Gutted Garden

Gutted Gardens

I’ve been opposed to pesticides for a long time. 

Don’t get me wrong; I won’t deny that there’s a time and a place for them.  

When human health is endangered by the likes of rat infestations, malaria outbreaks or similar occurrences, I concede that pesticides may be the lesser of two evils.

But when it comes to merely aesthetic concerns, I think the price we pay is way too steep for the supposed value gained. 

Do we really need sterile-looking, weed-free lawns and gardens? If we don’t have the time to pull up weeds by hand, couldn’t we just let them stay?

What’s wrong with natural beauty?

Back in the 80s, I started a movement – Mothers and Others for Pesticide Alternatives. 

In the beginning, I was the only member, but that didn’t stop me from getting a lot done! My campaign against unnecessary pesticides resulted in Buffalo, N.Y. making the national news as the first U.S. city to take a stand against the use of harmful pesticides. 

However, this success wasn’t achieved without personal tragedy – I was inspired to start the movement after I suffered a miscarriage due to pesticide exposure during my pregnancy. 

Additionally, my father had heart palpitations every year immediately after pesticides were applied to the lawn near his office.  Eventually one spring, following the annual application he suffered a cardiac arrest.

The long- and short-term health consequences of pesticides are far too many to address in the scope of one blog article, and there’s plenty of information out there that’s just a quick Google search away, so I encourage you to read up on it for yourself. 

Today I’d like to alert you to just one negative consequence of one of the most ubiquitous pesticides out there – Glyphosate: found in products such as Roundup, one of the most commonly used herbicides. 

It is ubiquitous in our environment due to its presence in most of the foods that we eat and in the sprays our neighbors apply to their lawns.

Glyphosate kills plants by interfering with the synthesis of amino acids, specifically by inhibiting the plant enzyme EPSP synthase. 

Glyphosate is generally claimed to be safe because humans don’t produce this enzyme, but guess what?  Many of the beneficial bacteria that live in our gut do—and can’t survive without it. So as a result, glyphosate has been accused of killing off helpful bacterial strains like lactobacillus while leaving harmful ones like clostridia to dominate.

Lovely, isn’t it?

Suffice it to say that glyphosate is bad for you. Very, very bad for you.
So let me summarize:

If something sucks away your nutrients, kills your gut bacteria, and then reduces your ability to detoxify and digest, you most definitely are left with something that hurts your gut.  And recent science has indeed confirmed these suspicions.

Think gluten and other food intolerance, IBS, Crohn's disease, chronic inflammation, autoimmune disease, allergies and other immune problems.

I specialize in GI problems, immune system problems and allergies, so this subject is of particular interest to me. 

Hence, I'm grateful that there are homeopathic remedies that address the conditions arising from gut problems, uprooting the illnesses and undoing the damage.

In fact there are so many remedies and protocols associated with this topic that I did a four-class course on the subject: Good Gut, Bad Gut: A Homeopathic Strategy to Uproot Seemingly Unrelated Illness in Body and Mind.

In the meantime, here are links to my favorite method for when one has an acute reaction to pesticide application, such as when your neighbor just had his lawn sprayed.

http://joettecalabrese.com/blog/articles/3-homeopathic-remedies-for-pesticide-exposure/

http://joettecalabrese.com/banerji-protocol/podcast-9-the-worst-kind-of-pollution-2/