INTRODUCTION

Everything Is Connected

O ur health and that of the planet are inextricably linked. These days,
many of us are concerned about the environment, and many of us are
also worrying about the sickness of a beloved relative or friend, or indeed
of our own bodies. But we may not have realised that the two concerns are
closely connected.
Good medical practice requires thinking about the underlying causes of
illness and, as a physician, I have spent decades seeing the direct effects of
environmental pollution on people’s health. We all know now that nutrition,
exercise, relaxation and sleep are crucial determinants of our health, but very
little has been written, outside of learned journals, about the devastating
impact that pollution is having on our bodies. The purpose of this book is
to close that gap, to translate the relevant science into ordinary English, and
to demonstrate how pollutants get into us, how they make us sick and how
we can avoid them as individuals and, collectively, stop them at source. There
is so much we can do improve our health and that of our children, once
we become aware of the numerous preventable sources of environmental
toxicity. And everything we do to help ourselves will help planet Earth as
well; the pollution that is damaging us is equally damaging our wildlife, from
monkeys to mosses, butterflies to corals to oak trees.
Do you know, or have you ever known, a person with cancer? That’s a
question I often ask a room full of people when I’m giving a talk. Usually,
almost every hand in the room goes up. This is profoundly shocking, but we
have got used to it; cancer has become familiar, normalised, normal. One in
two of us, we are told now, will be diagnosed with it. But if I had asked that
question of a room full of a hundred comparable people, say, fifty years ago,
maybe twenty hands would have gone up. A century ago, perhaps five or six
hands. Two hundred years ago, maybe one hand, or none. It’s really hard for
2 Getting Healthy in Toxic Times

us to notice that which has become ordinary. Ecologists call this the ‘shifting
baseline syndrome’,1 meaning that we can only compare the state of today’s
wildlife – or human health – with what we remember of the past, and that
cannot be longer ago than our own lifespan.
It’s not just cancer; the situation is similar with other degenerative dis-
eases. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, autism, arthritis,
asthma, heart disease, mental illness and infertility are all increasing at aston-
ishing rates. In the UK we have three million people with diabetes, mostly
type 2 diabetes, which used to be called ‘mature onset diabetes’, but now we
are seeing it in younger and younger people, even in children. One in three of
us suffer from heart disease; nearly a million have dementia in Britain alone.
I have argued in my first book, Staying Alive in Toxic Times: A Seasonal
Guide to Lifelong Health,2 (henceforth referred to as SAITT) that this dra-
matic increase is not, contrary to what we are often told, anything to do
with ageing. Cancer rates are going up fastest among children. And we are
not, in fact, living significantly longer than previous generations, we
are just living sicker,3 with our last years becoming a prolonged twilight of
disability and suffering. Yet it should be possible for all of us to live a full,
healthy life, eventually dying peacefully, simply of old age. This is not an
unreasonable aspiration; it is our birthright.
Our genes only change very, very slowly, over aeons. The vast majority
of people suffering today with a chronic, degenerative disease such as Alz-
heimer’s did not have an ancestor with that disease. The sheer speed with
which chronic degenerative diseases have increased, over just a very few gen-
erations, tells us clearly that we are dealing with environmental, not genetic,
factors. It’s our environment that has changed so rapidly that the forces of
biological evolution just can’t keep up. As the Lancet Commission on pollu-
tion and health said: ‘Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease
and death in the world today.’4

What’s Got into You?

When I first started researching this book, I went into a large bookshop in
central London that has many floors. ‘Health’ was on one floor, ‘Environ-
ment’ on another. (‘Health’ and ‘Medicine’ were also on different floors;
 Everything Is Connected 3

that’s another story.) But we have to join these dots: whatever’s in the air,
it’s in your lungs and in your bloodstream. Whatever gets into the water:
you’re drinking it. Whatever is sprayed on the soil: it’s in the crops and in the
food on your plate. Whichever nutrients are missing from the soil after years
of intensive farming: they’re missing from your dinner. (What farmers do,
I predict, will affect our health more profoundly than anything doctors do.)
So, we have a health crisis and we have an environmental crisis; the roots
of the two problems are the same, and the solutions are the same. The causes
of our frightening epidemic illnesses are not unknown. As I shall show in this
book, we are eating the causes, we are drinking the causes, we are inhaling
the causes and some of us are rubbing the causes into our skin. Industrialised
agriculture and the petrochemical industry are damaging our nutrition and
poisoning our atmosphere, our rivers, our oceans and our soil, and therefore
our bodies. We are not and can never be separate from our mother the earth;
when we pollute the planet, we pollute ourselves. But it is possible to stop
doing both, to heal ourselves and the earth, and this book explains how.
On a small scale, I have seen this work in my practice of ecological med-
icine, as have my colleagues. We identify the environmental and nutritional
roots of a person’s illness and enable them to recover by changing several
elements of the way they live, including what they eat, what they drink,
what’s in their home and what they put on their skin. (What they inhale
outdoors is of course harder to change; if they live on a polluted main road
the solutions are mostly collective and political rather than individual – but
we’ll come to that in chapter 4.) In making these changes to benefit their
own health, people are contributing to the health of the planet too. Here we
see an example in the case of ‘Ellie’. (In all the case histories in this book, the
identity of the patient has been disguised, and their story used with their or
their parent’s permission.)

ELLIE’S STORY
An eight-month-old baby was brought to see me, covered in eczema. I’ll
call her Ellie. Her skin was red, raw, sore, even bleeding in places. Her
hands were encased in little white cotton mittens to stop her scratching.
4 Getting Healthy in Toxic Times

Her mum was covering her in a moisturising cream, prescribed by the

GP, several times a day. I got out my magnifying glass and read the ingre-
dients list on the pack: paraffin (two types), parabens (two types) and a
few other nasties. These are petrochemicals, cheap by-products derived
from crude oil. Some of them are potentially carcinogenic, and they also
pose a serious fire risk.5 And the cream wasn’t even working. But what
alternatives were there? Plenty.
We found out the cause of the eczema – her mum was eating several
foods to which Ellie was reacting allergically. (Details of how to do this
kind of nutritional detective work are in SAITT.) Ellie’s mum altered her
diet, breastfeeding proceeded more smoothly than before, and the tummy
ache and irritability that had also bothered Ellie disappeared as well. Her
skin cleared up within a few weeks. Occasionally, Ellie’s mum forgets or
slips up with her diet, so Ellie gets a flare-up, but her mum now uses a
totally natural, herbal cream from a good health food shop; she checks that
there are no petrochemicals in the ingredients list. (There are numerous
herbs that help with eczema, including chickweed, chamomile, calendula,
liquorice root, marshmallow, burdock and evening primrose.)
What has Ellie’s skin cream got to do with the state of the planet?
A lot. Each time we buy a tube of such paraffin-based cream, whether
medicinal or cosmetic – and this stuff is in every chemist’s shop – we
are supporting an industry that is devastating the earth. Wherever they
extract crude oil from beneath the ground, you can’t live there, you
can’t farm there, nothing will grow. The soil and the rivers are poisoned.
Ogoniland in Nigeria is the best-known example of a huge area where
drilling for oil wrecked the land, and the livelihoods and the lives of the
inhabitants. The crude oil that these companies extract goes to make die-
sel, petrol, plastics and pharmaceuticals like Ellie’s skin cream, releasing
greenhouse gases in the process. Learning to use natural, nutritional and
herbal solutions to health problems like Ellie’s eczema is not only better
for the patient, it’s better for the earth – one fewer purchase of a product
that was toxic to the place and people where it was dug up and is eventu-
ally toxic to the end user too.
 Everything Is Connected 5

Most serious illness is multifactorial: it has several contributing compo-

nents rather than just one cause. In ecological medicine, we talk about a
person’s ‘total load’. That ‘load’ may include injury, infection, stress, assorted
nutritional deficiencies and numerous environmental toxins. In treating a
sick person, we need to identify these causal components and reduce each
of them as much as possible, to lower the total load. The focus in this book
is on environmental toxins – pollution – but in practice it isn’t often found
in isolation. So, in the following case history, we will meet ‘Ricky’, whose
illness resulted primarily from two particular types of environmental toxin,
but with lots of other factors, both environmental and nutritional, in the mix.

RICKY ’S STORY
Ricky had been suffering from numbness and pain in his hands and feet,
severe headaches, fatigue and increasingly blurred vision, for about four
months. He had become unable to work because of the headaches, and
unable to drive because of the blurred vision. Naturally, he went to an
optician, who looked worried and immediately referred him to a neur-
ologist. A brain scan resulted in a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS).
Remarkably, he came to see me straight after that; it is far more common
for patients to go through the mill of conventional treatment and suffer
numerous side effects for many years, with little clinical improvement,
before finally consulting a holistic practitioner as a last resort. The fact
that Ricky came to see me only four months after his symptoms began is
one of the reasons his treatment has been so successful.
I always begin by looking for causes, and in this case we were able to
identify the episode that had sparked off the symptoms. Three or four
weeks before the symptoms began, Ricky had had his office, where he
worked in southern Spain, sprayed for an infestation of cockroaches. The
spraying technicians, who wore full protective gear, had warned him not
to go near the office for at least forty-eight hours. However, Ricky had
important work to do and went into his office shortly after the spraying
ended; he spent that day and the following days working there. Within a
few short weeks, his MS began.
6 Getting Healthy in Toxic Times

However, a serious illness like MS usually has many contributing

factors; I suspected that the recent insecticide spraying was only the final
trigger. We identified a lot of other factors that would have predisposed
him to get ill: he had many metal amalgam fillings in his mouth, which
contain the neurotoxin mercury. He ate a lot of tuna – up to two tins
daily, for a quick lunch – that’s more mercury. (We will learn a lot about
mercury in chapter 2: where it comes from, how it gets into us, what it
does to us, and how to get rid of it and thenceforth avoid it.)
Ricky used a lot of artificial sweeteners as well as sugar, ate no healthy
fats, held his mobile phone to his head for many hours a day, slept very
little (‘too busy’), had several nutrient deficiencies, including the crucial
vitamin D, vitamin E, zinc and iodine, and he had additional chemical
exposure from frequent flying. This last effect is increasingly referred to
as ‘aerotoxic syndrome’, and it affects pilots and cabin crew even more
than frequent flyers; it is described in more detail, with a case history,
on pages 263–270 of SAITT. Significantly, Ricky had also had a previous
insecticide exposure when his attic at home was sprayed for wasps’ nests
some years before. He had high fluoride levels too; we’ll find out where
that comes from, what it does to us and what to do about it in chapter 3.
When Ricky came to see me, he had already put himself on Terry
Wahls’ excellent diet for MS. However, I find it a little too strict for most
people, so I added in eggs (organic and free range, of course), good-quality,
cold-pressed, organic vegetable oils (as salad dressing, always unheated)
and avocados, and focused on removing the vast amounts of refined carbo-
hydrates and artificial additives from Ricky’s diet. These had, of course,
been another contributing factor. This was really hard for him – it still is –
but he mostly sticks to it. When he doesn’t, his symptoms return at once,
which tells him the diet is working; lapses can be useful! Advanced tests
showed that Ricky’s mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles in our
cells, were not working well, so I gave him what mitochondria need most:
magnesium, coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), carnitine and B vitamins.
On testing, I found two different insecticides in Ricky’s system, not
surprisingly, and also mercury and cadmium – both neurotoxic metals.
 Everything Is Connected 7

Some of the mercury was actually attached to the gene that makes the
myelin protein. This is highly significant; myelin is the fatty insulation
that coats and protects the nerves, allowing messages to travel between
brain and body. It deteriorates in MS – that’s why Ricky’s hands and feet
had gone numb and his eyesight had become blurred – and repairing
it is crucial to recovery. It has a protein component as well as a fatty
component, and the protein component is the part that the immune
system attacks in people with MS. Multiple sclerosis is an example of
an autoimmune disease, and autoimmunity is like beating yourself up
at the cellular level.
Now, the immune system is very smart; it has kept us humans alive
for hundreds of thousands of years by successfully defending us against
invading microbes. (Most Europeans, Asians and North Africans today
are descended from people who survived the Black Death, while count-
less others around them died.) So, the key question is: why would our
very clever immune system start attacking the tissues of its own body?
This is a question that orthodox medicine does not ask; it just zaps the
immune system with steroids to try to make it stop. However, there is
good reason to suspect that toxic metals like mercury distort the pro-
tein’s structure, making it look alien to the immune system’s patrolling
white blood cells, which then treat it as they would an invading microbe:
they destroy it. Furthermore, insecticides are fat-soluble poisons, so they
make a beeline for fatty tissues in the body, such as the myelin sheath of
the nerves of the central nervous system.
So, my focus was on getting all the toxins out of Ricky’s system, to
give his myelin a chance to normalise. As well as correcting his nutri-
tional deficiencies, I instituted a detoxification programme for him:
very high-dose vitamin C for a few months (as described on page 305 of
SAITT); glutathione (essential for detox – we do make it ourselves, but
some of us, including Ricky, are less able to make it, for genetic reasons);
phosphatidyl choline (PC) liquid for getting rid of fat-soluble toxins like
insecticides; Epsom salts baths (Epsom salts are magnesium sulphate,
and assist with certain of the liver’s detox pathways as well as relaxing
8 Getting Healthy in Toxic Times

the muscles); and, most vital of all, organic vegetable juicing every day
(described on page 298 of SAITT).
After a few months, on my principle of ‘put the good stuff in before
you take the bad stuff out’, Ricky had all his mercury amalgam fillings
removed by a super-safe dentist, using the protocols of the International
Academy for Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT) to prevent further
release of mercury into the system. He bought a water filter, at my
request, so he wasn’t drinking chlorine or any of the other tap water con-
taminants we’ll discover in chapter 3. Finally, we moved on to two more
detox modalities, saunas and colonic hydrotherapy (explained in chapter
7 of SAITT), and I made him promise to avoid all kinds of pesticides
forever; this includes eating organic, strictly and permanently. By the end
of chapter 1, you will understand why this is so vital.
At the third consultation, a few months after his first visit, Ricky’s
energy level and vision were substantially improved, sensation was return-
ing to the numb patches on his hands and feet, and he was sleeping normal
hours. Re-testing showed that the toxic metals and insecticides were almost
gone – and they are now completely gone. By the fourth consult, his eye-
sight had normalised, to the delight and puzzlement of the optician. The
headaches have vanished, and he is essentially back to his former self. BUT
if he stops the good oils or the PC liquid, or he goes back to eating sugar
or refined carbs, he gets ill again – numbness, weakness, pain. Once back
on the regime, he recovers within two weeks. Natural medicine works,
especially if started very early on in an illness. But it is hard work: it takes
dedication from the patient and support and encouragement from those
around him or her; luckily, Ricky has these in plenty.

Good Stuff In, Bad Stuff Out

As you can see from Ricky’s story, getting better is not about EITHER
improving nutrition OR detoxing pollutants – it’s always BOTH. But there
are already countless books out there on nutrition, including my own, and
that’s why it is now time to focus on the Bad Stuff that’s making us ill in vast
numbers: toxic environmental pollution.
 Everything Is Connected 9

The problem with ‘vast numbers’, however, is that they’re hard to relate
to. When it’s your sister who’s got lung cancer, your dad who has just been
diagnosed with dementia or your child who is (God forbid) going through the
ordeal of chemo, how can you possibly focus on the Bigger Picture? It’s quite
natural to put all your energies into the person you love, just doing every-
thing you can to ease the path of that one beloved person. Yet it’s likely that
there are thousands of families going through the exact same misery at the
same time. The cold, dry statistics that are so hard to relate to nevertheless
tell the story of these tragedies, multiplied a thousandfold, a millionfold.
The very essence of tragedy is that it is preventable: it didn’t need to hap-
pen. The purpose of this book is the prevention of such tragedies, through
understanding and action. But I recognise that the last thing you can bear to
hear, if someone you love dearly is dying too soon or losing their capacity to
feed themselves / talk / walk / dance / live freely is that it didn’t need to hap-
pen. Therefore, it is all the more incumbent upon those of us who are alive,
well, still thinking clearly and not currently immersed in nursing a beloved
spouse / child / sibling / parent / friend to learn all we can about the causes
of these multiple tragedies, the causes I demonstrate in this book. Beyond the
dry (but overwhelming) statistics is human pain and, if we clean up our act
and clean up our planet, I believe many, if not most, of these tragedies can
indeed be prevented. It’s not too late.
It may be tempting to put our heads in the sand; but if we can face up to
these problems, and acknowledge that they exist, then we can solve them.

How Well Is Our Environment?

In the chapters that follow, I’m going to discuss pollution as it affects us in the
different realms of earth, water and air – but of course, they are not really
separate realms at all. Air pollution from car fumes, for instance, includes
particulate matter: tiny solid particles that fall through the air and land on
the earth. They also land on the fruit and vegetables displayed outside the
shop on a busy main road. Toxic chemicals discharged into rivers and lakes
find their way onto the land as well as into the sea. Conversely, pesticides
sprayed onto fields of growing crops find their way into the water table.
So do synthetic fertilisers, with disastrous consequences that we’ll come
10 Getting Healthy in Toxic Times

across in chapter 1. As regards the Fire chapters, I’m using the term semi-
metaphorically; it’s about physical rather than chemical pollution: energy in
the form of radiation. There is good light and bad light, as we’ll see.
The whole planet is one joined-up ecosystem, with everything intercon-
nected, just as the human body is. But just as, when teaching anatomy and
physiology, one has to describe the body ‘system by system’ – for example,
the gut and then the circulation, and then the lungs, and so on – while know-
ing full well that it’s all one (and that the interactions between systems are of
key importance), so I need to divide up the topic of pollution somehow, to
make it possible for us to get our heads around it. And I decided against clas-
sifying toxins according to their molecular structure – you’d need a degree in
chemistry to make sense of that, and even then it would be tough!
So, forgive me if there seems to be a certain artificiality in these divisions.
On the other hand, the categories of Earth, Water, Air and Fire go back many
millennia in our shared intellectual history; they’re part of our heritage. And
they make sense as much in the world of physics as in the worlds of folklore,
myth and mysticism.
After Earth, Water, Air and Fire, there is a short chapter about the sur-
prising poisonings of everyday life – what’s affecting you in your own home.
Indoor pollution is incredibly important yet remarkably easy to get rid of
– once you know it’s there. In Appendix I, there is a brief look at our mental
health, which is being as profoundly affected by environmental pollution as is
physical health; the brain is part of the body, after all. Appendix II gives a tiny
sample of the industrial pollution episodes that have profoundly affected the
health of local communities.
In each chapter, I suggest changes you can make to improve your own
health (and that of planet Earth), but please don’t feel you have to make all
the changes at once! Take your time, absorb the information at your own
pace and know that any change you make will make a difference.
This book is about solutions to pollution as much as pollution itself. And
in most sections, I’ll have to outline the problems before I can begin to look at
the existing and potential answers. However, in chapter 1, I’m actually going
to start with some of the major solutions because they are centrally import-
ant, life-enhancing and already happening. So – let’s get down to earth.