The most obvious steps for overcoming environmental toxins are simple: 1) know what and where they are; and, 2) avoid them. These are the simplest things you can do. They are also the least effective things you can do. Actually achieving good health in the face of all the environmental toxins around you requires making some crucial lifestyle choices.

The information in this post is extensive. It is crucial for your health. Carve out whatever time you need to grasp it and take action on it for your benefit.

Living in a Toxic World

This is the third article in a 3-part series on environmental toxins. The first two examined the worst toxin in modern times, glyphosate, in these two articles:

Glyphosate Toxicity – Government Approved Lies That Keep On Giving

EEK! Poison for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

As bad as glyphosate is, one single factor determines your response to it and all other environmental toxins.

That factor is…

Your Redox State

This obviously requires some explanation. Your doctors almost certainly don’t know about it. Your task is to learn about it, starting here. Then take action to adopt as many of the recommendations in this article as you can.

If my purpose for writing the first two articles was to scare the crap out of you, then this article gives you some hope on what you can do for good health in spite of constant exposure to things that poison you.

Now, to put my main point more succinctly:

To have any hope at all to be healthy,
you absolutely must improve your redox state.

Without improving your redox state, you are guaranteed to acquire one or more diseases of civilization (DOCs). The longer you live in a poor redox state, the more such DOCs you will acquire.

Any one of the long and growing list of DOCs can cause pain and a shortened lifespan.

Ultimately, especially in the U.S., you will suffer an outrageously expensive death at the hands of modern medicine.

Now let’s take a look at what you can do about all this.

Redox by Any Other Name

The cover article in Time Magazine on February 23, 2004, explained redox states and disease without actually using the word. The popular term back then, as it is now, was instead inflammation. The main subject of that issue was the link between inflammation and heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and a host of other DOCs.

The basic health issues of 2004 have not changed. Inflammation is, more than ever, viewed as the underlying cause of all modern diseases, even so-called infectious ones.

Inflammation means oxidation. Ultimately, it develops from a shortage of electrons in the right places at the right times. Electrons are reducers.

Your redox state, simply put, is the balance between reducers and oxidizers.

Chronic vs Acute Inflammation

All the arm-waving hype against inflammation has its drawbacks. First off, inflammation indicates that your body is under repair. You generate all kinds of oxidizers whose function is to repair injury or other damage. This is how your body fixes things.

The so-called evils, Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) and Reactive Nitrogen Species (RNS), are actually crucial for good health. The key is that these oxidizers come and go in relatively short order. This is how you benefit from acute inflammation.

A constant elevated level of ROS, RNS, and many other oxidizers underlies chronic inflammation. This is the root of modern disease. This is the chronic redox imbalance that ruins your health.

External oxidizers, such as environmental toxins, fuel a chronic redox imbalance.

Once you start reversing this imbalance, your body will automatically resist toxins of all kinds. This includes the internal ones that your body makes as well as the tens of thousands of external toxins in your environment.

Antioxidants – A Simple-Minded Strategy

Of course, antioxidants are antidotes to oxidizers.

Consuming antioxidants, either in foods or in supplement form, can be a little helpful. This is like spraying a little water on the redox fire within. They are helpful to limited extent. Harvesting electrons orally, though, is relatively inefficient for reversing a chronically poor redox state.

Although foods and supplements are often rated for their so-called antioxidant power, such ratings are only based on laboratory chemistry. They may have little or nothing to do with your biology.

The key consideration is what electrons you can get from them, and where those electrons go.

Dietary Electrons

All types of fruits and veggies provide dietary electrons in the form of antioxidants. Consuming enough of them to make a difference in your redox state is the challenge. The 4 or 6 or 11 (or more) recommended number of daily servings of fresh produce is not practical. Most people never eat that much. It is a matter of dosage.

You may be surprised to learn that the highest amount of electrons from any type of food comes from fats.

If you have succumbed to the low-fat food craze of the past several decades, then you are already on the wrong side of a healthy redox state. You must eat fats, and plenty of them, for good health.

Fats are an unparalleled source of dietary electrons. In case you are afraid of fats, which many people are, some of my earlier posts on their importance should alleviate your worries:

The Worst Diet in Human History

Myths About Saturated Fat – Pure Medical Idiocy

The Modern Low Fat Diet Plague

Einstein’s Nobel Prize – Key to Good Redox

This article is probably already getting a little too geeky.

Nevertheless, I think that a brief peek into Einsteins’ 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics is a must for guiding you to the all-time best source of electrons for improving your redox state.

His prize was awarded for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect. Briefly, this law explains how the emission of electrons occurs from a material when light shines on it.

PAY MAXIMUM ATTENTION HERE!

LIGHT CONVERTS TO ELECTRONS!!!

Let me say this unequivocally: Your health depends on electrons made from light.

The fantastic news for you is that those electrons are free. They are made from sunshine on your skin and in your eyes.

In my opinion, one of the weirdest developments against good health in modern times is the fear of sunshine. This is the focus of a super-important article that I posted some time ago, here:

Heliophobia Makes Modern Disease for One and All

Avoiding sunshine drives up the occurrence of some of the worst diseases in human history. Just one of them, breast cancer, is a good example. See what I mean in another of my earlier posts, here:

Breast Cancer Awareness Failure

For those who live in northern latitudes (or southern ones Down Under), access to good sunshine is limited, especially in winter. Older cultures in extreme latitudes, such as the Inuit, learned how to overcome that limitation with other kinds of lifestyle choices. They got their electrons from other sources, mostly animal fats.

How to make up for light deficiency is only partially a dietary story, though. This will be a topic for a future post.

You can, of course, generate electrons from certain kinds of artificial lighting. This is a dicey proposition, since modern artificial lighting is often too blue for your health. Blue light toxicity is a real problem in modern times. It is very, very dangerous. Much to our detriment, we live in a blue-lit world.

The benefits of getting electrons via sunshine in daytime are all undermined by blue light at night.

Some kinds of tanning beds can be beneficial. Be wary, though. Most of them emit unwanted and dangerous electromagnetic radiation.

Internal Sources of Electrons from Light

Many kinds of processes at the cellular level and below can generate light. One of the more surprising sources is your microbiome.

Bacteria in your gut emit light.

This means that your internal ‘bacterial lighting’ is beneficial for your redox state.

You may recall from my first article in this series that glyphosate inhibits the same enzyme in bacteria that it inhibits in plants. This makes it a bacteriocide as well as an herbicide.

Glyphosate, and all other kinds of bacteriocides (i.e., antibiotics), therefore drive your redox state in the wrong direction. Taking care of those little bacterial soldiers in your gut is a must for maintaining a healthy redox state.

Probiotic supplements fulfill a great need for keeping your microbes, and you, healthy against environmental toxins.

Best Free Source of Healthy Electrons?

This a toss up with electrons from sunshine. Another ‘best’ source is the ground you stand on.

Well, sort of.

At ground level our planet carries a negative charge – i.e., an abundance of electrons. These electrons are every bit as good for your health as those you get from sunshine or antioxidant foods and supplements.

All you have to do to harvest them is put your skin in contact with bare ground. Nothing could be simpler.

This is another source of electrons, besides sunshine, that a modern lifestyle precludes you from getting. Shoes, most flooring, asphalt, ungrounded beds – you name it – all insulate you from one of the best antioxidants on Earth.

There is absolutely nothing better or easier than contact between your bare skin and plain old dirt or grass, preferably wet, for getting charged up from your own planet. A wet ocean beach works great, too, if you have access to one.

If you can stand just one more link to a previous post, then here is my final one (promise!):

Best Antioxidant on Earth Costs Nothing

If you are starting to get the picture – that getting plenty of electrons in the right places will improve your redox state – then you are getting the main point of this post.

This is what you must do for overcoming environmental toxins
and all other sources of chronic inflammation.

Take action now. Your health, and your life, depend it.

All the best in natural (electronic) health,

Dr. D