Exposure to environmental toxins may be root of rise in neurological disorders

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/23/environmental-toxins-neurological-disorders-parkinsons-alzheimers

by bookofjoe • 4 years ago

99 43 4 years ago

glasss• 4 years ago

Well, I'm sure they're not helping, but our world is so complex I doubt there is any single / primary root to most of our issues nowadays.

kingsloi• 4 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree, but I'm sure there's like a top 10 right? With lead probably being in the top 5?

I hear stories like this all the time https://lailluminator.com/2022/04/11/known-to-be-toxic-for-a...

Also, children (for example) living near train tracks, having their sleep disrupted by train horns, all hours at the night, is extremely detrimental.

koyanisqatsi2• 4 years ago

It's been known for a while that high noise levels are correlated with psychological disorders like schizophrenia. It might be related to the fact that noise prevents people from getting a good night's rest.

willhinsa• 4 years ago

This was so obvious it should have been the null hypothesis.

I don’t mean to be glib, but the limitations of science as it’s practiced can lead to less than effective solutions.

For instance, why do we require double blind studies as the only way to “know” something scientifically? Parachutes have never been proven to be effective in a double blind study, after all.

Intuition can be invaluable for protecting us from dangers we can’t prove rationally, or at least can’t prove rationally right now.

It’s not always right, but neither is science. Except we live in a society where science is privileged over every other “way of knowing”. Sure, science updates false beliefs to reality over time, but until it does, people will be using “The Science” to call those people conspiracy theorists spreading misinformation.

I think we as a society need to take a step back and question many bedrock assumptions underpinning our world and examine if they’re really serving us.

Bubble_Pop_22• 4 years ago

That's because unless you are certain about something you better shut up and leave others relying on their own intuition , because they have one too.

blueprint• 4 years ago

because people are greedy and if they can find a way to keep polluting the earth and drinking their high fructose corn syrup then they will keep doing so

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

For studies like these, is there an accepted list of what to control for, or is that approach rife for p-hacking by accident?

E.g. controlling for family structure finds that children of divorce face statistically worse off than those with a stable two parent household.

Is it politically ‘okay’ for scientists to control for these variables when studying toxins or does the fact that poverty and dirty water pipes also correlate to divorce mean that they can’t?

bjourne• 4 years ago

Why do you believe that it wouldn't be "politically 'okay'"? Are you "just asking questions"? :)

oifjsidjf3• 4 years ago

> The mystery behind the astronomical rise in neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s could be caused by exposure to environmental toxins that are omnipresent yet poorly understood, leading doctors warn.

Keto/low carb/and especially fasting+lowcarb was shown to help in many of these diseases.

This article smells like misdirection away from sugar which is a poison which our kids eat in insane quantaties.

It's because of fructose (sugar) that fatty liver disease and T2 diabetes, which was once a disease that only appeared in adult alchoholics, now also happens in children and non-alchoholic adults: ~1980 was the 1st known case of a kid getting fatty liver.

One study found a quick way to eliminate fatty liver in kids: replacing 10% to 15% of carb calories of fructose with glucose.

Fat + fructose is also particulary dangerous, though the issue is not fat but fructose, it's just that when you combine them the negative effects of fructose get much, much more severe.

What does alzheimer and cancer have in common? Both cells have damaged mitchochondria. The difference between neurons and non-neuron cells in other parts of the body is that neurons do not have the ability to use the Warburg effect since they are missing some glycolictic machinery in order for that to happen. This is why neurons cannot go "full cancer" like other cells in the body and just "die peacefully": BUT that deaths might then create negative side effects later.

One video below clearly shows that cancer is NOT caused by mutations of the nucleus of the cell, so this theory seems to be totaly wrong. It seems to be related to damaged mitochondria due to way too much fructose and glucose.

This ties in well why people had total cancer remission with water fasting + keto.

Also many people have that amyloid plaque in the brain and yet have zero dementia, so there goes the amyloid plaque theory.

In a way you could say that all of these diseases are "diabetes of the cells", just expressed in different forms.

High sugar load also causes high blood pressure through uric acid production -> this blocks N20 production in blood vesseles -> and there goes your ability to regulate blood pressure out through the window.

(I myself cured my own high blood pressure just be elimnating all processed sweets, I still eat tons of salt, I experimented with ~10 to 20g of salt per day and still had a blood pressure in the ~125/75 range, but before on processed sweets it was ~145/95).

Overconsumption of fructose (therefore sugar) seems to be the main cause. Even if you remove fructose (and sugar) from the human diet we humans never ate a high carb diet until the last 10k years ago when we started growing grains.

While glucose (eg starchy food like oats and potatoes) is less damaging than fructose (thus sugar) it's still not harmless.

Those who are interested in this topic can view these sources:

One can also find examples of full cancer remision in these links (TLRD: water fasting for ~5-7 days than a keto diet). One can more examples of this on the net.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXiQgTZZqPg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK0BkTPUGQY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJQn6WZGAQ0

Melatonic• 4 years ago

You have some good points here but I think you may be missing the middle link - sugar is bad (and can be proven in the short term) but my personal theory is that one of the contributing factors to alzheimers (not necessarily the sole cause) is a yet to be identified autoimmune disorder. And overconsumption of sugar (and also lack of proper prebiotic fibers) will greatly mess up peoples immune systems through the gut bacteria pathway.

oifjsidjf3• 4 years ago

> is a yet to be identified autoimmune disorder

These things didn't exist ~120 years ago. So even if it as autoimmune disease it's caused by something new: and this all started (and can be healed to a certain or complete degree) via sugar elimination.

So "autoimmune disease" is downstream from sugar consumption.

Also, most of what we call "autoimmune disease" is BS: eg when they say that T1 diabetes is autoimmune they actually found damaged protein in the pancreas cells and the immune system was actually saving the pancrease from those damaged proteins.

But if the diet is bad those damaged proteins will keep being shuffled there: so it's not the immune system that hurts you: it's the chronic poisoning of tissue with stuff that should not be there -> then over time the immune system does some colleteral damage which compounds due to the chronic toxicity -> so the problem is chronic toxicity, not "autoimmune".

The same is true for arthritis: you can find stuff that should not be in the joint capsule there for people with arthtiris: the immune system then over time does some damage as it tries to save the joint from the foreign bodies which are chronicaly accumulated.

TLDR: autoimmune disease is mostly pure BS, it's chronic toxicity. It's just that we know how to detect white blood cells (WBC) betters in the blood than other (yet unknown) substances.

BUt just because you see a higher WBC count doesn't mean it's autoimmune: it's just that you can't find the real reason why WBC are activated.

About the gut: modern processed food is so unnatural that it destroys the gut barrier -> so again, not an autoimmune disease, but a pure food induced disease.

The stuff starts leaking from the gut into the blood which poisons the body (and the liver primarly, but from the liver it spreads into the blood).

sdeep272• 4 years ago

What’s your take on non processed high sugar food? Fruits, honey, etc.

I’m someone that is very anti processed foods but generally ok with sugar. I wonder what the overlap is.

oifjsidjf3• 4 years ago

Honey can be common in some parts of the planet, yes. Honey is also partially seasonal, there is less of it at some time + they didn't have artifical bee hives that would produce tons of honey.

Fruit on the other hand: 1) is seasonal 2) modern fruit is totaly different than fruits ~200 years ago: most fruit in nature had hardly any sugars in it: only the modern fruits have. So modern fruit should be thought of as a severely modified form of plants: they didn't exist and were not eaten 200 years ago in the current massive-sugar-form + were only consumed seasonaly since they couldn't ship it around the world in a few days or weeks.

TLDR: fruit was non-sweet, from what I know (might be wrong) berries are the only ancient-like fruits nowadays (10k years ago). There were grapes etc..yes..but if you ate homegrown old-school grapes you'd know they can be very sour actually, often not sweet at all.

sdeep272• 4 years ago

At the risk of sounding like a quack, I also wonder about the ubiquity of wireless radiation and it’s effect (as it’s rise also matches this rise). I’m less concerned about Wi-Fi router signals because of radiation dissipation at proximity, but I’d love to see more studies on devices we use that do not benefit from the inverse square law. Specifically AirPods or other Bluetooth devices that travel directly between the ears with no distance.

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

Does the sun bath us in RF power across a huge spectrum far beyond what is measured for cellular/wifi/broadcast etc?

titzer2• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radio_emission

radicaldreamer• 4 years ago

Not convinced that non-ionizing radiation is anything to worry about, but I think one argument is that life evolved with solar radiation as a baseline, but has not yet adapted to artificial sources of non-ionizing radiation.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

Anti-RF people claim that higher power and higher frequency are both bad, but they never explain why TVs are OK when their frequencies are way higher and their power levels are absolutely outrageous compared to radios.

lynguist• 4 years ago

Radiation is easy:

There is ionizing radiation (that affects matters as it travels through it) and non-ionizing radiation (that doesn’t affect matters as it travels through it).

X-ray is of the first kind. Decay radiation is of the first kind.

Wireless communications radio is of the second kind.

You should really focus on pollution and not on non-issues. Btw: air pollution killed more people over the same period than did Covid.

titzer2• 4 years ago

Microwaves are non-ionizing but can cause localized heating, ala the Microwave oven. But the amount of power needed to raise any amount of tissue appreciable amounts is very high.

marginalia_nu2• 4 years ago

This is sort of a naive dichotomy of radiation. Ionizing radiation is unique in that it can ionize particles, which is bad, but ionization isn't the only way you can affect matter that is bad.

If you put a bug under a magnifying glass on a sunny day you're exposing it to non-ionizing radiation. Ask the bug whether only ionizing radiation is harmful.

Here's non-ionizing radiation affecting metal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i2OVqWo9s0

Does this mean all non-ionizing radiation is bad? That 5G vaccines cause covid antennas? Of course not. That's ridiculous. But it's also ridiculous to brush off all non-ionizing radiation as harmless.

whatshisface2• 4 years ago

Nobody has ever made a single (plausible) suggestion of how that might work. Molecules have radiofrequency spectra inside of the high magnetic fields of NMR machines, not out in the open. It would be a major scientific discovery to find a protein or something that could work as a radio antenna, and due to the sizes involved relative to the wavelengths, I am not sure if that would even be possible.

(To answer people talking about heating: Yes, you can microwave food to cook it. But as far as I know you can only cook it - because you're coupling with large-scale modes that have no structure relative to the arrangement of tissues in the food.)

hypefi• 4 years ago

I have become sensitive to EMFs from electrical devices these last years.

Because it is a biophysics subject, the amount of variables is very high in order to detect the impact of radiation on nervous system easily, food, amount of sleep, stress, psychological state, overall health, environmental toxins, amount of radiation all enter into the equation which makes it almost impossible to pinpoint the EMFs. But still, for me, (one data point) I can clearly see that when I am not around EMF radiation anymore my overall state is better.

Red_Leaves_Flyy• 4 years ago

Have you been diagnosed by a licensed board certified doctor? Maybe Move to green bank?

koyanisqatsi2• 4 years ago

Microplastics are now found in human breast milk. The implications of this on physical development are not yet fully understood and will not be for a while but the fact that the Flynn effect is now in reverse should be an indicator of long term consequences.

Native Americans were by and large much healthier than their European couterparts who lived in civilized squalor. Pollution from industrial activity is now spread out across the planet evenly enough that it is impossible to escape. Children born today will have synthetic chemicals in their bloodstream because of all the past industrial activity and there is nothing anyone can do about it at this point.

AbrahamParangi2• 4 years ago

The funny thing about conspiracy theories is that they can be mutually exclusive, almost entirely wrong, and still be approximately right.

Maybe it’s the seed oils, maybe it’s the sugar, or the processed carbs, or the fluoride. Maybe it’s the vaccines, or the air pollution, or the water pollution. Maybe the lack of nutrients in our food or the endocrine disrupting chemicals in our plastics.

Regardless, we’ve made tremendous unintentional changes to the chemical environment that we inhabit and the fact is that we lack the measurement precision to tease out the effects from the noise on timescales shorter than a human lifetime.

Perhaps the real conspiracy theory is not that we’re being poisoned by something in particular but rather that we’re being poisoned and we have no idea by what and maybe won’t know for a hundred years and this is just the cost of industrial society.

Bakary• 4 years ago

We don't have enough studies or evidence, but we do have our subjective physical experience. And that pretty much tells us what is healthy or not for the most part. Our back aches when we sit for too long. We feel depressed when we doomscroll and sit inside. We feel like shit after eating processed food. We can sense that plastic isn't great. We know noise over long periods of time drives people crazy. We feel the rush and crash of our glycemic index.

It's like when we pretend that our ancestors had no idea smoking was bad. They weren't stupid and could instantly deduce that inhaling smoke was not great for you. Later on, we got a more precise idea and probably the same will happen with our current problems. In the intervening time, however, we can pretty much deduce what is wrong other than the more diffuse threats such as lead or radon.

MiguelX413• 4 years ago

I don't see how those are conspiracy theories.

pjkundert2• 4 years ago

Try introducing evidence supporting some of them.

On HN, the purple-haired priesthood will quickly [flagged] you, because your claims are not in line with orthodoxy and doctrine supporting $LATEST_THING.

It's quite astonishing to behold.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 4 years ago

just the cost of industrial society

It's just the cost of favoring corporate profit over the well-being of people. The rhetoric above was invented by the same assholes who convinced us plastic recycling mattered.

AbrahamParangi2• 4 years ago

Point to a communist society that did a better job. These chemicals are the metabolic waste of the modern world. Probably inevitable in aggregate if not on a case-by-case basis.

whatshisface2• 4 years ago

Autoimmune disorders are usually caused when a hidden genetic susceptibility combines with an environmental trigger to create antibodies that are cross-reactive with yourself. The greater the chemical diversity in your environment, the more genetic susceptibilities will be triggered. The greater the difference between the modern and historical chemical environments, the less effective evolution will have been at making sure those susceptibilities didn't make it to you. Exposure to thousands of diverse, evolutionary novel, otherwise-harmless chemicals is the worst-case scenario for autoimmunity.

Exposure to environmental toxins may be root of rise in neurological disorders

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