Chemical Contaminates
Poisonous forms of toxic compounds - pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, and heavy metals like mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, chromium, beryllium, and other elements are increasingly found in our post-industrial environment.
 
As industry expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, toxic heavy metals were mined, smelted, and added to any number of products that released those metals directly into the environment. Leaded gasoline, for example, released lead directly into the air with every stroke of the combustion engine.
Mercury fillings resulted in thousands of tons of mercury being expelled into the atmosphere as the bodies of those who passed away were cremated. Lead arsenate was also widely used as a pesticide on orchards and food crops across North America for much of the nineteenth century.
Once expelled into the open environment, heavy metals may be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed into humans, animals, plants, and fungi, or they may be transformed and combined with other substances to create new compounds but they cannot simply vanish. They persist.

It is the industrial exploitation and expelling of these elements—which were originally sparse and spread out at relatively low levels—that has turned vague primordial threats into everyday dangers. As by-products of smelting, ore extraction, energy production, and commercial goods, heavy metals and refined chemical compounds have poured into our air, water, soils, foods, ecosystems, and bodies.
 
Our Exposure to Environmental Chemicals
In September 2013, the CDC issued its updated fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, detailing more than 201 chemical substances that have been identified in blood serum and urine levels throughout the U.S. population. These can be ingested, absorbed, stored, excreted, metabolized, or bound to other compounds, potentially interacting with, blocking, or amplifying reactions within the body.
 
While many elements, including trace levels of certain minerals, are essential nutrients for catalytic conversions and biological functions, alarming concentrations of toxic forms of these elements have found their way into our lives at a pace that’s wildly out of balance with nature and hazardous to our health and longevity.
 
The Real Danger to Health
The real danger to health comes from long-term exposure to low-level doses of toxins over time, including heavy metals.
A few dozen key contaminants may be taking a crucial but yet uncalculated toll on the well-being of everyone around the world - with increased levels of toxins in everyday foods contributing to a general rise in inflammation, immunological and digestive disorders, neurological damage, organ failure, heart and lung ailments, cancer, and other serious diseases and conditions.

The Build-up of Toxins
Science now recognizes that these detrimental health effects are triggered by gradually accumulating, minuscule concentrations of toxins through repeated dietary or environmental exposure.
The tidal wash of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, rodenticides, fertilizers, preservatives, emulsifiers, and additives across the agricultural practices of the entire Western world - and increasingly the developing world - has contributed to the introduction of known toxins into the environment at apocalyptic levels. They interact with and are absorbed by soils, bodies of water, vegetation, fish, and wildlife. They are absorbed and integrated into plant and animal tissues. As humans, we breathe in these compounds, eat them, drink them, and accumulate them in our bodies. We also excrete them, or their
metabolized by-products, back into the environment, furthering the cycle of death and destruction brought on by these toxins. While further research is needed to expand our understanding of exactly how these toxins interact to produce disease and death, there is little debate about the importance of limiting environmental and dietary exposure to these toxins in the first place.