You are what you eat

Four years ago, I went to the emergency room with abdominal pains. When a guy my age staggers into the ER clutching his chest, there is no waiting in line; they immediately hook you up to the machines and make sure that your heart is still going. After some diagnosis, they discovered that I had a cancer of the gallbladder. I spent four or five days in the hospital after the surgery, and today I can happily praise God for four years free from cancer. My last checkup was just two weeks ago.

I noticed an interesting thing while I was recovering from that eleven inch incision. The pain killers changed the way my thought processes worked. Intellectually, I was able to stand aside as an observer of my own body and see how I could accept and believe things that I normally would have dismissed. It was an interesting experience.

How we think is a matter of chemical processes in the brain. When we are depressed, certain areas of the brain show patterns of higher or lower activity levels, so things like depression can be measured by medical equipment. But does it end there? What sort of chemical influences are we getting in our daily activities?

When I was in sixth grade, there was not one training bra on any of my eleven-year-old classmates. I was already interested in such things, so I paid close attention, casting furtive glances when I was pretty sure I would not be caught. That was 1967, in Golden, Colorado. Flash forward 40 years and look around - you may notice a lot higher percentage of nine-year-old kids with the telltale lines visible across their backs. To be honest, I am not looking at young girls for the same reasons I was back then - now it is an intellectual curiosity. What has changed in 40 years that has the girls hitting puberty so much younger?

I am not the first to notice this trend: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11483799 and http://www.center4research.org/children11.html - but I followed a different logical path to my conclusion.

Fifteen years ago, I started working on a project to reduce data from the USDA down to a few select cows so that a client could sell embryos to farmers at higher prices. The goal was to improve the Holstein breed of dairy cattle. Over the ten years that I helped Dave convert the data, I saw that the top milk producers doubled their output. Holsteins now give much more milk than they used to give.

I remember my grandfather telling that a guy showed up at his farm and offered to buy any cows that were past their prime as milk cows. He said he was a buyer from McDonalds looking for cheap meat for their hamburgers. My grandfather did not have dairy cows, but he was amused that they would be looking to buy older and tougher animals. Old cows make lousy steaks, but acceptable hamburger, I guess...

So I put three things together:
1) Cows are being selectively bred to have bigger udders and give more milk. They are better natural estrogen producers.
2) Fast food restaurants are buying up these higher-estrogen cows for hamburger.
3) Americans eat more fast food now than they did 40 years ago.

Could it be that the natural estrogen in the meat survives cooking and digestion and ends up stimulating our daughters to begin to mature earlier? If so, can it also be said that today's boys are less masculine than they were 40 years ago because of the same ingestion? Or did I just make that last part up?

Chemicals enter our bodies through several sources - the food and drink we consume, the water we bathe in, and the things we inject through the skin. This last one is the troubling one - because the immunizations that we are now required to have each include "adjuvants" - trace amounts of chemicals that enhance the effectiveness of the immunization, or that are left over from the serum creation process. The most common adjuvants are based on aluminum. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T3R-3VCK957-2

Trace amounts of aluminum have been tested with no noticeable effect - but a lifetime of flu shots and the raft of immunizations required to attend school probably have a cumulative effect.

I don't really have any firm conclusions about immunizations, other than that I've heard that autism is non-existent among populations that do not get immunized, like the Amish. But after hearing anecdotal evidence for so long a time, a pattern begins to emerge.

It looks to me like we really are what we consume, bathe in, and shoot up. I guess I had better watch what I eat...