Protecting Our Children From Chemical Exposure

Chemicals are all around us. They are being used ubiquitously in our convenience-filled lives today. Is it any surprise then that exposure to these chemicals begins in the womb itself today because of the intrusive farming methods that we have used all these years!

The cord blood that we trust will keep supplying nutrients and oxygen to the developing child, today also supplies many potentially harmful chemicals to the child. Even once the child is born, various persistent organic pollutants (POPs) which are present in pesticides and attach themselves to fatty tissues in humans, reach the child through the mother’s milk.

Pesticides also contain various persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that rather than being flushed out of our bodies, attach themselves to fatty tissues in humans and accumulate. Those fatty tissues are a source of nutrients for mother's milk, so as a mother's body calls on its reserves of fat for lactation, the pollutants go along for the ride, invading mother's milk, and in turn, the baby.

All this exposure to pesticides puts an entire generation ahead of us at serious health risk and switching to an organic diet significantly reduces this pre-natal and neonatal exposure to harmful chemicals. We know that the most rapid development in an infant is in the neonatal stages and exposure to hazardous substances during critical periods of infant development can disrupt the signals of normal development and lead to health problems later in life.

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So how do we protect our children and coming generations from this exposure to chemicals? While policies need to be devised around all sorts of chemical exposure in our daily lives, as individuals the least we can do is switch to organic food and organic products. It could be clothing and our cleaning products, our gardening, how we handle pests in the home, but we need to look for more natural and effective ways of doing things. Every such change, no matter how small, will increase the odds for a healthy life for our children. 

ProNature helps you do that by trying to make organic food accessible easily for adapting into your lifestyle. And we hope to make a significant contribution to healthier lives and happier people in our own way.