Today, 80,000 chemicals are registered for use in the U.S. and the EPA approves 1,700 more a year – an average of five a day – without any testing as to whether or not they pose a challenge to the immune system. This may well prove to be our next environmental disaster in the making – only this time the frightening changes taking place degree by steady degree are within the invisible, interior landscape of our bodies and not the global climate. As one Johns Hopkins’ researcher put it, we’ve outpaced our evolutionary ability to keep up with the number of toxins we come into contact with everyday. It takes the human body thousands of years to adapt to new environmental stresses – yet in less than a hundred years we’ve dumped so many toxic substances into our environment that our immune system is being asked to differentiate between our own body and unrecognizable foreign invaders non-stop. Which makes our body so much more likely to make mistakes and turn on itself.
Today’s children are the high stakes pawns in this game: pound for pound they eat more food, drink more water, and breathe more air than we adults do, and their immune systems are still developing and vulnerable. It’s as if we are all unwitting participants in an uncontrolled human health experiment as we document how the rising levels of toxins and pollutants in our blood are resulting in climbing rates of autoimmune disease.
