The power of some foods to prevent and even heal childhood illnesses is nearly miraculous. If Americans ate better, it’s unlikely that one out of three American children would suffer from asthma, birth defects, cancer, lead poisoning, or mental-behavioral disorders. Many of these children are sick because they were exposed to toxins while in their mothers’ wombs or during early infancy. Because their defenses weren’t strong during these periods, they lost the battle against these chemicals.
It is unfortunate that in too many families, neither children nor their mothers eat foods that defend against toxic assaults. No matter how well-nourished people are, everyone has some toxins in them, and some children are genetically more susceptible than others. But the threshold for resisting toxins is usually lower in poorly nourished children and in children with specific nutritional weak spots.
This is more than just “eat an apple a day.” Recent discoveries about how our body’s systems work has led to an awareness of how certain foods protect against specific illnesses.
One battle takes place in our immune system, where we, like all mammals, can generally generate an army of antioxidants whose mission is to fight oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is the ordinary result of our body’s perpetual struggle to rid itself of the by-products of normal cellular metabolism. Normally, our bodies win these daily battles.
But then along come manmade contaminants such as PCBs, which we all have in trace amounts, even though these chemicals (once widely used in electrical equipment) were banned decades ago. Many types of PCBs cause a huge amount of oxidative stress, far more than many people’s antioxidant powers can cope with; the stress ends up inflaming the cells that line blood vessels and damaging the cardiovascular system, as well as the brain and nervous system. A child exposed in the womb to a dose that’s the equivalent of one single drop of PCBs in a bathtub can suffer a lowered IQ and an increased chance of attention deficit disorder and cardiovascular diseases later in life.
Manmade contaminants especially threaten children because their bodies produce lower levels of the master detoxifying antioxidant, glutathione, than adults’ bodies do. And some children produce even lower levels, probably because of inherited genetic variations (see my article “To Vaccinate Your Child or Not”). These children are often the ones with learning and behavioral disorders.
