Focus on Prevention: How to Determine Your Body Burden

March 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It’s difficult to know what specific steps you can take to reduce your exposure to hidden toxins if you don’t know the different possible ways you are being exposed. Getting a handle on your body burden requires getting your blood, urine, and possibly hair tested for the presence of these substances. As of right now, there are no formal tests or reliable standards for measurement and even less hard information is available on how to reduce your body burden let alone how to the chemicals out. Most of what we know about body burdens of contaminants comes from limited studies of a few contaminants, conducted by government agencies on selected groups of people.

Monitoring the presence of certain chemicals in a community for example can help identify pollutants present in that community that may be adversely affecting the health of the population in that community. But there’s no definitive way to determine how or how much they are being impacted by the exposures.

This is obviously a growing area of concern so eventually there will be better standards for measuring and determining not only what your body burden is but how you can go about lowering it. In the meantime, try this What’s in You? Online Body Burden Assessment. While it doesn’t give you specific steps you can take to lower your burden, it does give you an idea of where you stand relative to the average American with respect to some key substances.

Just going through the process of filling out this questionnaire will raise your IQ in this area by making you aware of products you use that might be adding to your burden –everything from personal care and household cleaning products, to non-stick cookware, to how long you sit in front of a computer monitor or television everyday, all provide a clues about how much potentially toxic exposure. Very eye-opening I must say! I scored 315 out of 794 which is lower than average. While that’s encouraging, there were still some areas that came to my attention that I need to work on!

There is one caveat in that even if your body burden is in line with the average or higher, there’s no way of knowing what the health impact of that is. If you follow the precautionary principle of better safe than sorry then an average or higher than average ranking should be a wake up call to make some changes. There are safer, healthier alternatives to a lot of the products out there that are being commonly used and there are simple changes and adjustments you can make to your routines that will help!

For more information on Body Burden, check out these resources:

If you take the online assessment, please share with me your scores and what you learned in the process.

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Focus on Prevention: What is Your Body Burden?

March 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

You’ve probably noticed that my focus for the past week or so has been on prevention. Taking pro-active preventive measures to protect yourself from unnecessary harm –first in the arena of personal care and beauty, then in the area of medicine consumption. Because those are areas that you have a lot more control over and are relatively easy to manage.

But now I’d like to focus on areas that are hidden sources of trouble and that are a little more difficult to manage –mainly exposure to environmental toxins—because in many cases they are difficult to detect. One indicator of how much you’re being affected by exposure to toxic or potentially toxic substances, and how that might impact your health is something called your “body burden.”

What is your body burden? It’s a measurement of the total amount of synthetic chemicals, heavy metals, and other substances that build up in your body over time –starting with exposures you had as a fetus in the womb.

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tests the “body burden” of chemicals every two years, finds the average American now has 116 synthetic compounds in her body, including dioxin (produced by burning plastic), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (found in auto exhaust) and organochlorine pesticides (found in farming areas).

Recent studies have detected these pesticides, plastics and polymers not only in umbilical cord blood, but also in the placenta, human milk and the bloodstreams and body fat of infants. Though some of these chemicals pass through body systems in a matter of days, some maintain a long-term presence because exposure is constant. Exposures add up, as they say.

Scientists say women are especially sensitive to synthetic chemicals because these substances can interfere with female hormone cycles and because they adhere to body fat that is more prevalent in women than in men.

Voluntary bio-monitoring programs are key to driving the scientific research to determine and ultimately eliminate or limit unnecessary exposures. However programs like this take time and given what we already know and are constantly discovering, it would be prudent to start embracing “best practices” now rather than waiting for conclusive evidence –at which point the damage for many may be irreversible.

Health advocates are encouraging consumers to shun pesticides, remove outdoor shoes in the house, choose fragrance- and toxin-free products, use baby bottles that are free of a carcinogenic chemical called bisphenol-A and press authorities for stricter laws and more studies.

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