Problematic Pesticides

You know what I find strange?  How people will go to great lengths to make sure their water is free of any and all chemicals, yet they don’t go to the same lengths to make sure their produce is chemical-free.

Granted, organic farmers aren’t hurting.  More people are buying organic today than they were 20 to 30 years ago, and that’s largely because more people are aware of our pesticide plague and how their linked to an array of diseases and conditions like non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, sarcomas, low-weight newborns and stillborn babies.

But the risks don’t end there, because we’re learning more and more about pesticides and their ties to other health risks.  The latest?  How pesticides affect our thyroid glands.  And not in a good way.

Unless you have hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism, you probably don’t even know what the thyroid gland does or where it’s located.  Located in the neck, the thyroid gland basically serves as the body’s energy regulator.  It works with metabolism in controlling how quickly the body converts food into energy for use.  But for a great many people (mainly women), the thyroid gland underperforms, meaning that it doesn’t produce enough hormone for energy conversion to take place.  If it’s not treated, hypothyroidism can cause obesity, joint pain, even heart disease (there’s also something called hyperthyroidism, in which the body produces too much thyroid hormone.  This leads to unintended weight loss and sapped energy leve.

And as researchers from the University of Nebraska Medical Center have discovered, overexposure to pesticide residue increases a person’s risk for both of these thyroid diseases.

Researchers discovered the link after looking at women married to farmers, or men who used pesticides during their employ.

After analysis of 44 different pesticides and 16,500 women living in America’s heartland, they found that women married to men who used pesticides were about 1.5 times more likely to have some form of thyroid disease (hypothyroidism was far more common than hyperthyroidism).  Overall, 12.5 percent of the women had some form of thyroid disease.

The most poisonous pesticides were in the organochloride insecticide class, which include pesticides like aldrin, DDT, lindane, and chlordane (fortunately, aldrin has been banned from usage since the late 1970s.  However, because pesticides like aldrin can remain in soils for years after long-term use, it still remains in the food supply).

Studies like these reconfirm to me why it’s so important to always buy organic.  Yes, organic is more expensive than conventional produce, but the negative health effects that result from a lifetime spent around pesticide-poisoned produce makes going organic all the more important.

For more information on what you can do to treat hypothyroidism all naturally, check this out.

Sources
mayoclinic.com
en.wikipedia.org
caps.20m.com
newsmaxhealth.com