Toxicity and Air Pollution

The World Health Organization estimates that on a world wide basis 4.6 million people die each year from diseases directly caused by pollutants in the air.

In this country alone, expenditures on illnesses from outdoor air pollution alone costs 70,000 lives and as much as $55 billion.

So what is air pollution? By definition, "any alteration of the natural characteristics of the atmosphere by any biological, physical, or chemical substance".

With the air that we breath all around us and an estimated 1450 metric tons of man made pollution floating around in the atmosphere as I write this, isn’t it any wonder that we are going to breath some of this every day that we are exposed to the outside atmosphere?

Enter the toxicity part of the equation:

To put things in simple terms, man’s breathing system evolved at a time when pollutants were just dust and particles made from natural things burning. These pollutants for the most part where easily filtered out by the tiny hairs in our noses.

Today that has all changed.

We are breathing air that contains man made chemicals and pollutants . Substances that contain particles thousands of times smaller in size then anything our distant ancestors were breathing.

So what happens? Those particles go deep into our lungs when we breath.

Particles so small from man made solvents and other highly refined chemicals that they go right into the very system that our lungs provide for our bodies, putting oxygen into our blood streams. Yep, that’s  where these pollutants (at this point considered toxins) go, right into our blood and this adds to the stock pile of toxins and unwelcome visitors we have floating around in our bodies. A general name for this is: our "body’s burden".

In the next few entrees we will begin to cover what has to be done to try and rid the body of these unwelcome visitors.