Stunning Facts About Our Toxic Human Bodies

Written by Jack Dini on March 4, 2021. Posted in Current News

You may think of yourself as a highly refined and sophisticated creature—and you are. But you are also full of discarded, rejected, and recycled atomic elements. Don’t worry though—so is almost everyone and everything else reports Curt Stager. (1)

What do radiation, hypochlorite, nitrogen oxide, cyanide, ozone, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, 1,4-dioxane, trichloroethylene, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and chloroform have in common? One answer is that they all bring to mind scary, perhaps carcinogenic agents, created in most part by industry.

Another answer is that these are all created by ourselves, within our own bodies, without any help from outside forces such as industry or the environment. For example, the average human body contains:

• enough sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog

• carbon to make 900 pencils

• potassium to fire a toy cannon

• fat to make seven bars of soap

• phosphorus to make 2,200 match heads, and:

• enough iron to make a three inch nail.

Look at your fingernails. Carbon makes up half its mass, and roughly one in eight of those carbon atoms recently emerged from a chimney or a tailpipe.

All of the carbon in your body derives from organic matter, which in turn obtains it from the atmosphere. (1)

The medical community has long recognized that humans exhale volatile organic compounds. The major VOCs in the breath of healthy individuals are isoprene (12-580 parts per billion, ppb), acetone, (1.2-1,880 ppb), ethanol (13-1,000 ppb), and methanol (160-2,000 ppb). (2)

When you smile, the gleam of your teeth obscures a slight glow from radioactive waste. Several thousand unstable radiocarbon atoms explode within and among your cells every second as their unstable nuclei undergo spontaneous radioactive decay.

Some are the natural products of cosmic rays that can turn atmospheric nitrogen into carbon-14, while others result from the decay of unstable mineral elements that are found in soil. But many of them represent the echoes of the thermonuclear air bursts from the Cold War,

finding their way into our water supply and meals. Many of them are bound up in your teeth. Unlike most of the atoms in your body, those embedded in your strong, stable tooth enamel have been with you ever since you ingested them through your umbilical cord and your infant feeding. If you were born during the early 1960s, you have more nuclear waste in your teeth than if you were born later, when soils and oceans had time to bury radioactive atoms. In fact, forensic scientists use the proportion of bomb carbon in tooth enamel to determine the age of unidentified human remains. (1)

An average adult carries between 8 and 10 pounds of wastewater within them, and one in ten of your tears are the metabolic by-products of your breathing and eating.

Sweat, which is mostly water,  has small amounts of lactate, urea, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, chromium, nickel and lead. (3)

Of particular interest in these days of Covid-19, one sweaty, huffing, exercising person emits as many chemicals from their body as up to five sedentary people, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study. And notably those human emissions, including amino acids from sweat or acetone from breath, chemically combine with bleach cleaners to form new airborne chemicals with unknown impacts to indoor air quality. (4)

Many gym facilities frequently use chlorine bleach-based products to sanitize sweaty equipment. And while these cleaning products work to kill surface bacteria, they also combine with emissions from sweat, mixing to form a new cocktail of chemicals.

The team was the first to observe a chemical group called N-chloraldimines, a reaction product of bleach with amino acids in gym air. That meant chlorine from bleach cleaner sprayed onto equipment was reacting with the amino acids released from sweating bodies.

And although more research is needed to determine specific impacts this might have on indoor air quality, chemically similar reaction products of ammonia with bleach can be harmful to human health. Although the researchers collected all data for this study pre-pandemic, the team says their results illustrate that a modern gym with low occupancy and good ventilation may still be relatively safe for a workout, especially if masks are used. (4)

What’s in your pee?  Medical textbooks list anywhere from 50-100 chemical compounds in urine, and standard tests only check for six or seven compounds. But researchers at the University of Albert using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography found over 3,000 different chemical compounds. (5)  Of particular interest is that each human excretes a minimum of 1.5 grams of phosphorus per day, so that the annual input of phosphorus as phosphorus pentoxide is more than one-half billion pounds of phosphate. (6)

At the concentration secreted by the stomach lining, hydrochloric acid (pH 2.0) is deadly to living cells and powerful enough to dissolve zinc (more corrosive than coke).  (7)

Misconceptions about natural versus synthetic compounds can have devastating consequences. The anxiety over formaldehyde is a telling example. Formaldehyde occurs naturally in fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and foliage. It is found in high concentrations in Peking duck (120 parts per million), smoked salmon (50 ppm), and processed meats (20 ppm) as a normal result of traditional curing processes. It is found at levels of 2 ppm in a healthy human body, where it plays an important role in the production of DNA. (8)

Carbon monoxide is an example of a ‘pollutant’ that is important for human existence.  Although carbon monoxide inhalation can be lethal, our bodies make the molecule naturally in small amounts. (9)

Hydrogen sulfide can be a dangerous gas: worker exposure recommended limits are 10 ppm, loss of smell occurs at 100-500 ppm and nearly instant death at 1000-2000 ppm. The human olfactory system detects the rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulfide at the practically nonexistent rate of 0.02 parts per million.

Yet, as Mary Roach reports, “Hydrogen sulfide is not the devil. Beneath the danger of stench is a molecule as basic and indispensable as sodium chloride. The gas is produced in all of the body’s tissues, all the time, regardless of what was for dinner.” Also of interest, the newest research with mice suggests that slower transit time– that is, longer exposure to your nasty stuff, may in fact be of benefit.

Hydrogen sulfide appears to prevent inflammation and its sometimes consequences, ulcerative colitis and cancer. (10)

One last bit of information. The principal contributor of internal radiation in our bodies is K-40, a long-lived radioisotope of potassium. Because the concentration of potassium is higher in muscular tissue, the amounts in men tend to be somewhat higher. So, if you find yourself in a crowded room and want to keep your dose rate to a minimum, stand close to a woman to avoid receiving an unnecessarily high dose of K-40. (11)

Mary Roach sums this up well:

“The moral of the story is this: It takes an ill-advised mix of ignorance, arrogance, and profit motive to dismiss the wisdom of the human body in favor of some random notion you’ve hatched or heard and branded as true.” (10)

So the next time you hear someone talk about a chemical free world remind them of all the toxic chemicals they live within their bodies.

 References

1. Curt Stager, “You are made of waste,” Nautilus, Issue 7, November 7, 2013
2. J. D. Fenske and S. E. Paulson, Journal of Air & Waste Management Association, 49, 594, 1999
3. Anne Marie Helmenstine,”The chemical composition of sweat,” thoughtco.com, September 22, 2019
4. “Sweat, beach and gym air quality,” phys.org, January 5, 2021
5. Dan Nosowitz, “What’s in your pee?”, popsci.com, September 5, 20133.
6. William McGucken, Lake Erie Rehabilitated, (Akron, Ohio, University of Akron Press, 2000), 75
7. Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), 23
8. James Kennedy, “Chemophobia is irrational, harmful and hard to break,” aeon.co, June 11, 2016
9. Liz Geltcher, “Life’s a gas,” New Scientist, 172, 39 (November 24, 2001)
10. Mary Roach, Gulp, (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2013)
11. B. L. Cohen & D. W Moeller, Issues in the Environment, American Council on Science and Health, pp 62 & 66, 1992

About the author: Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has written for The American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, Hawaii Reporter and Canada Free Press.

Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Expose The Lies About COVID19

PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Trackback from your site.