Getting Healthy in Toxic Times: An ecological doctor’s prescription for healing your body and the planet

Praise for Getting Healthy in Toxic Times

‘As a food writer who is particularly interested in mental health and environment too, I’ve long been a fan of Dr Jenny Goodman. I think we all know now in 2024 that everything is connected, but where and how do we start in actually improving our health and the planet’s? And in a long-term, sustainable way? HELP! Dr Jenny is back again with her second book – packed to the brim with her medical experience, her fantastic way with words, her empowering practical tips and the scientific research to back it all up.’

Melissa Hemsley, chef and author of Real Healthy

‘Dr Jenny Goodman’s new book is a treasure! It should be required reading in all high schools. The author has first-hand knowledge of her subject matter. Lots of great advice on how to avoid toxic exposures and what to do to restore health once they’ve made you ill while eschewing pharmaceutical drugs. The science is highly accurate but not too technical for the lay public. The book is sprinkled with engaging stories of specific cases and is so timely in this age of pervasive toxic chemicals in our food, water and air.’

Stephanie Seneff, PhD, author of Toxic Legacy

‘Dr Jenny Goodman has a rare ability to communicate complex science in the most easily digestible way. Despite the alarming nature of the subject matter, Getting Healthy in Toxic Times is an easy and compelling read. Dr Goodman tackles what is arguably the most pressing issue we face as humans: the damage we have inflicted on our environment and the inevitable harvest of suffering we are now reaping. At the heart of the message she wants to convey to the public is the appreciation of our utter inseparability from nature, of the fact that we are nature and that damaging our environment is an act of self-harm.

In the interests of our well-being, Dr Goodman tackles multiple thorny issues head-on, bringing a wholesome mix of science and humanity to bear on a situation that she finds simply too urgent to mince her words. This book contains a mass of invaluable information collected together to provide a comprehensive resource to protect the health of our and our family’s health and well-being, and thereby to contribute to the well-being of our environment and all the other people and species depending on it.

Getting Healthy in Toxic Times needed to be written and Dr Jenny Goodman was ideally placed to have been its author. Now it needs and deserves to be widely read.’

Robin Daly, founder and chairman of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity

‘Getting Healthy in Toxic Times is an important book. It shows what humanity is doing to their own environments and to the whole planet, damaging the health of every form of life on earth. Small improvements have been made here and there, but the whole situation is getting worse day by day. In order to make a real difference, we need to think of the root cause of all of this and address that root cause. Is it human greed? Is it the ever-increasing tyranny of global corporations? Is it money-based, merry-go-round economy? Is it the modern religion of individualism and looking after number one? The toxicity of our environment is connected to all other aspects of our lives. To address the environment, we must change as individual human beings and as humanity as a whole. We must become kinder and more loving to everything alive around us and we must get closer to nature.’

Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride, MD, the creator of the GAPS concept and the GAPS Diet

Copyright © 2024 by Jenny Goodman.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Commissioning Editor: Muna Reyal

Project Manager: Susan Pegg

Copy Editor: Susan Pegg

Proofreader: Jacqui Lewis

Indexer: MFE Editorial Services

Page Layout: Laura Jones-Rivera

v1.202406

ISBN 978-1-915294-33-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-915294-34-0 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-915294-35-7 (audiobook)

Chelsea Green Publishing

London, UK

White River Junction, Vermont USA

www.chelseagreen.co.uk

Disclaimer: This book is designed to provide helpful information on the subjects discussed. It is not meant to be used, nor should it be used, to diagnose or treat any medical condition. For diagnosis or treatment of any medical problem, please consult your own physician or a suitable professional practitioner. The publisher and author are not liable for any damages or negative consequences from any treatment, action, application or preparation to any person reading or following the information in this book. References are provided for informational purposes only and do not constitute endorsement of any websites or sources. Readers should be aware that the websites listed in this book may change. The information and references included are up to date at the time of writing but given that medical evidence progresses, they may not be up to date at the time of reading. All personal names given in case histories have been changed to preserve privacy/anonymity.

In loving memory of some friends who died before their time:

Stephen Walsh

Helen Rose

Ziva Weaver

Zelda Alexander

Nina Maraney

Geela Caiden

Brian Taylor

Mervyn Lebor

Rose Rose

and

Nickie Shapero (2 October 1957–17 February 1979)

Contents

Introduction: Everything Is Connected

1 Earth I: Nourishing or Toxic?

2 Earth II: Heavy Metals

3 Water

4 Air

5 Fire I: Poisonous Light

6 Fire II: Poisonous Tech

7 Indoor Pollution: A Tour of Your House

Conclusion: Our Bodies, Our Earth

Appendix I: It’s Environ-Mental! Body, Brain and Mind

Appendix II: In Your Backyard

Resources

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED

Our 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 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 diseases. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, autism, arthritis, asthma, heart disease, mental illness and infertility are all increasing at astonishing 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 dramatic 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 Alzheimer’s did not have an ancestor with that disease. The sheer speed with which chronic degenerative diseases have increased, over just a very few generations, 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 pollution 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, ‘Environment’ on another. (‘Health’ and ‘Medicine’ were also on different floors; 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 medicine, 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. 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 ingredients 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 diesel, 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 eventually toxic to the end user too.

Most serious illness is multifactorial: it has several contributing components 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.

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. 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 countless 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 protein’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 nutritional 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 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 contaminants 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 returning 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 eyesight 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.

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 everything 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 happen. 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 happen. 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 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 interconnected, 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 knowing 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 classifying 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