The National Human Adipose Tissue Survey found volatile organic compounds building up in the tissue of every American.By: John M. Taggart

Organic chemicals, contrary to their name, are man made substances. They are very pervasive in every aspect of modern day living. There are organic chemicals in the toxic by-products of many industrial processes. There are organic chemicals in paints, inks, dyes and solvents.

They are the active ingredients in pesticides, fertilizers and weed killers. Organic chemicals are formed when water is chlorinated.

They are in gasoline fumes, tobacco smoke, air fresheners, plastics and aerosol sprays. They are in most cleaning products, fire retardant chemicals and building materials. They are used in many perfumes and skin care products. Organic chemicals are in pharmaceutical medicines, birth control pills and used as food additives.

They're everywhere. Organic chemicals come in contact with our skin, they're in the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink.

As Americans we are familiar with some of these substances by more specific names and categories. There are organophosphates, organochlorides, dioxins, THM's, DDT's, EDB's and PCB's. There's Penta-, Hexa-, Hepta- and Tetra- chlorophenyls.

There's Benzene, Styrene, Toluene and Xylene. There's chloroform and bromoform and Bromodichloromethane and Chlorodibromomethane. I'll stop there. According to the NRDC, scientists have identified more than 4 million chemical compounds since 1965. Of these, 60,000 are in wide use in the United States. Many of these are organic chemicals.

Although some of these compounds are formed as by-products of other reactions, many have been formulated to ascertain and utilize their beneficial properties. Do they work? Sure. We all use them for various things every day. For some applications they're considered indispensable.

They've also been proven very effective at being poisonous, allergenic, mutagenic, teritagenic, neurotoxic and carcinogenic. This does not mean that all organic chemicals cause these adverse effects all the time, but a preponderance of the ones that have been tested show one or more of these properties. Of course the jury is still out on the 98% that have yet to be tested.

Organic chemicals are not water soluble. They do not dissolve in water. Once they find their way into the environment they circulate until they find a medium into which they are soluble.

Organic chemicals are fat soluble. Fat is found in the tissues of plants and animals. Animals that eat plants have higher concentrations of organic chemicals in their adipose (fatty) tissue than the plants that they consume. The carnivores that kill and eat these herbivores have higher concentrations of organic chemicals in their fatty tissue than the animals they consume.

Organic chemicals have the insidious property of working their way up the food chain in increasing concentrations. This process is known as bioaccumulation.
One problematic aspect of this is that mothers pass incredibly high concentrations of these organic chemicals on to their young. Mammals do so through the breast milk that they produce and reptiles pass these contaminants along into the "whites" of the eggs that they lay.

The egg white, like mothers milk, is the food that the creature consumes as it develops. An example of this is the deadly poison TCDD, a dioxin, the most studied and carcinogenic of the organics. 50-90% of the TCDD we consume is stored in our liver and adipose tissue.

Mothers milk has up to 80 times the concentration of TCDD than what is found in the mothers adipose tissue.

Fish are known to have up to 200 times the concentration of any contaminant stored in their tissue than can be found in waters that they frequent. The rare birds that feed on these fish have higher concentrations still, and pass along even higher concentrations into the food portion of the eggs that they lay.

These chemicals like DDT keep the shells from hardening and render the egg "white" unsuitable for proper development of the yolk. This has led to population decimation and extinction for many of the avian species that used to grace the wetlands of North America. Bless you Rachel Carson.

Could the human species be threatened by the same population decimation? It is highly unlikely, we have common sense. We apply these toxins directly to the foodstuffs that we grow to consume ourselves and those that we feed to our livestock so that they can bioaccumulate them for us.

That way we can get the highest concentrations of organic chemicals available.... and then there's dairy products.

During the same thirty years that scientific proof of the mutagenic, teritagenic, allergenic, carcinogenic and neurotoxic properties of organic chemicals in general and pesticides in particular has burgeoned; The use of these miracles of modern science has quadrupled, the mineral nutrients in our grains and vegetables has plummeted by 80% and crop loss due to pests has nearly doubled. Now that's progress.

The National Human Adipose Tissue Survey (NHATS) is conducted by the Public Health Service. It tests the fat of different people for the presence of 100 toxic chemicals. The top 35 of these are present in at least 50% of the subjects tested and at least five were observed in everyone.

We know that there are 60,000 widely used chemicals in the U.S. many have been shown to pose no health hazard at the levels to which we are exposed. By necessity the NHATS tests for the substances which we would be protected from or would be inclined to avoid, the ones proven to be most toxic.

100 is very small number, when compared to 10,000 it's 1%. Therefore it is highly likely that many of the less toxic organic chemicals that we have higher levels of contact with are present in our fatty tissues at least as often as the more poisonous ones.

Because of the fact that 1 in 3 Americans has cancer of one form or another and that all forms of cancer except lung and stomach are on the rise in persons over 50 , most of the animal testing done on organic chemicals has been for carcinogenicity.

In 400 long term studies by the National Cancer (NCI) and the National Toxicology Program (NTP) 31 of the 72 pesticides tested were proven to be carcinogenic in one or more of the experimental groups. This does much to dispel the theory that "everything causes cancer".

Laboratory experiments attempt to isolate the effects of exposure to a single compound and do not take into account the cumulative and synergistic affects of these substances as they accumulate and recombine in our adipose tissue.

Comparatively very little work has been done on the neurotoxic effects of organic chemicals. The symptoms of neurotoxicity are insomnia, depression, irritability, memory loss, decreased libido, difficulty in concentration, confusion, loss of feeling, reduced motor skills, anxiety, nausea, schizophrenia, tremors, dementia, headaches, apathy, neurosis and a high propensity toward and intolerance to substance and its abuse.

The organic chemicals, sarin the original nerve gas is among them, that have proven neurotoxic effects are thought to act on the body in three ways. First they interrupt or alter the electrochemical information delivery (neurotransmitters) of the central nervous system.

Your body is an electrochemical device, so is the battery in your car. Your nervous system uses chemicals to send messages to you muscles, glands and organs in a similar way that your car battery uses chemicals to carry electricity. Foreign substances can alter and disrupt this delicate system.

The second way that neurotoxic chemicals assault your nervous system is by doing damage to the coating of the nerve fibers. Much like the wires in the electrical system of your home, nerves have a protective coating that insulates them. This protective coating is called the myel in sheath.

This myel in sheath is largely composed of one of the best insulators in animal tissue - fat. We know that organic chemicals bioaccumulate in adipose or fatty tissue.
As they build up they eat "holes" in the protective nerve coating and "short circuit" the workings of the central nervous system. The third way that organic chemicals cause neurotoxic effects is through enzyme induction and inhibition. There are dozens of enzymes in the human body.

Enzymes perform hundreds of functions in the body. They are often referred to as the catalysts that help the body convert carbohydrates into fuel and proteins into the building blocks of cellular material. The inhibition of enzyme activity is detrimental to our fundamental life systems.

Those that are at the highest risk to neurochemical damage to the fatty tissue that protect the nerves of the central and peripheral nervous system are: the unborn and newborn, the drug abuser, the elderly, chronically exposed workers and the infirmed.
The symptoms of neurotoxic poisoning, some of which are listed above, are strikingly similar to those of many of the diseases that are frustrating patients and baffling doctors nationwide.

Among the afflictions that have similar symptoms are Lou Gerhigs's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), hypersensitivity, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome (MCS), Epstein Barr, Total Allergy Syndrome (TAS), Parkinson's and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

If one were to total all of these the sum would be in the neighborhood of 40 million afflicted Americans. Because of the nature of the symptoms, we would be remiss if we did not include the thirty million Americans who are considered mentally ill in the tally.

It would be foolish to assert that organic chemicals are the sole cause of 70 million illnesses. On the other hand it would be blatant ignorance to say that exposure to organic chemicals is not a contributing factor in most cases. Further it would be sheer insanity not to recognize that exposure to these substances poses an impediment to recovery.

To varying degrees organic chemicals are biologically persistent. That is, once they find their way into your body it takes years to get them out. Agent Orange has a half life of seven years in human adipose tissue. That means that seven years after your last exposure 50% of the dioxins 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the active ingredients in this dangerous defoliant, are still present in your body.

We are constantly in contact with biologically persistent organic chemicals that bioaccumulate and we have a good reason to suspect that these substances are at least a contributing factor in the diseases of 70 million people in this country.

Many of these diseases were unheard of prior to the proliferation of organic chemicals of the last thirty years. Since they are so pervasive and debilitating we need to become more aware of the places where we come into contact with them in order to minimize our total contact so that, hopefully, the amount that we bioaccunulate each year is less than the amount that we shed.
Remember that these substances bioaccumulate, but that they also have half lives, which means that the body slowly gets rid of them. Not enough is known about the way that organic chemicals accumulate, their cumulative and synergistic effects and the length of time that it takes to cleanse the body of them.

If we can accept the theory that these substances are a contributing factor in the "phantom" diseases as well as others, and take into account the fact that these substances are present in the tissues of everyone in America. It would be reasonable to conclude that organic chemicals do not promote well being and contact should be minimized by those who are concerned about getting better and those that are interested in staying well.

There are four ways that organic chemicals enter the body. They are: through drinking water, foods, air and skin contact. Each one of these areas can be addressed in order to suggest avoidance measures. Water that is used for cooking, drinking and bathing should be filtered with an appropriate medium for eliminating these chemicals.

Whole unprocessed foods such as organically grown produce and range fed meats will minimize the amounts of organic chemicals that you ingest. Indoor air is known to have up to twenty times the concentrations of theses contaminants versus outdoor air.

Plants absorb organic chemicals during their normal respiratory cycle, plenty of house plants are a good Rx for reducing airborne contaminants.

Ozone is used in many industrial processes to break organic chemicals down into harmless by-products and it is a widely held opinion among those familiar with the technology that ozone air purifiers among other benefits are effective at inactivating airborne organic chemicals.

The skin is the largest organ in the human body, it absorbs trace amounts of surface contaminants from a myriad of sources. It is important to use biodegradable cleaning products and nonchemical skin care products to reduce direct skin contact with organic chemicals.

Warning: this article attempts to throw a thin net over a large topic and is laden with sweeping generalizations, oversimplifications and deductive reasoning.
It comes to you with an apology from the editor. We are sorry that more studies have not been done to document the causal relationship between a deteriorating ecosystem, a nation, that despite prosperity hithertofore unknown to man, that is sick beyond belief and a mentality so insistent on creating compounds to accomplish a specific end without regard for the by-products and side effects of those unnatural creations.

We live in an age of science. Things must be proven to be believed. Rightly so. Intuitive reasoning is the province of the individual and not the collective. Such is life in a democracy. We vote. We vote when we cast a ballot and when we part with a greenback.

These are the avenues whereby our intuitions determine material reality. By using these mechanisms to bring about a safer cleaner more natural world we will be sharing the vision of the late Robert Rodale who for forty years pursued an intuitive vision that a more natural way of living was called for.

He shared that vision with the American public by publishing Prevention and Organic Gardening magazines before the EPA was founded or the first toxicity study on DDT was performed.

The verdict is in on enough of the harmful aspects of a chemical world to warrant a national penchant for an all natural way of living without the need to wait for the ninety years that it would take to test for cacinogenicity, neurotoxicity, mutagenics and teritagenics on 60,000 man made compounds. We hope our apology and our vision are accepted. So if you're bugged by NHATS, Vote.

Vote when you shop by buying all natural and recycled products as well as in the first week in November. America needs you.