1. Heavy metals: mercury, cadmium, arsenic, lead, iron and aluminum4

a. A more extensive list would include antimony, bismuth, cerium, chromium, cob alt, copper, gallium, gold, manganese, nickel, platinum, silver, tellurium, thallium, tin, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.
b. A few of these are necessary in trace amounts, such as manganese and zinc, but can quickly become toxic if present in excess… and, yes, even iron can be toxic in large amounts or in its improper form.

2. Chemicals: pesticides, preservatives, hormones, antibiotics, metabolic analogs such as artificial sweeteners, food dyes, and even additives to our drinking water mandated by our government such as chlorine and fluoride.

3. Biologicals: yeast, viruses, parasites, non-native bacteria.

4. Common foods and food additives that cause toxic reactions including allergies.

• Toxins are substances that disrupt the normal, healthy function of your body. They may be elemental, chemical, biological, or a normal food that causes metabolic irritation.
• Toxins are present in the air we breathe, water we drink and food we eat… including the so-called “healthy” foods; broccoli can be covered in pesticides, too.
• Toxic “load” is the cumulative effect of all the offending substances that you have ingested.
• Long before you reach your load-limit that causes external disease, the toxins start to impact your immune system effectively lowering your limit; it’s a downward spiral.
• The government will not protect you by ensuring the cleanliness of your food9.
• It is each person’s responsibility, and the responsibility of parents for their children, to act intelligently with regard to what they eat, drink, and even breathe to protect and foster the health of their bodies and minds.

Toxins are substances that inhibit or harm normal, healthy operation of your body.

A note: just because science hasn’t discovered that a substance is harmful, doesn’t mean that it’s not. At one time we didn’t know that the pesticide DDT was harmful—and not knowing didn’t make it harmless3. However, for now, we feel that biological and medical science has progressed sufficiently far to have fairly well classified most of the substances that are poisonous to human health. This includes broad groupings of chemical compounds, such as pesticides in general. If we can eliminate those from our bodies, and our future foods, we’ll be far better off.

Then we can work on avoiding the introduction of any new and unnecessary substances into our diet.
The following is a list of the toxins and toxic substances which are present in our environment. This list is not all-inclusive, but is meant to give you an idea of how pervasive the assault on our health really is. The shame is that much of the attack on our well being is the product of economic greed and can be easily avoided with just a small hit to the profits of major corporations—but that’s the subject of a different book.