I’m trying to determine how to get the most bang for my buck. Obviously, avoiding toxins and preventing problems is my first choice, but you can’t avoid everything. There wouldn’t be a single food left to eat! And we’d have to walk around with gas masks.
Bioaccumulative chemicals.
From Get the Facts: Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic Chemicals (PBTs):
… Many bioaccumulative chemicals are fat-soluble so that they tend to reside primarily in fat deposits or in the fatty substances in blood. This explains why fat-soluble bioaccumulative chemicals are often found at elevated levels in fat-rich breast milk.[6] But bioaccumulative substances may also be deposited elsewhere, including bone, muscle, or the brain. …
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Examples
A partial list of known PBTs includes: anthracene, asbestos, cadmium and cadmium compounds chloroalkanes, C10-13 (short-chain chlorinated paraffins), p-Dichlorobenzene, hexabromobiphenyl, hexabromocyclododecane, hexachlorobutadiene, lead and lead compounds, mercury and mercury compounds, musk xylene, pentachlorobenzene, perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, perfluorooctane sulfonyl fluoride, phenanthrene, polybrominated biphenyls, polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs), polychlorinated terphenyls, tetrabromobisphenol A, 1,2,3-Trichlorobenzene, 1,2,4-Trichlorobenzene, 1,2,3,4- Tetrachlorobenzene, and 1,2,4,5-Tetrachlorobenzene.
Many polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are also PBTs. These chemicals were phased out of commerce in the late 1970s because they are persistent, bioaccumulative, and increase the risk of cancer. Since then, we have learned that PCBs also interfere with normal brain development in children. However, because they are persistent and bioaccumulative, most people in the US still have detectable levels of PCBs in their blood although levels are gradually declining. …
There’s MORE! Please read the entire page. An excellent overview of the countless toxins we’re subjected to.
What percentage of the national stupidity can be attributed to toxins affecting the brain?
Fortunately, many toxins are expelled by the liver, kidney, lymphatic system, skin and lungs. I try to avoid toxins in food and water, don’t take prescription drugs, rarely drink alcohol, and don’t smoke cigarettes (weed at night), but there’s nothing I can do about the dust storms and smoke from fires.
I wish someone analyzed the dust, especially since it might contain pesticides from all those new farms in Red Lake off Antares. There’s likely Valley Fever virus and maybe Hunta and who knows what else in the dust.
I’ve seen more dust storms THIS year than in the previous 21 years combined. “Someone” ought to inquire with the Mohave County Health Department about that.
Toxin Response
Machine learning approach sheds light on how the liver and kidneys respond to toxins
Exposure to potentially harmful chemicals is a reality of life. Our ancestors, faced with naturally occurring toxins, evolved mechanisms to detoxify and expel damaging substances. In the modern world, our bodies regularly process chemicals, from medicines and food additives to agricultural and industrial chemicals, to protect our tissues from harm.
As the organs responsible for metabolizing and excreting toxic chemicals, the liver and kidneys bear the brunt of this exposure and are at the highest risk for toxin-induced damage. Understanding how these organs respond to, or are damaged by, toxins is of particular importance in pharmaceutical development and public health research.
Now, Harvard Medical School investigators have developed a machine learning approach using high-quality, large-scale animal model data that sheds new light on the biology of the liver and kidneys after toxin exposure.
I strongly object to torturing animals.
We should be focusing on the effects of toxins on people — diagnose, document, analyze …
The findings, published in Molecular Systems Biology in February, reveal new mechanisms of toxin vulnerability and tolerance that may be broadly relevant to studies of human disease, the authors said.
Their analysis—based on a publicly available data set of the effects of 160 different chemicals on physiology, histopathology and gene expression in rats—revealed nine distinct patterns of response to chemical exposure that the authors termed “disease states.” These states shed light on the dynamics of toxin-induced liver and kidney injury, including defense mechanisms and novel biomarkers, and provide insights into molecular signals that cause toxin-induced appetite suppression and weight loss.
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Tolerance transition
Unexpectedly, the team found that some injurious states transitioned to this defensive response over time. Increased toxin tolerance was strongly associated with increased resistance to ferroptosis in the liver, but not to other forms of cell death. A better understanding of this process may help uncover ways to target ferroptosis and improve the liver’s ability to tolerate drugs.
“Often, patients have to stop taking medication because of adverse side effects and wait for their bodies to recover before they can begin again,” Shimada said. “This gives us a starting point to study tolerance in a controlled format, and perhaps find ways to improve dosing schedules or even pretreat patients so that they are better able to cope with toxicity and suffer less tissue injury.” …
Interesting. If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger.
I say “no” to medications unless absolutely necessary. Not once in my life were pharmaceuticals necessary. Update: I had pneumonia a few times when I was a little kid. Don’t even know what meds I got.
… They found that the expression activity of insulin-like growth factor-1 (Igf1) and three other associated genes were strongly up- or down-regulated. In the data set, rate of food consumption was most strongly linked with body weight over time, as expected, which could be partially explained by the role these genes play in blood sugar levels. These signals appear to collectively mediate organ-to-body communication as part of the toxin response, the authors said.
The team also identified a gene, Gdf15, that was linked to appetite suppression. The protein encoded by this gene is known to regulate feeding by acting on receptors in the brain stem. Increased Gdf15 gene expression activity, particularly in the kidneys, was a consistent response to tissue injury. The pathway may represent a novel mechanism for appetite suppression and toxin-induced weight loss, but further studies are needed to clarify its role, the authors said.
Can you see the $$$$$$? Striving for the ability to put people on more pharmaceuticals and maybe find that magic bullet for weight loss.
Because the data set is based on animal models, the findings are not immediately applicable in humans, Shimada said. In addition, the computational analyses revealed statistical clusters of toxin-induced changes in the kidneys and liver but are not inclusive of other organ systems and likely miss responses unique to one drug or do not share similarities with other responses.
Doesn’t THAT suck!
However, it is a very interesting study and now we know a lot more about 160 chemicals and their impact on rats:
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/msb.20188636#F1
Isn’t it time to look at humans?
Why don’t we have a national database with DNA and medical data on millions of people?
I realize there are privacy issues, especially concerning insurance and employment, but with proper privacy legislation, many would volunteer to share specific and limited data for research. After all, few people care that Ancestry and others sell their data to biotech companies:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/genomics/google-s-calico-snags-access-to-ancestry-com-data-to-find-genetic-causes-of-long-life
Just read that doctors’ check-in data is monetized by the company providing the software to market you.
Why doesn’t every patient get a complete DNA test?
The government could even make a profit from the data sales while ensuring privacy compliance. I’d like to see a lot more government research to be shared and licensed instead of biotech companies getting more patents.
The data should be available to researchers without personal identifiers.
Patients should be able to opt-in to be contacted for further testing, studies, etc.
And leave those poor rats alone.
