I am writing a chapter on type 2 diabetes for the new edition of an Integrative Medicine textbook. I was asked to do this because of a paper I published in a medical journal that reviewed the scientific evidence for some of the more commonly used remedies – things like cinnamon, garlic, chromium and Gymnema. This book was a very nice project to be asked to help with, because it is probably the most widely-known textbook in the field. It is ‘the bible’ and will be read by thousands of doctors all over the world.

In case you haven’t heard, type 2 diabetes is a global epidemic. It is spreading faster than the HIV virus ever did. Almost 1 in 10 adults in the western world now has diabetes, a number that has doubled in a decade. This meteoric rise was predicted based on increasing obesity rates, but it was supposed to take until 2030 for it to happen. The problem is getting worse – faster than anyone thought – and about one third of diabetics don’t even know they have it because it doesn’t cause symptoms until very late in the disease. You might have it.

Modern medicine assumes that the problem is all about obesity, over-eating, high-glycemic index diets and lack of exercise. One of the things that I left out of my journal article was the sinister possibility that this entire global epidemic is caused by toxins. This will definitely have a prominent place in the textbook chapter and is part of the reason we are paying more attention to treating diabetes at the Seekers Centre.

There is a disturbing body of research suggesting that diabetes is linked to arsenic in drinking water – at levels that government agencies consider ‘safe’. Studies from Taiwan, Bangladesh and Mexico demonstrated that very high exposure to arsenic could cause diabetes, but a major US study showed that people with arsenic levels at the high end of ‘normal’ were more than three times as likely to be diabetic as those with levels at the low end of normal. This was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association on 20 August 2008 and is a paradigm-shifting event.

Another group of US researchers has shown that some pesticides might do the same thing. The specific pesticides involved a group of synthetic toxins named organochlorines. In a US study based on the same large population – the nationwide NHANES database - those with higher levels of these PCBs were up to 20 times more likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes – even at the same level of obesity. This was published in Diabetes Care in June 2007.

Detoxify. Begin with your environment. Clean up your air, your food, your water, your cosmetics, clothing, furniture, office space … you get the point. Then consider detoxifying your tissues – keep your bowels moving, sweat regularly, keep your urine flowing and keep it alkaline, eat healthy fats, de-stress and get specialized treatment like chelation therapy if you are compelled to do so.

Tell your member of parliament you want Canada cleaned up. The world is a dirty mess, and climate change is the least of our problems – people can’t be healthy on a dirty planet. You can’t have healthy fish in a dirty fishbowl. I have come to realize that the human race is getting sicker, and this is not limited to diabetes. Many other diseases are on the rise, ranging from cancer and cholesterol to allergies and autism. Pollution in the body is a major new cause of disease that no one is addressing – because it is on no one’s radar.

Thankfully, people are waking up. It is time for us to shake some sense into our governments so they can protect us from the companies that are polluting our fishbowl – and start taking money from dirty industries and giving it to the clean technologies of the future. Canada has a terrible reputation in this regard – be it about the tar sands, asbestos mining in Quebec or dirty salmon farms in the Maritimes. Hopefully the next government has the courage to make the kinds of choices that Canadians can be proud of.

A little bird told me an election is just around the corner. Make some noise.

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