Health news blog

Although beneficial in minute amounts in natural form, cadmium, as an environmental pollutant, is extremely toxic. It is found in smoggy air, coming mostly from automobiles. Many brands of gasoline and lubricating oils contain cadmium. It is also present in commonly used phosphate fertilizers whereby it pollutes the soil, wherefrom it is taken up by vegetables and particularly by cereal grains. Most of our water supplies, especially so-called soft water, are heavily polluted by cadmium.

One of the common causes of slow, chronic cadmium poisoning is the ingestion of water which comes out of the faucet first thing in the morning, as it had picked up dangerous amounts of cadmium by standing in the pipes overnight. Both the galvanized and the newer black plastic pipes contain cadmium, which is dissolved and leached out by acids in the water. Hot water leaches even more than cold water and, therefore, should be never used for cooking or drinking.

Shellfish and animal livers concentrate cadmium and are dangerous to eat for this reason.

Cadmium poisoning can also be caused by the use of enameled utensils and pots. Toxic cadmium is used to achieve the beautiful colors in enamel (the same way as lead is used in ceramics). It is dissolved by acids in food and ends up in our bodies.

Cadmium is even more dangerous to your health than lead. It can cause high blood pressure and heart disease, iron-deficiency anemia, atherosclerosis, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, lung fibrosis, kidney damage and cancer.

Protection

1.    Vitamin С. It is a specific protector against the toxic and disease-producing effect of cadmium.

Dose: massive doses up to 3,000 mg. a day. In acute poisoning, even more.

2.    Include zinc-rich foods, such as pumpkin seeds, sunflower seed and other raw seeds, nuts and whole grains, in your daily diet. Zinc prevents the assimilation of cadmium. Cadmium and zinc are chemical “antagonists.” If zinc is present in the diet in abundance, it winds up being stored in our body in place of cadmium.

3.    Avoid white flour and everything made with it. Seventy-eight percent of the zinc present in whole wheat is removed with bran and wheat germ during the milling process, leaving an abundance of cadmium in white flour.

4.    Avoid using enameled utensils. Use glass, earthenware or stainless steel utensils.

5.    Do not drink regular tap water. Use bottled spring water if you live in the city.

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GENERAL HEALTH

When we come to consider the general relationship between heredity and environment, not as regards disease, but as regards characteristics, we find there has been a great controversy in the past. Can acquired characteristics be inherited? Biologists of the present day are pretty well convinced that they cannot. Here is a big experiment. Jews since many centuries before Christ have been circumcised. And yet after all these centuries the prepuce of a Jewish baby is just like that of a Christian.

But I think that one can see how environment might affect heredity in some characteristics. Darwin in his Origin of Species advanced the argument of the survival of the fittest. If a certain characteristic might benefit the animals possessing it, then those having it to a superior degree have a better chance to survive and pass it on to their offspring. Certainly, the environment might determine what are the best characteristics for survival.

If, as Dr. Wilson told us a few pages back, all people of English extraction have a pedigree going back to William the Conqueror, presumably we are all related. Why do we not then, have the same inheritance? In the nearly ten centuries since the Conqueror, his many genes have occurred in his descendants in a tremendous number of combinations. I think there is an analogy here with the brown trout of the fish hatchery at New Hampton, New Hampshire. In one pool there are many big white trout raised from fingerlings in the regular pools. We are told that about once in every seven million there is a white one. If he is scooped up and put to one side he grows into a big white fish. But bred to a brown one we are right back where we started. One seven-millionth of a chance of our being a genius just because we are proud of our pedigree from William the Bastard?

John Buchan wrote a book called The Path of the King, which is an allegory concerning great inheritance. In the woods and fens of England, long before the Normans conquered at Hastings, a witch gave a young boy a gold ring. Always the possessor would have strength, ability, nobility in the best sense, and perseverance to carry through his good intentions. Through the centuries a series of owners of the ring displayed all the great qualities the witch had promised, but they always perished while carrying out their endeavor. In the final episode Nancy Hanks Lincoln passed the ring to her son Abraham who lost it, but as the mother saw in a deathbed vision, only after he had inherited the gifts of the ring in quantities far greater than ever before. We know of but few possessing the ring throughout its long history, nor do we know the paths by which it came to Lincoln. The accurate tracing of human heredity is an all but impossible task. The possession of great qualities is not necessarily made known to the world for they may well lack the opportunity to be demonstrated. Circumstance plays a large part in man’s existence.

The complications of the laws of heredity are enormous; the possible combinations of traits and the impossibility of accurate human records make predictions futile, but the chances of good progeny are best if humans breed according to the practices of animal and plant fanciers, avoiding bad and choosing good qualities. Which advice, like much we get from our economic advisors, will often prove futile.

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GENERAL HEALTH