The testing for weed-killer chemical residues in urine from individuals across 18 European countries, organised recently by Friends of the Earth groups, is to be commended. Some herbicide and insecticide toxins may not only be negatively affecting bee colonies around Europe, but might also promote serious human diseases, such as hormonal imbalances, some cancers and possibly Parkinson’s disease – to name a few where the exact cause is unclear.
A toxin that may leak out from plastic water bottles into their contents has been suspected of causing hormonal imbalances in humans. Plastic baby-feed bottles have now been banned in Europe, and the British health authorities have just warned that much consumption of plastic bottle water might be partly related to increasing obesity in young people.
About a year ago I was contacted by a young couple who had discovered they both had significantly high blood mercury levels. The wife had communicated with an American doctor via his website (because of a minor scalp hair-loss problem) and had been advised to check her blood mercury.
When I contacted the government’s toxicology unit’s head, I learnt that blood mercury testing of the Maltese population had never been undertaken. Contaminated food (including seafood) is a common claimed cause of high mercury levels.
The recently much publicised horse-meat ‘contamination’ of beef products in some European countries is probably only the tip of an iceberg of foods (and food supplements) whose content does not exactly match their label’s stated contents. Who is testing, for example, the validity of claims that some more expensive agricultural produce is organically-grown?
America’s Life Extension Foundation has claimed that some food supplement tablets they have tested are found to have little or zero bioavailability – another indication that some product label contents might be fraudulent.