Why fast?
This famous photo by George Silk for Life Magazine in 1948 featured model Kay Heffernon posing in a cloud of DDT with a hotdog, a soda and a plastic straw. The publicity stunt was shot at Jones Beach State Park, New York. It was intended to convince the American public that DDT spraying was safe. It wasn’t safe at all. DDT is a known carcinogen. A recent trans-generational study showed DDT exposure increased the risk of breast cancer four-fold. DDT has also been linked to Alzheimer’s dementia. Though DDT is now banned in the United States, its half-life in aquatic environments is 150 years, so a lot of the DDT that was sprayed all over everywhere in the United States—including farmlands, public beaches, parklands and suburban neighborhoods—is still around. Some of it is inside us.
Since 1948, many new pesticides, herbicides and fungicides have been released into the environment, along with thousands of petrochemicals. Heavy metals like mercury are released into the environment from mining and burning coal, and from dental mercury amalgam fillings. Chemical additives and preservatives have been added to the food chain and to personal care products. Some estimates are as high as 10 million tons of toxins released into the environment every year. That’s more than 21 billion pounds of chemicals dispersed by wind and rain or dumped or washed downstream into waterways and onto farm soils every year, year after year after year. What are we thinking when we say “we don’t know” what is causing our chronic illness epidemic? Are we thinking, ”I don’t want to know?”
Sadly, our very human problem of environmental contamination now includes a legacy of uranium mining, plutonium manufacturing, nuclear weapons testing, nuclear waste dispersion and catastrophic nuclear power plant accidents that have been normalized to the point that the news media hardly mentions them. But they are real. The synergistic effects of all these toxins are becoming starkly clear. One study in Ireland, by scientists worried about radioactive contamination of the Irish Sea from radioactive waste dumping from the British Plutonium Reprocessing Facility at Sellafield, found a correlation to vascular dementia when radioactive Cesium 137, a common radioactive by-product with a half-life of 30 years, is combined with the common agricultural herbicide paraquat, known to cause Parkinson’s disease.
What protects us from all these toxic substances in our environment? Our humble liver, kidneys, colon and bladder do their best. These organs of detoxification and elimination of waste filter toxic substances in our blood, metabolize them, and excrete them from our body before they cause permanent damage to our heart, brain, skeleton and other organs. Yet how do we treat these humble servants that make up our core Self?
Too often, rather than nurture them and take care of them, we Americans tend to stress them out even more by overusing pharmaceutical drugs including over-the-counter pain relievers, prescription narcotic pain killers, steroids, anti-anxiety and anti-depression psychiatric drugs, sleeping pills and antibiotics. Because Americans also overuse alcohol, many people mix alcohol with pharmaceutical drugs—a combination guaranteed to toxify your liver and kidneys and cause chronic constipation. Finally, we Americans tend to drink everything but water. And to top it off, Americans overeat sugary, processed, packaged, and nutrient-depleted foods that are hard to digest, constipating, and often allergenic and inflammatory because they’ve been doused in pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.
So this is why we fast, and why we need to fast more today than ever before. Because we’ve all to some extent been Kay Heffernon, the model who posed for the DDT marketing campaign back in 1948. We’ve all pretended that dangerous environmental toxins were safer than they actually are. We’ve all been there. Pretending that we didn’t know when we sensed something was wrong. Practicing deliberate ignorance. And trusting against our gut intuition and common sense that something was safe when it wasn’t safe at all, just because somebody said it was safe. And so we allowed ourselves to believe. For this reason, the healing we need to return to true state of wellbeing isn’t just physical. It’s also mental, emotional and spiritual.
