Women's Health & Vitality ~ Thriving in a Toxic World
Good health is not something we can buy. However, it can be an extremely valuable savings account – Anne Wilson Schaef
women in particular, the biological milieu is best thought of through an analogy – which I fondly think of as ‘The Buzzards on the Yadkin River’! Picture, in your mind’s eye, a “kettle” of buzzards feeding
A
on debris and other waste that may be found in the Yadkin River. Conceptually, there are a number of ways to rid the river of the buzzards. Either, one might could shoot them, and solve the problem immediately. Or one could clean up the river so that the buzzards have no reason to return! The river is life and rep- resents on different levels the body, mind and spirit – one’s bio- logical footprint. The buzzards represent imbalance, illness or pathogenic opportunists. So the call is to clean up oneself on all levels. One may consider this as biological gardening. Balancing & optimizing your health is becoming increas- ingly important, and may be done through the seven modalities:
• Nutrition & Hydration, • Exercise,
• Detoxification, • The Mind Body Continuum, • ANS(Autonomic Nervous System) Regulation, • Hormonal Balance, & • Immune Regulation.
Women, in today’s society and environment have a multi-
faceted role that is rapidly becoming difficult to sustain. Invariably some of these facets may include: consumer, mother, bread winner, and custodian of the family’s health, amongst others! On one level or another, we are all concerned with the question of how our health is connected to the health of our planet. If, as individuals, we believe that by ignoring any possible connection between ourselves and the environment, we might as well read a fairy tale called, “The myth of living safely in a toxic world”.
8
NaturalTriad.com
s we move into the 21st century, optimizing one’s health through exercise, nutrition, nutraceuticals and periodic detoxification is becoming increasingly important. For
Women are es-
pecially at risk be- cause of their bio- logical systems. Re- search has shown that a higher level of fatty tissue increases the body’s burden of hazardous toxins that interfere with their physiological milieu. Women tend to have more fatty tissue than men, and also have different ‘windows of susceptibility’ such as pregnancy, meno- pause, and menarche or the luteal stage - the second phase of the menstrual cycle. We see girls entering puberty at an earlier age as well as an explosive increase in breast cancer suggesting that various chemicals called endocrine disruptors interfere with human hormonal and biological systems. Consider breast milk, that most perfect form of infant nutri- tion with its unsurpassed powers to encourage the development of the immune system and prevent various illnesses. Because humans are at the top of the food chain, mothers’ milk may be amongst the most chemically contaminated of all human foods. It carries concentrations of organochlorine pollutants that are 10 to 20 times higher than cows’ milk. Thus on average, in indus- trialized countries breast-fed infants ingest each day 50 times more PCBs per pound of body weight than do their parents. The same is true for dioxins. Whilst pregnant, the placenta does an excellent job protecting the fetus from infections, but this is not true for hazardous chemicals and heavy metals. Another case in point is the widespread contamination of ocean fish with mer- cury, which is now widely acknowledged as a threat to public health. In North Carolina, the recommendation is that women of childbearing age and children avoid consumption of fish that
A good gardener knows the following three things about her garden:
First, she has to work the soil regularly.
Second, she cannot banish every fungus (yeast), bug, or weed from her garden.
Third, after she has seeded and tended the soil, she looks up and hopes for the Sunshine and rain to bring out her flowers.
- Majid Ali, MD
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
