Dioxin

Dining on Dioxin?

If you who like to surf the web, check out www.scorecard.org, a research site run by the non-profit Environmental Defense. You can enter your zipcode and get facts on pollutants being released in your area, and who's responsible. You can also find out how certain chemicals in your household cleaners or personal care products affect your family's health.

Health seekers need to be proactive in staying abreast of all the assaults on our health from our food supply and the environment. I wish each of you subscribed to Nutrition Action Health Letter. The October 2000 issue devotes six of its 16 pages to its cover story, Dioxin for Dinner? "Dioxin is diabolic," says epidemiologist Richard Clapp of the Boston University School of Public Health. It's the most potent animal carcinogen ever tested. There is evidence ithat it causes birth defects, learning and developmental delays, endometriosis, and immune system abnormalities.

We don't want it in our neighborhoods. But 90% of the dioxin that enters our bodies comes from meat, cheese, milk, butter, and foods that contain animal fat. As I tell our Let's Be Well classes, there has never been a better time to be a vegan.

Dioxin is actually a family of 75 chemicals, including dioxins, furans, and PCBs. Its molecule binds particularly strongly to intracellular receptors in the nuclei of animal/human cells, so dioxin can easily get into the nucleus where it can cause cancer and birth defects.

"It starts out as emissions from incinerators and spills from electric transformers. It ends up in cheeseburgers, chicken wings, and pizzas. Dioxin and its chemical cousins, the furans and the dioxin-like PCBs, make their way from the air, water, soil, and sediment into plants. As animals eat the plants, [or cattle and hogs are fed dioxin-tainted grain], and people eat the animals, [or drink cow's milk] the concentration of dioxin climbs.

"Clearly, one way to minimize your exposure to dioxin is to avoid animal foods, including dairy products. The more targeted approach is to eat less animal fat, since that's where dioxin and its fat-soluble relatives reside.

"In most instances, anyone who reduces the amount of animal fat in [his/her] diet will reduce the amount of dioxin [consumed]," says Dwain Winters of the EPA. "Vegans -who eat no animal products- should get the lowest levels, but ovo-lacto-vegetarians who substitute full-fat dairy products and eggs for meat can be exposed to levels found in a typical diet."

Dioxin's half-life is seven years; it takes that long for it to be excreted from the body. If you lose weight you lose some with the fat, since that's where it's accumulated.

+++