Nutrition and Mental Health Part 7 — Pollutants, chemical toxins and detoxification

We all know about pollutants in the air, and water, even about plastic waste and all the others. Can they impact our mental health and well-being? What about detoxification and what role the right nutrition plays in this?

There are three sorts of toxins:

• The chemicals that are present naturally in food, natural toxins used to ward off insects or fungi,
• The chemicals acquired from the environment (like pesticides or insecticides), go into plants, and from here into the animals grazing the plants,
• Things that we may add to the food at the end, to preserve them (these ones are extensively tested, so their toxicity levels are quite low, but not zero).

About plastics, there are two ways to ingest them, one is as microplastics, tiny particles, derived from plastic bottles or polystyrene, eroded by the sea over a long, long time, sometimes just microns wide, filtered by organisms like mussels, and if you ate them, you end up getting a dose of microplastics. The fish can eat mussels, you eat the fish, and you end up with another dose of microplastics. That is the plastic itself. Then there are chemicals within the plastics called plasticizers, used to make the plastic soft, and these ones leach out of the…