Travelling With Nanoparticles

In the world of consumer and related products the research and effort into new and more powerful goods is a great deal greater than that into the possible effects and consequences of their use.


Nanoparticles have been discussed before and their use is now widespread in so many household and personal products that very few people can avoid them or even discover if they are in use. They are assumed to be necessary and a good thing. That is good because they help the hype of marketing.

One study recently titled “Nanoparticles Used as Additives in Diesel Fuels Can Travel from Lungs to Liver” from Marshall University has found that the additive cerium oxide used to increase the efficiency of diesel fuels can make its way into the liver from the lungs and with toxic effect.

The nature and functioning of the toxicity needs further study. The full article is here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111117141157.htm

We know from the information available that basic products are now highly complex with a wide range of varied chemicals, largely synthetic, for the uses for which they are designed. We do not know the extent to which they impact on our bodies.

As anyone who has travelled by road does know, there are a lot of trucks and other vehicles that use diesel about and so a lot of nanoparticles being pumped out of the exhausts to go where they will.

If this form of pollution has toxic effects what other toxic delights do we get?

Finding The Food

Channel 4 has been running a programme called “The Food Hospital”. It takes a number of varied cases of people suffering from a number of different conditions. They have all reached a serious level of ill health and the purpose is to try to deal with their illnesses by means of careful diet control rather than medication.

It is refreshing to see something that goes for the causes rather than the effects. Many illnesses are more difficult to deal with in this way but even some of those can be made less difficult by care with the diet.

One matter that did strike me was that in some cases to help clear and rest the system a liquid diet was given for a few days to be augmented and later replaced by recommended foods. Sometimes this was done to identify any food that might be a trigger for an outbreak of the illness.

The liquids in question were carefully prepared concoctions designed to ensure enough of the vital nutrients and vitamins necessary to health and to help rebalance the body intakes of these. So if these are easily and readily available, how is it that in so many hospitals and care homes actual malnutrition is occurring so often?

Clearly some of these, which are easily assimilated with other basic healthy foods could mean that there is never any need for malnourishment. It also means care over hydration levels as well but to have patients going nowhere suffering dehydration is astonishing.

Beyond that much of the discussion and analysis with patients was about body chemistry and how to deal with the different issues arising. With quite a number of illnesses covered overall a good deal of complicated chemistry is involved.

Which lead to the curious feature of a programme whose essence is the chemistry of the body in relation to food ignoring totally and never mentioning other forms of chemical impact on the body. Yet in many cases clearly the people involved must have been experiencing other types of chemical impact.

Why should this be? Perhaps there are two basic reasons. One is that the firms producing personal and household chemicals could well have created enough trouble for the programme makers to make the message about food lost.

Another is that as this is commercial TV and with so much of its vital advertising revenue coming from the marketing and production of these products it would be far too risky to the finances to suggest in the programme that these could be a factor in a number of the illnesses.

So at one stage in the viewing when a major advertisement feature came up for a personal product it was odd to see being pushed as desirable one that makes my stomach turn whenever I encounter it. What was ironic was that it appeared after the specialists were dealing with a patient with chronic inflammation of the gut.

You win some you lose some…………

Using Our Heads

In the Daily Mail recently there has been a run of articles featuring ladies, usually young, who have had a severe reaction to hair dye. This one is the latest and is typical of the others.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2059679/Another-teenager-left-horribly-swollen-face-allergic-reaction-hair-dye.html

We have had the same experience. My wife, near thirty years ago had a marked reaction when using hair colouring and gave up using it. This was followed by taking great care to choose which shampoos or anything else for hair.
Since then the various dyes and treatments have been stronger and more extensive and claim to do all sorts of things to the hair to make it brighter and better.

But where we sometimes stand for performances we look down at the heads in front. The evidence of my eyes tells me that a lot of younger lades these days have hair that is thinner than those of the past and often very brittle.
It seems that the more the hair deteriorates the more products are used to correct the trouble and the stronger they are.

Also, there is the issue of the cases were some ladies we have known who have used strong dyes on a regular basis for some time have developed tumours. This may be coincidence but there are suggestions that some are at risk.

Taken together with all the other products and materials going onto and into the body and the huge increases in the last two to three decades when will we begin to see some of the consequences more evidently?

One of the major difficulties is that research into this costs money and little or none is forthcoming for anything that does not “add value”. Since we have cut down radically on products we doubt we have saved a great deal.

If there is an evident increase in the serious effect of the impact of many of these products, when will the community at large and government be prepared both to admit and to address the causes?