This post is a three-part series on aging cells and how our environment is a major cause of aging. Aging is nothing more than the buildup of genetic and cellular errors. The good news is your cells already have repair mechanisms in place. Many of the environmental conditions that cause DNA errors can be slowed and even obliterated. Smoking, obesity, inactivity, alcoholism, stress and sleep deprivation all contribute to deadly DNA errors.
But be warned and wary of all of the detrimental environmental conditions as they are out to get us all and are getting worse every year.
Back In My Day…
It seems to me that growing up as I did as a youth in the 40s and 50s we never heard of ADD, ADHD, COPD, hepatitis, autism or bipolar disorders. In the 40s people died from influenza, tuberculosis, cholera, malaria and polio, plus coal miners died from black lung disease. While they were around we seldom heard of cancers and heart diseases because they were either rare or undiagnosed. And wow, I actually laughed at the term anxiety the first time I heard it referred to as a medical condition.
While cancers have always been with us, we really didn’t hear much about them until the mid-70s. That’s when our environment began to pummel us with:
- Dramatic increase in the consumption of processed meats
- The shift to high consumption of processed and fast foods as a major portion of the diet
- The switch to high Omega-6 saturated diets
- Exposure to over 100,000 industrial toxins never before seen in the history of mankind, deregulated by our government, and released into the environment by the hundreds of thousands of tons
- Mass use of known carcinogens such as chlorine and fluoride in the public water supply
- Explosion of cigarette smoking in society after WWII
Aging Cells
Today, some fifty years later, our environment is much worse and not getting any better. Our air, water supply, noise pollution, soil pollution are under constant attack and our immune system and our poor livers can only fight these conditions for so long.
Liver disease is a rapidly growing problem for the seniors. More than one in three adults has liver disease, and if you drink or suffer from hepatitis your risk increases dramatically. About 200 pollutants were measured by either blood or urine test in a study of 200 participants. This study ended up with a list of 111 chemical pollutants which were commonly found in at least 60% of the subjects.
Seniors can only hold out for so long before the buildup of these toxins destroys our immune system and renders our liver as a dead organ. In my next post, I discuss another major source of pollution and cause of cellular aging: our food.
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