Taking the Scenic Route

While reading about Autism Spectrum Disorders and dietary interventions, I came across a line of thought that just really spoke to me and has far reaching implications.

Remember the stories of the early coal miner safety precautions of taking a canary down into the mines with you?  When the canaries start keeling over, the miners know it is time to get out fast before they are affected by the gases.  It has been suggested that the sudden rise in Autism could be the “canary” signaling the environmental toxins are getting to a critical point.  Right now, the majority of people aren’t overtly affected, health-wise, to the effects, but our weakest humans are being affected.  It should be a big wake up call that we need to clean up our act fast or the epidemic is going to become much worse.

Some antidotal notes:  When I was a kid, I was allergic to onions.  I know that I am the only one in my class of 30 kids with any kind of food allergies/intolerances.  At any given time, I was one of only 2 or 3 in the school of 100-120 students (K-12) with food issues.  (there was a diabetic girl 2 years younger, and I assume there had to be 1 or 2 more over the years judging by the number of “special trays” the lunch ladies made over the years, depending on what was being served.

From what I am seeing IRL and on message boards, you would be hard pressed to find groups of kids that size with no food issues, or behavioral and health issues that can be linked to food problems.  It seems like almost every family has at least one person, if not the entire family, affected by food problems.

I don’t think there is one single cause of this.  I think it the cumulative effect of pesticides & herbicides, lack of genetic diversity in crops, water and air pollution, use of antibiotics (which have benefits, but can also cause yeast overgrowth in our guts which can cause malabsorption, among other things), and the massive amounts of processed foods that are consumed (which magnify the effects of the toxins because they lack the nutrients our bodies need to counteract the toxins).  I wonder if things like ASD (includes ADD & ADHD), Celiac, diabetes and whole hosts of other issues that are now much more widespread (no, I don’t have stats to back that up, just appears that way to me & I don’t feel motivated to research the specifics right now) because our environmental insults have reached a breaking point where humans can’t handle them very well any more.

Food for thought. 

Dang, this whole ASD thing is going to end up turning me into a full blown environmentalist yet.  lol.