Are you who you think you are?

There are times in ones life when the question “who am I?” arises. Most of the time the question is in regards to personality, actions and interest, do you see your self how others see you. I am not asking that question right now; I am asking if you are biologically and organically who you think you are? I personal have always wondered if my seizures, which are neurological and not epilepsy, were caused by pesticides that my mother consumed while I was in the womb, or is it what the doctors say and I developed it from being near deaths door at six months old. Do we really know what we are at the cellular level?

My ponderance comes after reading an article this morning regarding a briefing given to the congressional staffers in the Dirsksen Senate Office Building where several key scientists reported on the use of antibiotics on livestock and the direct link to antibiotic resistant bacteria in humans. The report outlines cases where livestock and livestock workers carried the same resistant bacteria, pointing out that the antibiotics are then carried off in the food we eat, water run off and that the workers become carriers of these antibiotic resistant bacteria spreading it to other people. At the same time that they are reporting this they slowly retreat, ending their report by saying that hospitals are the biggest culprit and maybe we don’t need to do anything about the livestock.

Now I for one try very hard to not take antibiotics, taking them only where absolutely necessary, and I never use antibacterial soap. In fact in the last three years I have taken antibiotics once and that was for strep throat. Reading this article has made me realize that I have involuntarily been consuming the very thing that I try so hard to avoid and am just as venerable to resistant bacteria’s as the next guy. Don’t get me wrong I have known that livestock is feed antibiotics and try to eat organic whenever possible, but to read the stats in this report gave me chills. It also made me think once again about what my body is going through and do I really know what I am.

In my head I am a healthy eater. I cook most of my own meals, eat plenty of greens and try to by local organic food whenever I can afford it, but where does that really put me. Do the live cultures in my organic plan yogurt that I eat in the morning help my body fight against the antibiotic riddled chicken I eat at night? Can you really cancel out one bad food with one good food? How many toxins enter my body when I eat the lettuce that was grown in soil that is over fertilized and has 20 years of pesticide leeched in it? There really aren’t any test to tell me how many toxins are in my body and the test I can take wont tell me what foods put them there.

As a society we are consistently raising money for cures. Cures for breast cancer, cures for arthritis, Alzheimer’s….ect all these things just appear in our body and we try so hard to fight them off, to cure them, but what are we doing to prevent them. There are many research projects that are looking at what cells or genes may cause such diseases but there is little being done about things we may consume that would cause diseases. Albeit it is near impossible to prove with out a doubt that one thing causes a disease, but perhaps we need to stop requiring absolute certainty in these matters, for a life is priceless no matter what value the EPA and economist have put on it and I for one want regulation that allows me to know that what I am consuming will not harm me. There may not be a cure for what I has already happened to me but there is a way from stopping future damage to us all.