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What’s Making Our Children Sick? is the title of a new book by long time pediatrician Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams PhD, professor of medical anthropology at the University of California. We need to get the word out about the epidemic of chronic disorders in our children.
The authors review the many causes of this epidemic, such as, leaky gut, dysbiosis, microbiome, and toxic exposures in the environment. However, they focus in on what they feel are the primary underlying root causes – industrial food and genetically modified foods.
These ideas are also in line with the principles of The Weston Price Foundation. Co-founded in 1999 by Sally Fallon and nutritionist Mary G. Enig the foundation honors the extensive work of Dr. Weston Price, a dentist who practiced in the early 1900’s. He became very concerned when he noticed that his patients who had poor dental health also had poor health in general.
He set out on a mission to find out more about what was making people sick.
His book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration documents his 10 year journey around the world studying isolated, indigenous cultures eating their own traditional foods.
What he found was astonishing.
Those cultures who were truly isolated from the foods of modern commerce (Dr. Price’s words) and eating only foods in their most natural state – unadulterated and unrefined – were in excellent physical condition, from their straight healthy teeth, healthy gums and strong musculature to their clear skin.
In these traditional cultures, the main cause of death was accident, not illness.
In the early 1900’s the main foods of modern commerce were only five – refined sugar, refined flour, refined vegetable oils, condensed milk and soft drinks.
The Weston Price Foundation is also on a mission to improve the health of our children. For those of you who already know this organization – you know that their focus is also the food supply:
The critical information about what is wrong with the food supply has been the focus of this blog as well.
According to the authors, industrial food and glyphosate are making our children sick and I couldn’t agree more. The generation having babies now have literally been raised on conventional, industrial food. They are in the late twenties and thirties and many have health issues since childhood.
Now, they are trying to have babies and they are experiencing infertility and other difficulties. If they go on to feed their children conventional food, the children start developing health, learning and behavorial issues, such as autism.
It’s an epidemic of a generation of sick kids.
From the very first paragraph in the Introduction:
In this book, we argue that a new generation of kids with chronic, hard-to-diagnosis, hard-to-treat health problems are getting sick because they are chronically exposed to poisons in their environment, and specifically in and from their food. Our children have guts that are impaired and immune systems that are overtaxed, making it hard for them to clear even the simplest health problems, such as colds. Eating processed foods that are high in carbohydrates, sugar and hollow calories is the first problem, but in this book we argue it is not the main problem. The more insidious danger is foods that are full of pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics…
Just to list a few.
When I lecture in the local community I usually start my lecture with a question to the audience:
Who here is concerned about their health? Who is concerned about their children’s health? Who is concerned about their grandchildren’s health?
They all raise their hands.
We all need to be very concerned about the issues these authors have so articulately expressed in this book: industrial food and glyphosate exposure.
The next question I ask is,
What is the most critical threat to our health today?
The answer is glyphosate.
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup. It is a non selective herbicide that was patented in 1964 as a strong metal chelator. That means that it grabs hold of elements and makes them unavailable.
In 1974 Monsanto registered glyphosate as an herbicide. It binds up calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, manganese, magnesium, nickel, boron and zinc.
Glyphosate disrupts plant physiology so that they cannot grow and can’t defend themselves against disease. The plants die as a result of the diseases they may acquire — indirectly from the glyphosate.
Glyphosate is systemic.
According to the authors, use of glyphosate has increased by a factor of more than 250 percent – so much so that a report in 2015 noted that ranchers used enough to cover every acre of of cultivated cropland with 3/4 pound of glyphosate (page 138).
It has been shown that glyphosate breaks down the tight junction in the gut wall and all mucous membranes and also the gut/brain barrier.
Glyphosate disrupts the shikimate pathway – a metabolic pathway only present in bacteria, so it has been thought of as safe. However, we now know that we have a critically important organ called the microbiome that is composed of trillions of bacteria that keep us healthy.
The shikimate pathway of our gut bacteria is at risk from glyphosate exposure.
The more diversity in your gut bacteria, the greater the amount of carbon redox molecules you make – these molecules are made by your beneficial gut bacteria. The more species you have the more variety of redox molecules and the greater is your language of immunity.
They estimate that we should have 20,00 – 30,000 species of bacteria, when in fact, in the western world we have about 5,000 – 10,000. With this small diversity, the pathogenic, disease causing bacteria such as, C. diff, E. coli, salmonella, candida, etc. can flourish – which is what we have today.
Dr. Perro has been focused on what our food supply has been doing to the health of her patients, and gives them root cause solutions to their health issues.
Dr. Adams is a medical anthropologist who has studied eastern and western medical systems and is also focused in on how food can be both the cause and the cure.
The book is a guide for parents and clinicians to help in understanding the new research into the microbiome, glyphosate and its effects on children. There are case studies of patients who took the alternative road to solve their health problems.
There is information about the various diagnostic tests and treatments used by integrative health doctors in order to get a the root cause of illness.
The book is a link between the processed industrial foods of our time, our poisoned food supply and the medical, social. political and economic effects this has on our society.
The book is a giant leap forward for those not already familiar with these issues.
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