The Impact of Toxins on Your Health
We live in a world that has many different toxic chemicals to which we are all exposed on a daily basis. While some of the toxins we are exposed to are beyond our control (for example, air pollution), there are things that we can do to help minimize the amount of toxins to which we we are exposed.
One helpful way to begin to minimize toxins is to look at how they are coming into your body through the food that you are eating. Conventional produce is sprayed with herbicides and pesticides and those chemicals then are left on the produce you buy even after you wash them.
While buying all organic produce is ideal, sometimes we can be limited by budget so one thing that I recommend doing is checking out the “Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen” list published by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Click here for the Dirty Dozen list. Click here for the Clean 15 list.
These lists can be helpful to know the top most important produce items to buy organically and ones that are less critical to buy organically (often because there is some sort of a peel on the produce or the crops tend to be sprayed less). You can print out this list and have in your purse or wallet to refer to when you are making buying decisions.
In addition, another way that we are often exposed to toxins is through processed foods.
Products like frozen entrees, breakfast cereals, and potato chips often have many chemicals added to them to make the food taste better and make you want to keep on eating them. For example, when you see “natural flavors” on the label, this often means that chemicals are used to make that item highly addictive to your taste buds and you can end up eating the whole package in one sitting! I don’t know about you but I’ve had that happen in the past and it is interesting to understand why that is!
Many processed foods also have things like food coloring added to them to make them visually more appealing. Many of these dyes are actually banned in Europe yet they are used in products in the US! Research has revealed that many of these food dyes have negative effects on our health. For example Red Dye #3 has been linked to cancer when tested on animals. And Red #40, Blue #1, and Yellow #5 are all made from petroleum and have often been found to be contaminated with carcinogens.
The more you learn about what ingredients to avoid (a great place to learn more is The Food Babe website), the healthier you will be because the more we are exposed to toxins, the harder our bodies have to work to try to eliminate those toxins.
Toxins can strongly impact how our various genes are being expressed (for example, turning on a cancer gene that wasn’t active before). By making the best choices for your health, you can be more empowered to stay healthier.
I’ll be diving deeper into this topic and other factors that impact your health on my free webinar on Wednesday July 28 so make sure you get signed up for that now!
