Exposure to secondary smoke affects non-smokers negatively, for example – through choking, coughing, and feelings of nausea. On a daily basis, it will have a major impact on your health.
Pollution of our food and water
People are exposed to contaminated public water through heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium and aluminum in treatment plants. Refuse dumps and other unregulated chemical dumps mix up with public water supply across the nation.
People have resorted to drinking bottled, filtered and distilled water in unprecedented amounts today. In addition, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides are used in the production of most of our foods. Medical research shows that all these chemicals create increased oxidative stress when consumed. The question is now quantity versus quality and cost to human health.
Ultraviolet sunlight
Before your 20th birthday, you would have received two-thirds of your lifetime sunlight exposure to your skin. The sun’s ultraviolet rays produce increased free radicals in the human skin. This in turn has proven to cause damage to the DNA in the cells of our skin, which leads to skin cancer.
UVA and UVB light increase free radical production and thus oxidative stress in the skin. The use of sunscreen is highly recommended for protection from UV rays. Go for products with SPF rating above 60 or greater.
Everyone is encouraged to keep a watchful eye on their skin for any unusual growths or changes in pigmented moles.
Pollution from medications and radiation
Every medication causes increased oxidative stress in our bodies. Patients on chemotherapeutic drugs and radiation therapy always find such drugs so hard to tolerate. They do not just kill the cancer cells, they cause collateral damage to normal cells.
Drugs put a demand on all metabolic pathways in the liver and body as a whole and great effort must go into metabolising and eliminating same.
A lot of people in the 21st century have become so dependent on medications. Drugs have specific benefits and each carries an inherent risk or side effect. Serious adverse drug reactions are now the third leading cause of death in the world. A medical doctor friend recently reported that his aged father never suffered from any illness until they began giving him “blood tonic”.
More than 70 chronic degenerative diseases are the direct result of the “toxic” effects of oxygen. We have, in so many ways, established the fact that oxidative stress is the root cause of the degeneration of the body and can be likened to how rust corrodes even the strongest metal, if left exposed and unprotected.
The great news is that not only do our bodies possess a tremendous antioxidant defence system, they also possess a remarkable repair system.
God is our true healer.
Balance is key when it comes to oxidative stress. Our body makes some antioxidants, but they are simply not enough. Our food, especially fruits and vegetables, used to provide all the extra antioxidants our bodies needed. A generation or two ago, people ate more whole, fresh foods that contained significantly more antioxidants than today’s diet does.
We therefore need to add high quality nutritional supplements to the balance in order to provide the level of antioxidants our bodies need.
A healthy diet, exercising moderately and taking high quality nutritional supplements will help everyone improve our antioxidant defence system.
The effects of many chronic degenerative diseases can be reversed. We will conclude in our next article by exploring a whole new approach of preventive medicine: cellular nutrition.
References
- What your Doctor doesn’t know about Nutritional Medicine may be killing you – Ray D. Strand, M. D.
Mrs Chima Ejimofor is the lead partner of Infinite Health Consult, and is available for the purchase of high quality nutritional supplements, health talks and wellness seminars. She is based in Lagos, Nigeria. Telephone/WhatsApp: 07033179632, email: infinitehealthconsult@gmail.com
