Achieving Victory Over A Toxic World

16. Obesity and Toxicity – It’s not just McDonald’s fault

It seems that every day you read another story about the obesity epidemic in America. You go to the local book store and the most popular part is the diet section. Atkins, South Beach, Blood Type, Pritikin, Glycemic Index, and on and on.  The truth be known, most only work for about 10-20% of the people who actually use them and most often, only for the short term.  So why is it so hard to lose weight and more importantly, keep it off?

In 2002, while working with a dear friend who was also the head of nutrition for a prestigious cancer clinic, I came up with an answer (not the answer, no one has that) and it was toxicity. Of this issue, I could (and probably will) right an entire book, but in this setting I will go over my assumptions briefly.

In animal studies there is an observation usually made that as a laboratory rat is exposed to toxins, their metabolic rate drops and their internal temperature goes down as well. As you can imagine, this phenomena occurs in humans as well.  As you have seen in previous chapters, we have been increasing the body load of toxicity in people every year and with so many of us having impaired detoxification pathways, it would seem that body temperatures would follow the pattern exhibited by animal studies.

Guess what?  The pattern fits.  A few years ago, the American Medical Association debated whether to drop the average healthy body temperature of patients from 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit to 98.0 degrees not because it was healthier to be lower but because fewer and fewer people were coming into doctor’s offices with the higher temperature.  So instead of trying to figure out why this was happening, they just moved the norm down.  Kind of like the Jay Leno quote at the top of the page.

What is the mechanism behind this temperature drop and what is its implication in the obesity explosion?  First off, I believe that toxins affect the main cellular energy producing pathway known as the Citric Acid Cycle (aka TCA Cycle or Kreb’s Cycle). From observations I have seen in the results from urinary organic acid tests, I believe that toxins, ranging from heavy metals to petrochemical solvents actually block the entry point into the cycle, primarily stunting the ability of the body to produce energy from carbohydrates.  This inhibition I believe causes a slowdown in our bodies’ resting metabolism.

Here is how it slowly makes us gain weight. First off, not all of the energy we expend is when we are active; our bodies still need energy to keep our systems going.  Suppose we ingest 2,500 calories and our daily activities use up 25% of our intake or 625 of those calories, the remainder of the calories that need to be burned equals 1875.

In a normal (if that even exists today) person, they would burn those last 1875 calories while at rest.  In a toxic person, my estimate is that their chemical load impairs their caloric burn by about 7%.  One-hundred and thirty one calories remain unburned which in turn gets stored.  Do this for one year and you get 47,815 calories left behind (365 days X 131 calories).  Typically if you burn 3,500 calories you lose one pound.  Take those 47,815 calories and divide this by 3,500 and you get

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