There’s this popular misconception that everything gives you cancer.
Cigarettes give you cancer.
Booze gives you cancer.
Pesticides on fruits and vegetables give you cancer.
Toxins in your shampoo or soap give you cancer
Cell phone signals and wifi (maybe?) give you cancer.
Stress gives you cancer.
Red meat gives you cancer (Or is it NOT eating red meat that gives you cancer?)
BPAs in plastic containers give you cancer.
Mold in your house gives you cancer.
Pollution gives you cancer.
Even the “health” supplements you take (might) contain toxins that give you cancer. Geez!
Eventually, you start thinking…
Damn! I guess I’m just going to get cancer… Might as well just enjoy life because I’m going to get cancer one way or another. Why worry about it if you’re just going to die anyway…?
At least that’s how a lot of people think. Unless you’ve devoted some time to studying health and staying up to date with research and science, you’ll likely believe that "everything gives you cancer." There’s some truth to this. The truth is that there are A LOT of toxins in our environment and they will give you cancer. This is why SO many people have cancer. The advice we’ve been hearing ad nauseam from the gurus and the diet experts is to remove the toxins from your environment.
This is pretty good advice if you have $2000 a month to spend on really good organic food and products, you could probably avoid a lot of these toxins and it really would improve your health and make you feel better.
But a lot of those organic products are not actually organic, “organic” is a marketing scam half the time.
Your house might contain toxic mold that you don’t even know about. Or your office. Or your Airbnb rental.
If you’re like me, you like to eat out at restaurants a couple of times a week with friends or family. I have a quite disciplined diet but who knows what sorts of toxins these restaurants are putting in their foods?
If you fly, you’re consuming all sorts of nasty toxins that promulgate the passenger cabins of cost-cutting airlines.
If you travel or commute daily, unless you can afford a fancy late-model Mercedes or Lexus with an onboard air filter in the air conditioning, you are breathing a lot of pollution in.
Maybe you’re a real freedom-loving type who likes to go down to the gun range to keep your shooting skills sharp in case of a zombie apocalypse, guess what you have to worry about? Lead toxicity.
Despite your best efforts, you’ll still consume a lot of toxins unwittingly and you might still get cancer anyway (like this guy!)
Do you do much international travel for business or pleasure (or both, at the same time)? Well, you can look up the pollution index to make sure you’re not going somewhere with an egregious polluted environment but perhaps you’re a bit more adventuresome like me…
A couple of times a year I’ll take a mini-vacation going salsa dancing in Moldova, lounging at a resort town by the black sea, or hiking a volcano in central Panama. Who the hell knows what kind of toxins I expose myself to in these sorts of locales. Also, every once in a great while I like to get my Winston Churchill on and smoke a Dominican cigar!
I, for one, am NOT going to be going toxin-free anytime soon.
Does that mean that it’s just an inevitability that I’m going to get cancer? Not hardly.
Head Strong, an excellent book I’m reading demystified the toxin-mania for me. What people don’t understand is that our bodies are quite good at dealing with these toxins - thank God, Mother Nature, or evolution for the systems we have for getting rid of a lot of these toxins. From the book...
Your body requires a lot of energy to detoxify and expel or neutralize these toxins. Anything you can do to increase your cellular energy production, therefore, can also enhance your body’s ability to detox. But given today’s influx of toxins, you can’t get by with the same amount of cellular energy that would have been serviceable a hundred years ago.
Dr. Frank Shallenberger (who discovered and named EOMD) estimates that we actually need 50– 100 percent more energy now than we did a hundred years ago to get rid of all of the toxins that are inside our bodies, slowing down our energy production and making us weak.
(p. 37)
So instead of trying to live like a monk and avoid all toxins at all costs, a much more pragmatic approach is to minimize toxins as much as you reasonably can but focus on Biohacking to optimize mitochondrial function to double cellular energy production.
So you’re thinking…
Great. How do I optimize mitochondrial function?
Well, that’s what the book is about! And I’m not finished reading it yet.
One thing that I know from five years of research that helps mitochondrial function is (surprise, surprise) using certain Nootropics.
Also…
Two of the main organs that purge toxins are the kidney and liver, which is why I recommend performance-enhancing Adaptogenic herbs so highly. There’s excellent evidence that they repair and maintain the function of these vital organs. If this Mitochondrial strategy makes way more sense than being OCD and paranoid about toxins all the time you might want to read this book along with me...
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“Everything gives you cancer”