Abby's

Volume 6 Issue 4

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Raising Children in a ToXic WoRld Our children, our future, are living in a trying time made especially so because of the heavy load of environmental toxins to which they are being exposed. According to the Environmental Working Group, a study on newborn babies found up to 287 chemicals in the cord blood of randomly selected children. Additionally, Dr. Leonardo Trasande, co-director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, when interviewed on CNN, said "We are in an epidemic of environmentally mediated disease among American children today. Rates of asthma, childhood cancers, birth defects and developmental disorders have exponentially increased, and it can't be explained by changes in the human genome. So what has changed? All the chemicals we're being exposed to." Children are the most sensitive to even the minutest amounts of toxins, which can affect their health for the rest of their lives. Toxins can be extremely damaging to our children's neurological systems. Dramatic increases in ADHD, autism and epilepsy are being seen and much of the scientific research being done has suggested that toxins do play a role in the rise in neurological issues. Toxins' Surprising Role in Obesity Another troubling trend is a huge increase in the incidence of childhood obesity. According to research, the number of children who are clinically obese has risen three fold in the past 30 years. Surprisingly, this trend may not be due to By Mark Schauss, MBA, DB poor diet and a lack of exercise alone. Chemicals such as Bisphenol A and phthalates, known endocrine disruptors, have been implicated as possible factors in the increased numbers of obese children. These chemicals are now being called "obesogens" because of the disruption of normal development of controls over the regulation of energy production. The concern is so great that the largest prospective study (a study that follows over time a group of similar individuals) on children ever was started in 2009 called the National Children's Study (NCS). It will be following 100,000 children over a 21-year period to try to understand the role the environment has on the development of obesity. In my book, Achieving Victory Over a Toxic World, I explain one of the mechanisms of how weight gain can occur even when a person eats a healthy diet. When food is eaten, the cells in our bodies create energy through a process known as the Citric Acid Cycle (CAC), which powers all the processes that occur in our bodies. In 2002, while working with a clinical nutritionist friend who was concerned about gaining weight despite keeping her caloric intake down, I noticed that her levels of toxicity were elevated and that her CAC markers were abnormal. Digging deeper, I found that it is commonly known in toxicity research that when laboratory animals are exposed to toxic chemicals, their metabolisms slow down and their body temperatures go down. There has been a trend that many doctors have seen in that the average temperature of people is going down, something that the toxicity model predicts. Page 14| Abby's Magazine - www.AbbysHealthAndNutrition.com Continued on page 16

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