Environmental Health
Environmental toxins like pesticides pose unique risks unlike natural plant toxins our bodies have evolved to handle over millions of years. Understanding hormesis reveals why low-dose plant compounds protect us while synthetic chemicals harm us—and why eating more plants while avoiding environmental pollutants matters.
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Recently, the science magazine Science Daily reported, "Common Pesticide May Contribute to Global Obesity Crisis."
This reminds us a bit of an old SPIEGEL article from 1994 that we frequently cite, An Ocean of Hormones, which states:
«Impotent panthers, transsexual fish, alligators with stunted penises – in the animal kingdom, reproduction is stagnating. Culprits are hormonal substances that have become a new environmental plague. Even Homo sapiens shows effects: his reproductive power is declining.»
This in turn reminds us of Hebrew University Jerusalem. A "wake-up call" from a professor who published a study on fertility and environmental toxins. "We need to change!" he called out to us. Because: "Something in our environment, in our lifestyle is making us sick. We must act."
Why does he say that? It's simple to understand: We live in an age where male animals are becoming female. Where the water in which fish and frogs live causes the genitals and gonads of animals to shrivel and sperm count to drop drastically—where men increasingly have testicular malformations and testicular cancer, and women increasingly cannot have children.
Moreover: men's sperm today contains 60% fewer sperm cells than it did forty years ago. And—mind you—this is not genetic. These are environmental influences for which we ourselves are responsible. Our genetic apparatus doesn't seem adapted to it.
And that's precisely the point: study after study shows that even the tiniest exposures to these environmental toxins make us sick. Even tiny amounts of arsenic can have severe consequences for the development of aquatic organisms—ever wondered how that would affect a human embryo? At any rate, what applies here is not what Paracelsus taught, namely: "The dose makes the poison." This is also the decisive difference from "natural" toxins that nature brings with it.
Because nature too has many toxins. Humans have been eating some plant toxins for millions of years. We're so well adapted—genetically accustomed—that we don't even realize they're toxins. Quite the opposite: these toxins don't make us sick; they actually keep us healthy.
As a reminder: the former chief toxicologist of the USA and probably one of the most important biochemists of our time, Bruce Ames (known for his Ames test), once told the world in no uncertain terms that a cup of coffee naturally contains the toxin equivalent of a year's supply of pesticides (mind you: decades ago!). And that 50% of the toxins naturally found in plants are potentially carcinogenic.
But we absolutely must add what the famous aging researcher Dr. Sinclair (Harvard) discovered and postulated: He described the concept of "xenohormesis." This is precisely where "hormesis" from Paracelsus comes in: Sinclair describes how plants create protective substances that often also act as toxins to predators, but in low doses exert an equally protective effect on, for example, a mammalian organism when consumed.
Long story short: many plants—such as lettuce, apples, and broccoli—are healthy because the substances in them, which in higher doses can become quite toxic, in low doses trigger beneficial adaptations in you and me.
Let's extend this to coffee—it's a good example. In low doses, the 1000 compounds in coffee make us feel better. We feel more awake, we get through the day better; even at the cellular level, coffee keeps muscles, liver, and brain fit and—according to studies—even reduces mortality to a considerable degree. Wow!
On the other hand, coffee depletes us of important vitamins (like B1), it disturbs iron metabolism in various ways, it inhibits a multitude of enzymes in the body, and to top it all off, coffee disrupts energy metabolism in the long term. The consequences can be hunger and low energy. People who quit coffee after prolonged abuse often feel much better without it.
From what we've written, we can draw two conclusions:
How this can be implemented in practice, we recently explained in an ebook ("Understanding Metabolism"). Here are the links to the ebook (PDF), audio file, and printed brochure, should you not know them yet. These files are for newsletter subscribers only, so please don't share them:
With that, your body should function normally again. And so should your sperm ;-)
