The Ocean of Toxins Our Children Are Growing Up In

Written by Emma Suttie, D.Ac, AP on December 14, 2023. Posted in Current News

Our children are being exposed to a toxic load that is unprecedented in our world. This ubiquity of chemicals has dire consequences that have parents worried about their children’s futures while wondering how to navigate our increasingly toxic lives

And as the world becomes more toxic, our children are getting sicker.

In addition, when overweight, obesity, or risk of developmental delays were included, the number jumped to 54 percent—a sobering figure that represents a more than decade-old landscape.

Undoubtedly, the numbers are much higher in the present day.

Epidemic Answers, a website made up of parents, clinicians, researchers, authors, and wellness experts dedicated to helping kids heal from health issues, lists the prevalence of some of the epidemics affecting our children—a few of the most common are:

• Asthma: Asthma now affects at least 1 in 8 children, with an estimated one in six African-American children.
• Food allergies: One in 12 children has a “true” IgE-mediated food allergy. An estimated 1 in 3 children have food intolerances, and 1 in 17 has a life-threatening food allergy. Almost 2.5 percent of children in the United States are allergic to peanuts—a 21 percent increase since 2010.
• Obesity/Overweight: One in 5 children in the United States is considered obese, and since the 1970s, the number of obese children and adolescents has more than tripled, according to the CDC.
• Autism (autism spectrum disorder): In 2020, 1 in 36 children were diagnosed with autism, according to the CDC. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
• Pediatrics found the prevalence of children with autism spectrum disorder for the same year was 1 in 30 children.
• ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder): ADHD affects 6 million children (9.8 percent) between 3–17 years (2016-2019) according to the CDC.
• Learning Disabilities: One in 5 children in the United States have learning and attention issues, according to a research report from the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
• Mental Health Disorders: Nearly eight million children (16.5 percent) in the United States have at least one mental health disorder, according to a 2019 study in JAMA Pediatrics.

Beth Lambert—the founder of Epidemic Answers—is an educator, former health care consultant, and author of A Compromised Generation: The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America’s Children. She recently gave a lecture at the Documenting Hope Conference called “An Introduction to Total Load,” where she discussed the troubling increase in health challenges affecting our children.

She stated that we are witnessing an epidemic, as more than half of our children now have at least one chronic disease.

One Epidemic Masquerading as Many

In her lecture, Ms. Lambert explained that even though we seem to be in the midst of an alarming number of epidemics simultaneously, what we are really facing is one epidemic. This overarching epidemic has underlying imbalances that manifest as a variety of symptoms and diagnostic labels.

According to Ms. Lambert, some of those underlying imbalances are the decreasing diversity of the microbiome, inflammation, toxicity, increased oxidative stress, dysregulation of the immune system, nutritional imbalances, and impairment of our body’s ability to detoxify.

Underlying Causes: Modern Living Stressors

In the last hundred years or so, there has been an increase in many of the chronic diseases that plague us today. Children, particularly, are getting sicker earlier and earlier and now suffer from diseases that were traditionally only seen in adults, like Type 2 diabetes and various forms of cancer.

To use an example, in the 1970s, autism was diagnosed in one in every 10,000 children. That number has steadily increased, and according to recent CDC statistics, it is now one in every 36 children.

It also presents a sobering statistic, saying that in 1960, children who had a health condition that was severe enough to interfere with their daily activities was 1.8 percent. In 2010, that number rose to 8 percent—an increase of more than 400 percent in only 50 years.

Toxic Load

The stresses associated with our modern lifestyles have become enormous and overwhelm our body’s ability to handle them—which is especially true for children who are more susceptible because they are growing and developing.

Ms. Lambert also noted that when children experience too many of these stressors at critical times in their development, it can cause serious problems with lasting effects.

This idea is called toxic load, and it refers to the accumulation of harmful chemicals in our bodies through a variety of exposures.

These include air pollutants, chemicals in our water supply, medications like antibiotics, anesthesia medications, and vaccines, agricultural contaminants like pesticides and herbicides, chemicals in personal care products and household cleaners, and an almost impossible-to-fathom number of chemicals and additives in our food.

In looking back over the last fifty years or so, we can see how we have moved away from the more natural way of living that our parents and grandparents may have enjoyed—such as having a backyard garden, spending more time outdoors, and the fact that there were far fewer chemicals in the air, water, and food than there are today.

Given all of this—there are ways we can support our health and the health of our children, it just takes some mindful attention.

Health Supports

To support the health of our children, Ms. Lambert shared some tips—things we can all do—but are especially important for our little ones and can help them build more resilience.

• Live in harmony with the earth’s natural rhythms.
• Expose ourselves to sunlight.
• Access clean air and water—using water and air purifiers and filters in our homes can help.
• Make sound nutritional choices.
• Practice stress management.
• Engage in movement.
• Get plentiful sleep.
• Practice earthing.
• Regularly engage in spiritual and mindfulness practices.
• Develop and honor strong relationships.
• Cultivate beneficial microbes for a diverse microbiome.

A Formula for Healing

When you become aware of the sheer number of stressors we are all exposed to daily, it is easy to get bogged down and depressed—but there is much we can do to lighten our toxic load and regain our health and the health of our children.

Knowing our options and making conscious choices about what we put in our bodies and our children’s bodies as well as how we spend our time together on this earth will make a difference for us and future generations.

See more here theepochtimes

Header image: The Guardian

About the author: Emma is an acupuncture physician and has written extensively about health for multiple publications over the past decade. She is now a health reporter for The Epoch Times, covering Eastern medicine, nutrition, trauma, and lifestyle medicine.

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