On a Sick Planet, It Is Impossible to Be Well
In the book Anticancer, the author David, who is both a doctor and a cancer patient, quotes a healthcare worker, Michael Lerner, who spent twenty years caring for cancer patients: "On a sick planet, it is impossible to be well." I like this sentence very much, so I borrowed it as the title of this article.
This fellow later switched to environmental protection work, feeling it necessary to prevent cancer at its root. Yet on our blue planet of 7.8 billion people, the limited work of environmentalists can achieve very little. Every day I see mountains of plastic waste piled up beside the trash bins of every residential compound in Beijing.
Most people can hardly imagine where this plastic waste finally ends up. A considerable portion of it eventually breaks into tiny plastic particles that enter our soil and oceans, while some float in the air. Certain animals in the sea and on land mistake them for food and swallow them. As the highest link in the food chain, we humans then take these toxin-laden particles back into our own bodies through the fish and meat we eat.
By rough estimates, humans are exposed to more than a thousand kinds of toxic substances from the environment, so each of us carries a large toxic burden. These toxins love to hide in fat, which is why obese people are more prone to chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes.
While I was gardening at the foot of Fragrant Hill, I once chatted with a billionaire in the plot next door. How did I know he was a billionaire? Because he told me himself that he was an investor who had backed several projects worth hundreds of millions; he cared so much about food safety that he rented a large plot to grow his own vegetables. Most of the time his driver tended the garden, but lately the driver had been injured, so he would come over now and then to water the plants.
During our chat, he told me that over the years of gardening here he had noticed that the strawberries in this ecological farm's pick-your-own patch were sprayed with large amounts of pesticide as they grew. Ever since seeing with his own eyes how the strawberries at this farm, which styled itself an ecological picking garden, were actually grown, he has stopped eating strawberries. In an age when health problems are so pervasive, wealth has not brought him much happiness.
Of course, this fellow's knowledge is still far too limited. Though both of us have our own managed vegetable plots, we still cannot escape the harm that dairy, eggs, fish, and meat do to our bodies. Agriculture and animal husbandry worldwide have long left the original state of nature behind, so humanity effectively has no safe food left.
Because of the food chain, the various toxic substances humanity has discharged into the environment since the industrial age have already been "universally distributed" through the chain into the bodies of every living thing—even penguins in the Antarctic now carry DDT and other violently toxic compounds. Anyone with a little basic biology knows that the higher an organism sits in the food chain, the more toxins accumulate in its body, because the harmful substances in everything it eats pass into its own tissues. So we humans are, in effect, already saturated with a hundred poisons.
The relatively safe approach is to be vegetarian as far as possible and to eat less fish, meat, eggs, and dairy. Medical experts advise keeping animal-sourced foods below 20% and choosing organic for plant-sourced foods as far as possible. But that is hard for most people, because the high price of organic food is beyond everyone's means.
Even so, we still need to minimize the toxins we take in through food and improve our physical constitution through a healthier lifestyle; otherwise we will easily be plagued by all sorts of hard-to-cure chronic diseases.