down my dairy and meat intake. Science is beginning to show that people that eat plant based diets are much healthier all around than people that eat animal based diets. It's not your fault either! We were simply following bad advice, and that doesn't make us stupid.
I'd encourage anyone that feels sick to try to eat less meat and dairy before resigning to prescription drugs. It's worth a shot. Voting with your wallet is the only effective way to send a message to the food industry, because all they care about is money. That isn't to say that they are evil, it's just the way that business works. Supply will meet demand, and if we all demand more plant based foods, than that is what we will get. It seems rather unnecessary to continue to cause massive suffering amongst farm animals when scientists are saying that everything we need to survive can be found in the plant kingdom. If we used that land to grow more fresh fruits and vegetables instead of feeding and graze cows, than perhaps we could knock out both world hunger and the largest contributer of environmental damage simultaneously.
Polluted water is the cause of about half of all human disease. As we enter a world where it's becoming harder to trust tap-water, we must ask ourselves, what can we do to reverse this destruction? With cattle causing more damage to the Earth than fracking, and with a president in office that does not seem to care about scientific facts, the world's fate is in the hands of the people. It seems overwhelming, but the truth is that there are simple things you can do to make a difference.
Sadly some things are beyond our control. There is one more issue that I want to shed some light on, because frankly it is very disturbing. Scientific evidence is confirming something that ecologists have known for years-- much of the prescription drugs that we take are impossible for municipal water treatment centers to filter out. Traces of anti-depressants, opiates, and most concerning, birth control, can be found in US lakes, rivers, aquifers, and tap water, in alarming concentrations. Hormones are potent chemicals, and it doesn't take very much exposure to these chemicals to cause damage to human and animal life alike. Premature puberty and increased testicular cancer has been observed in humans, and studies have discovered an increase of hermaphrodite fish in aquatic ecosystems. Essentially, we are seeing mass sterility as a result of second hand hormone exposure.
This happens because enough people have been passing prescription drugs through their bodies to cause an accumulation of these substances in our water supplies. I am no expert, and thus am not sure why water treatment facilities cannot filter these chemicals out of the water. I can only guess that it's because these drugs are water soluble. Treatment facilities typically utilize the natural filtration of the Earth to treat the water, so it makes sense to me that anything soluble will remain.
There you have it, anything smaller than thirteen micro-grams cannot be filtered out of waste water this way. The put this in perspective, medical grade micron filters used to prep water for injection use 0.02 micro-gram membranes, which is sufficient to remove just about everything but the water itself. Pharmaceutical chemicals will indeed pass right through a 13mm filter.
It's not realistic to ask people to stop taking medications, so we need to find another way to deal with this. Perhaps it's time to seriously rethink our waste treatment and disposal methods. According to the EPA, municipal waste water wells are Class V injection wells, which are supposed to be for treating non-toxic waste. This has appeared to work well for a long time, but it is becoming apparent that it's simply not enough, and that our sewage waste is more toxic than we thought. We need to protect our environment and the ecosystems that we are so interdependent on at all costs. Methods of treating water vary depending on the problem that the water in question has. For example, water with high levels of iron is treated with charcoal filtration, and bottled water is purified using reverse osmosis membrane. The problem is that none of the conventional methods of treatment can remove all of the contaminants-- except for properly implemented distillation.
The standard for producing medical grade water has always been distillation. It used to be a very expensive procedure that required very high amounts of energy, but that's changed thanks to the modern vapor compression distiller, invented by Dean Kamen (the segway dude from Manchester, NH). These units recycle the input energy as they operate so effectively that they consume just 1 kw per hour, and are able to produce ~ 40 liters of clean water per hour. Incredibly, these devices can turn just about any source of water into water that's not only safe to drink, but also is suitable for injection! They cost less than $ 2,000, which is amazing. Could vapor compression distillation help solve our water crisis? Would this be a reasonable replacement for the methods used by traditional water treatment plants? I don't know, but it's worth looking into, and a better approach than what we are doing now, which is basically pretending that we don't have a problem. With all of our insane tech, surely humanity can figure this out.
Finally, while on the quest for better health, I realized that the environment is not limited to the outdoors. I am kind of a slob by nature, and until recently was not good about keeping my place clean. Vacuuming up about ten pounds of dust, cleaning the hell out of my bedroom, and finally throwing away a moldy pumpkin that I'd pretty much forgotten about seems to have worked wonders for my allergies overnight! It doesn't matter what you eat when your house is becoming toxic. It took me 27 years to figure out how important this is. I can even think more clearly now that my house is clean again. I mention this because it seems people have a habbit of overlooking the most obvious solutions to a given problem.
That's all for today. Remember, there is nothing more valuable than good health.
