Arsenic, the Poisoning of a Nation

I am Dr Patrick Flanagan, and this is the latest edition of my Dr Health Secrets newsletter. I am a scientist with over 300 inventions related to health, longevity and medicine. This newsletter installment is about toxins in our water and food supply. I found that some substances are far more widespread than I thought. So I decided to write this newsletter about arsenic and its effects on your body. Childhood Memories It seems like only yesterday when you could relax with the knowledge that you weren't drinking raw sewage, parasites, or caustic chemicals. I remember the days as a child when I could grab a glass from the cabinet and fill it with some nice, clean, cool, refreshing tap water and drink it down on a hot summer day. Truth is, I have found research on toxins showing that chemicals have been finding their way into our water supplies for almost a hundred years. Fluoride was added in 1945, but chlorine took the lead in 1911, when it was first added to public drinking water as a "disinfectant." Up until recently, health advocates and environmentalists found their pleas falling on deaf ears in regards to how unsafe tap water truly is. When I told people twenty years ago that their tap water was poisoned, they could not believe me even though there was plenty of data proving it. Even ten years ago people were suspicious of such claims, but due to recent health scares with water supplies and bottled water, people are starting to stand up and take notice. Many people boycott drinking tap water on taste alone; chlorine is often noticed by the palette and rather unappetizing. Others have shied away because of health concerns, but the fact still remains that most people still use water in many other aspects of their daily lives: bathing, laundry, dish cleaning, cooking, coffee, tea, etc. I Smell A Rat The next substance I want to tell you about is arsenic. Arsenic on the periodic chart is atomic number 33, but arsenic is so much more than a simple number. Still widely used today, arsenic is commonly found in wood preservatives, agricultural products, glass, and most notably, rat poison. Yes, rat poison. This harmful and toxic chemical is currently residing in your tap water. This is not a comforting thought. The EPA strongly pushes for regulations on cancer causing materials and typically doesn't allow a substance that has more than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing cancer to be within our water. At 0.5 parts per billion, arsenic has a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing cancer. Do you think that arsenic levels within public drinking water never rise beyond 0.5 parts per billion? I wish I could say that they did not, but most of us know otherwise. Arsenic levels range all over the charts, and in 18 states, including Arizona, California, and Nevada, arsenic levels are at, and even sometimes greater than, 0.5 parts per billion. Assuming we were all drinking water from just the 18 states with arsenic at the accepted level of .5 parts per billion, then out of the current U.S. population of 296,241,806 roughly 29,624 people could develop some form of cancer from arsenic. Currently, arsenic is found in the drinking water of over 22,000,000 American homes. This number is only accounting for the areas that actually had their water tested. There are still vast areas of this country that have no idea what their drinking water contains. Arsenic poisoning over an extended period of time can lead to damage of the central and peripheral nervous systems, heart and blood vessels, serious skin irritations and problems, birth defects, reproductive problems, and many more. As of late, scientists and medical professionals have argued that arsenic isn't safe at any level within drinking water. Tune Up With all of the harmful chemicals that are fighting their way into your body at every given moment, help your body's defense team strike back. There are numerous ways to pull heavy metals out of the human system. Some methods work for you and help support your body's health at the same time. The process of pulling heavy metal out of a human system is called "chelation" (key-LAY-shun). Silica is a natural chelator and there are special forms of microcluster