Toxins lurking in your foods

These attacks on our health are real. False advertising, misleading “scientific studies” and big business are serious foes.

by Becky Coffield — 

A biochemical war is being waged on our health as we are assaulted with more deadly toxins than at any other time in history. Besides air and water pollution, we are bombarded with a continuous flow of electromagnetic waves, including those of very low frequencies. Food additives are also incredibly deadly weapons in this biochemical assault.

Sodas

Of all the items we consume, sodas may well be the very worst. It doesn’t matter if they are diet, caffeine-free or sugared. They are all lethal.

Diet sodas contain aspartame. Irrefutable evidence now shows that this substance causes cancer. According to Dr. Russell Blaylock, a former brain surgeon who has witnessed firsthand what chemicals can do to the brain, aspartame breaks down into formaldehyde and formic acid, which attach to DNA and then cause multiple breaks in it.

Blaylock refers to studies showing that incidences of leukemia and lymphoma increase with exposure to aspartame, as do breast and brain cancers. In addition, aspartame is a proven addictive substance.

Regular sodas are dangerous also, as it is well known that cancers thrive on sugar.

MSG and excitotoxins

Another additive that is extremely dangerous is MSG. While most people are aware that MSG is not a healthy additive and try to avoid it, many do not know that it is often called something other than MSG when it is added to food. Some of the other names used for MSG are:

• Hydrolyzed vegetable protein
• Caseinate (also calcium caseinate)
• Autolyzed yeast extract
• Beef or chicken broth
• Natural flavorings

These ingredients appear in numerous store-bought foods, including most salad dressings, catsup, coffee creamers, some cake mixes, many chips and snack foods, many canned goods, and almost all prepackaged foods.

The problem with MSG is that it is an excitotoxin. These excitotoxins are added liberally to prepackaged or preprepared foods, including baby foods. When neurons are exposed to excitotoxins, they become very agitated and excited, firing until they reach a state of exhaustion and then die. Essentially, these substances cause brain damage. One may ask, could these substances be causing the increase in brain tumors, brain cancers and Alzheimer’s disease?

Toxins in wrappings

Most consumers are now aware of BPA in plastic bottles, but many may be unaware of PFOs (perfluoroctane sulfonates) and PFOA (perfluoroctanoic acid). These are classified together as PFCs (perfluorinated chemicals), which are present in the packaging of food and leak into the food itself. These chemicals are now found in almost every person’s blood and are linked to increased rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke and impaired fetal development. They also adversely affect the liver, thyroid gland and immune system.

Soy extracts

According to Dr. Blaylock, America’s love affair with soy and soy products is also extremely hazardous to one’s health. The glutamate level in soy products is even higher than that found in MSG products. A study confirmed that those who consumed the most soybean products had the highest occurrence of dementia and brain atrophy.

Blaylock is not alone in his denunciation of soy. Elaine Hollingsworth, author of Take Control of Your Health and Escape the Sickness Industry (Empowerment Press International, Ninth Edition, 2003) writes extensively of the negative effects of soy, saying, “No less an authority than the U.S. Department of Energy Health Risk Laboratory has published research showing that isoflavones in soy act in the same way as the outlawed insecticide DDT to cause breast cancer cells to multiply. In 1988, a Taiwan University team led by Dr. Theodore Kay remarked that, for more than half a century, soy has been known to cause thyroid enlargement, especially in women and children.” (p. 125)

Soy’s adverse affect on thyroid has been well documented by many others. “Health and nutrition magazines tout the benefits of soy as a cure-all for women’s health, hormonal problems, cancer prevention, weight loss and many other problems. The reality, however, is that promotion of soy may be more a matter of business and marketing, rather than recommendations based on sound scientific evidence,” according to Mary Shomon in Soy’s Thyroid Dangers. Shomon is the author of a number of books on thyroid disease.

The necessity of choosing natural, unadulterated foods is increasingly obvious. Many health issues such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, cancer and diabetes can be directly linked to the ingestion of the toxic chemicals that most people ignore or assume are not dangerous because the FDA has allowed them to be marketed. It unfortunately becomes necessary, in many cases, to follow the money to understand why these substances are on the market at all.

These attacks on our health are real. False advertising, misleading “scientific studies” and big business are serious foes.

Becky Coffield is a freelance writer who writes for numerous publications. She is also the author of several award-winning books. www.rlcoffield.com.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 28, Number 1, Feb/Mar 2009.