Arctic Seabirds Loaded With Toxins
Think you’re safe from pollution because you live a few miles outside of the city? HA!
Remote areas like the Arctic are often thought of as pure, pristine “safe zones” from all the sorts of environmental toxins that we spew out of our factories every day. It seems to make some logical sense; after all, there’s no human population up there churning out all the junk, and it’s SOOOOO far away from everything else, so it has to be clean, right?
Nope. The Candian Wildlife Service recently checked the levels of toxins present in the excrement of seabirds in the Arctic (okay, somebody definitely had to have drawn a short straw to get THAT job). What they found was seriously elevated levels of toxins like mercury, cadmium, and lead.
Seabirds eat mostly fish, and so they are at the top of the food chain for concentrating toxins in their bodies. The littlest fishies will have some toxins in them, and as progressively bigger fish eat the smaller ones, more and more of those toxin get stuck in their tissues, until a seabird comes along and eats that toxic fish.
Of course, the concern here isn’t that a couple of birds have really nasty poop. It’s a dramatic indicator that our oceans… and really, our whole ecosystem… has become so overwhelmingly polluted that there is no safe place any longer. Even in remote places like the Arctic Circle, there’s high levels of toxins, so how bad is it in more populated areas?
You can’t get away from at least some exposure, so do everything you can to limit the amount of toxins in food, water, and air. In other words, eat organic, filter your water, and consider an air filter for the home. No, it won’t protect you 100%- that’s impossible. But by reducing your exposure as much as possible, you better your odds of not having major health issues arise due to toxic exposure.
Beyond that, supplementing with antioxidants can help, since their main action is to clear toxic gunk out of your body. Of course, we could demand that our political leaders set up stricter guidelines on industrial pollutants HAHAHAHA I can’t even type that sentence without laughing. THAT will never happen. So, better take care of yourself as best you can, because Big Government and Big Business sure aren’t going to help.
Stay healthy!
[…] If this were a thousand years ago, and we didn’t have an environment so polluted that even seabirds in the Arctic are full of mercury, then sure, a healthy diet should do the trick. But we’re under chemical stresses our […]