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Friday, June 11, 2010

Unreasonable Happiness Blog: Chlorine vs Fat

Marcus wrote a blog on chlorine recently, and it's a good one so I'm sharing it with all of you. Enjoy and if you really like it, subscribe to Marcus' blog too! (If you're not already.)
All the best,
Katie

It's Not The Fat That Can Kill You, It's the Chlorine In Your Water!

One of the most dangerous and common misconseptions of the twenty and twenty first centuries is that fat is the cause of arteriosclerosis, the hardening of the arteries... Its not, bad arteries are.

So what in the modern postindustrial world causes bad arteries and then eventually heart disease? Because heart disease is attributed to 34.3% (CDC numbers) of all deaths in America, that's 1 in 3. When you do the math, that means there are 81 million Americans that are living with one or more types of cardiovascular disease in this county, and if you don't know one of them, then you happen to be one. But here is an interesting statistic, in the 1800's and prior, deaths from heart disease were actually as low as 2% of deaths.

Why?....

Well the popular answer is bad diet and lifestyle. The problem with that is, pre-industrial man ate copious amounts of supposedly terribly artery clogging, cooked, saturated fats and cholesterol. The exact thing that should cause more blocked arteries and heat disease.

So what changed in 100 years and is giving everyone these heart problems, since apparently it's not from fat consumption the thing that is supposedly clogging and hardening our arteries? Because otherwise, we wouldn't see such incongruous statistics in just 100 years. So, if it's not he fat then what?

It's the water.

Once we started congregating the cities and moved away from the agrarian lifestyle, because of the industrial revolution, the need for a clean centralized water supply became essential. But the challenge was not necessarily finding water but keeping it clean. Luckily with the industrial revolution came the revolution in the sciences, particularly chemistry and the love of chemical disinfectants. Most of them totally toxic but supposedly "safe" in small amounts, sure?

The most insidious of these chemicals is chlorine, because chlorine probably has killed more people than any other chemical or disease in the history of the planet.

How?... Read this,  it's much more concise and eloquent than I ever could be. It's excerpts for Dr. Merola's site.
The Negative Health Effects of Chlorine
Summary 

Federal regulations require chlorine treatment of the water supplied to urban/suburban areas of America and much of Canada from surface sources such as lakes, reservoirs and rivers. That constitutes about 75 percent of water that Americans consume. Water from underground sources generally is not chlorinated unless it is supplemented by surface water. My hometown, Lacey, Washington, and some surrounding communities that are supplied water by Lacey, are fortunate to be among that group; I'd like to see that continue.

Chlorination is inferior water treatment on at least two counts. (1) Although it has greatly lowered infectious waterborne diseases in the U.S. and Canada, chlorination fails against a variety of water problems including parasites and can seriously harm people who use the water. (2) Its cost is unnecessarily high. As of 1996, Andover, Massachusetts' new ozone treatment costs $83 per million gallons of purified water, only two-thirds as much as the old treatment process. The town saves $64,000 annually in chemicals costs alone, [1] and uses less electricity. See later.

Possible damage to people's arteries 

When chlorinated water is run through a hose or carried in a pail followed by milk as in a dairy, "very tenacious, yellowish deposits chemically similar to arterial plaque" form; with unchlorinated water this doesn't happen. [2] 

CBS' "Sixty Minutes" show July 11, 1992, displayed two laboratory rats, both of them eating standard rat chow and drinking chlorinated water. One rat had clear arteries. The other was also on pasteurized, homogenized milk. When the animals were sacrificed and cut open, the arteries of the milk-drinking rats were clogged. A scientist in a white coat winked at the camera and said, "He [the live rat he was holding] is the only one doing research on that." The researcher didn't say why, but the powerful dairy and chemical lobbies come to mind. 

Dairy buckets, hoses and rats' arteries resist the arterial-wall damage known as atherosclerosis. But what can chlorinated water and cow milk, particularly homogenized milk, do to the far more susceptible arteries of humans? Those of young chickens are about as susceptible to such damage as people's arteries. So as a first approximation, J.M. Price, MD gave cockerels (roosters less than a year old) only chlorinated water (without milk). They developed arterial plaques; and the stronger the concentration of chlorine, the faster and worse the damage. Cockerels on unchlorinated water developed no such damage.2

The residents of the small town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, had no heart attacks despite a diet rich in saturated animal fats and milk -- until they moved away from Roseto's mountain spring water and drank chlorinated water. After that, consuming the same diet, they had heart attacks.2 The Roseto example is dramatic enough, but the needed detailed comparisons and follow-up have never been done.

How well does the incidence of heart attacks match the areas where, and times when water is/was chlorinated? Chlorination spread throughout America in the second and third decades of this century, about 20 years before the mushrooming of heart attacks. Light chlorination, we will recall, yielded slow growth of plaques in Price's cockerels; and so chlorination of people's drinking water at the usual low concentration might have been expected to take at least 10-20 years to produce clinical manifestations of atherosclerosis.

A physician team led by William F. Enos autopsied three hundred GIs who had died in battle in the Korean War. These men, who had passed induction examination as healthy, averaged 22.1 years of age. To their shock and amazement, in seventy-seven percent of the 300 the pathologists found "gross evidence of arteriosclerosis in the coronary arteries." In several, one or more heart arteries were partly or completely occluded. [3] 

Although Dr. Enos didn't try to explain his grisly discovery, he assumed arterial clogging had developed gradually. Seeming to support that assumption, almost 20 years later pathologists discovered early arterial damage in ninety-six percent of nearly 200 consecutive babies who had died of whatever cause in their first month outside the womb. Two of those babies' coronary arteries were blocked, causing infantile heart attacks. [4] Identified as crib deaths, these were related to functionally deficient vitamin B6. [5]

But did arterial damage in fact develop slowly? The water that the American soldiers had to drink in Korea was so heavily chlorinated that many could hardly tolerate it. In Vietnam too, autopsies of American solders found heart-artery damage. [6] Again, water supplied to them had been heavily chlorinated.2 Did much of the soldiers' arterial damage develop, not gradually but quickly as in Dr. Price's cockerels? The truth -- slow or rapid development of clogging -- may never be known. Interestingly, from 1950 to 1965 while heart attacks mushroomed, on a population level arterial lesions did not increase; [7] the major growth was in clotting.


Other risks of chlorinated water

Chlorine in swimming pools reacts with organic matter such as sweat, urine, blood, feces, and mucus and skin cells to form more chloramines. Chloroform risk can be 70 to 240 times higher in the air over indoor pools than over outdoor pools. [21] And Canadian researchers found that after an hour of swimming in a chlorinated pool, chloroform concentrations in the swimmers' blood ranged from 100 to 1,093 parts per billion (ppb). [22] If the pool smells very much of chlorine, don't go near it.

Taking a warm shower or lounging in a tub filled with hot chlorinated water, one inhales chloroform. Researchers recorded increases in chloroform concentration in bathers' lungs of about 2.7 ppb after a 10-minute shower. Worse, warm water causes the skin to act like a sponge; and so one will absorb and inhale more chlorine in a 10-minute shower than by drinking eight glasses of the same water. This irritates the eyes, the sinuses, throat, skin and lungs, dries the hair and scalp, worsening dandruff. It can weaken immunity, see below.
A window from the shower room open to the outdoors would release chloroform from the shower room air. But to prevent its absorption through the skin requires a showerhead that removes chlorine. The ShowerWiseTM filter and showerhead can be ordered for $69, plus two filters $129 -- from What Doctors Don't Tell You, 1-800-851-7100 or fax 410-223-2619. Others offer comparable products.

Dishwashers pollute indoor air with chlorinated organics created from dishwasher detergents and volatilized in the air for us to breathe. They vent 5 to 7 liters (quarts) of air into the house air every minute of operation. The chlorine reacts with food scraps. [23] Ceramic disks, used instead of detergents, totally avoid the problem and are said to be about 75% less costly than detergent. [24] [25] [26]

Other harm from chlorination

Long-term risks of consuming chlorinated water include excessive free radical formation, which accelerates aging, increases vulnerability to genetic mutation and cancer development, hinders cholesterol metabolism, and promotes hardening of arteries.

Excess free radicals created by chlorinated water also generate dangerous toxins in the body. These have been directly linked to liver malfunction, weakening of the immune system and pre-arteriosclerotic changes in arteries (which, as we saw, struck Dr. Price's cockerels and may have happened to American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam). Excessive free radicals have been linked also to alterations of cellular DNA, the stuff of inheritance. [40] Chlorine also destroys antioxidant vitamin E,2 which is needed to counteract excess oxysterols/free radicals for cardiac and anti-cancer protection. 

A study in the late 1970s found that chlorinated water appears to increase the risk of gastrointestinal cancer over a person's lifetime by 50 to 100 percent. This study analyzed thousands of cancer deaths in North Carolina, Illinois, Wisconsin and Louisiana. Risk of such cancers results from use of water containing chlorine at or below the E.P.A. (Environmental Protection Agency) standard and "is going to make the E.P.A. standard look ridiculous," stated Dr. Robert Harris, lead scientist in the study. [41]

A later meta-analysis [B] found chlorinated water is associated each year in America with about 4,200 cases of bladder cancer and 6,500 cases of rectal cancer
. Chlorine is estimated to account for 9 percent of bladder cancer cases and 18% of rectal cancers. [42] Those cancers develop because the bladder and rectum store waste products for periods of time. (Keeping the bowels moving regularly lowers such risk.) Chlorinated water is associated, too, with higher total risk of combined cancers. [43] Chlorine in treated water can also cause allergic symptoms ranging from skin rash to intestinal symptoms to arthritis, headaches, and on and on. [44]

Recent research has found a new hazard in chlorinated water: a byproduct called MX. A research team from the National Public Health Institute in Finland discovered that, by causing genetic mutations, MX initiates cancer in laboratory animals. [45] [46] Also, DCA (dichloroacedic acid) in chlorinated water alters cholesterol metabolism, changing HDL ("good") to LDL ("bad") cholesterol [47] -- and causes liver cancer in laboratory animals. [48]


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