water – The Cancer Canary

Morning Routine

I recently spoke with an old friend who had heard of my diagnosis through the grapevine. He asked if I was doing all the things… all the things a person does when they get a diagnosis like this. Yes, I replied.

But what are the things? Well, there’s a lot of ’em, so I’m breaking them down by the phase of a typical day.

Here’s Part 1: Morning Routine.

I’ve wavered in consistency lately in terms of my morning routine. Months of extra-snowy and cold winter, plus traveling & staying with family are just a couple of the reasons why. There’s also “couch inertia,” aka “warm blanket in front of the fire,” inertia.

Yeah, its a thing.

Here’s the morning routine I strive for (and often achieve):

Wake up between 6 and 7 am. I don’t use an alarm but seem to always wake up around this time.
Put on my dumb watch, which counts my steps and tells the time, but isn’t constantly sending updates to my phone.
Open the blinds & get a blast of natural light into the bedroom.
Brew some organic coffee, which I drink black.
Use filtered water, of course.
I add about a tablespoon of chaga to my coffee. Chaga is a mushroom product that has some really great health benefits.
A quick walk outside, usually my backyard. Put bare feet on the earth. This is called grounding, and there’s a wonderful documentary on YouTube called The Earthing Movie… check it out.
While I’m outside, I like to break pine needles and smell them. I feel that it wakes up a different part of my brain. In the summer, we have other aromatics like rosemary, basil, and lemon balm to choose from. But in winter, it’s pine.
Set my circadian rhythm by looking at the sun. We have mostly hazy sun here, and if you live in a very sunny place, this would be impossible. Still, our stomachs set their expectations based on this morning exposure to the sun. Read about it in the book The Oldest Cure in the World by Steve Hendricks.
I started doing this morning activation routine with Master Shi Heng Yi, and it was a great starting point. However, over time, I’ve added reps and hand weights and a few more exercises to make it a more challenging routine.
A shower with only yuka-approved soap, shampoo, and conditioner.
While showering, I do a lymphatic massage. This is based on lots of reading and videos by lymphatic specialists. A great resource is the Lymph Love Club, which you can follow on social media for lots of reminders and techniques. (Note: CLL is not only considered leukemia but also a form of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, so taking care of that system is important for me, especially to balance out my sedentary work.)
A cold blast at the end of the shower, based on the research of Wim Hof.
Out of the shower, I get dressed, walk the dog, and do chores — or hit the rebounder — with a goal of getting 2500 steps before settling down to my desk at 8:45 am.

Ok, that’s it for the wake-up routine. Tune in next time… 📻

Like Your Life Depends On It

I’ve written before about the need to filter your water. Every time I look at the news, there’s a new reason to do so. If it’s not the herbicides and pesticides, it’s the PFAS and forever chemicals, it’s other people’s pharmaceuticals that can’t be filtered out 😦, it’s contamination from industrial areas, it’s… just a really long list that keeps growing.

So yes, filter your water … like your life depends on it … because it does.

This video is a great explanation of PFAS and related risks and also covers types of filters and filtration systems.

This YouTuber is a great source of inspiration, especially during spring cleaning, as she knows her stuff about household contaminants and hidden sources of toxins. Check her out!

Full House Filtration

Looked into various water filters today at Lowe’s. Found the small ones for one single faucet, but also found this whole home system for $339.

Ok, that’s more expensive than the single faucet systems, and it would need to be installed between the main water line and the hot water heater by a professional, which could cost a bit, BUT it filters for the entire house. And you change the charcoal only once for each 6 years (assuming a 4-person household).

Lowe’s also has some DIY water testing kits. Though neither the basic kit ($13) nor the ultimate kit ($29) includes a test for glyphosate, it does cover quite a few other types of chemicals and contaminants.

I like these tests because you don’t send them off to the lab. You actually just get the results immediately using a litmus-type strip.

Canary

I had a few ideas for naming this blog, including “Defensive Living” and “Eye of Sauron,” but ultimately settled on the Cancer Canary. Because, like a bird in a mineshaft, my health indicates a much larger picture.

Finding out that my cancer (CLL) was linked to glyphosate (Roundup) caused me to look much closer at this situation, not just in how it affects me but how it affects us all.

Dr. Zach Bush explains it better than I can:

… this march of metabolic collapse, we now can map this back to this ever-increasing amount of herbicide, which was disrupting our metabolic function of the microbiome within soils, and ultimately, our gut, as we consumed the residues of those herbicides.

In the late 1980s, Monsanto and other chemical companies started to recognize the carcinogenic effect of these chemical compounds, and they published that — they showed that — with enough Roundup or glyphosate, you could induce cancer changes in cells. But they couldn’t imagine, at that time, in the late 1980s, that we would ever be able to apply that much chemical to the environment, because it would kill the crops themselves.

Because, in the late 1980s, we could not imagine that, within just a few short years, we would learn to genetically modify wheat, corn, soybeans, legumes of all kinds — even roses and petunias and everything else — genetically modify them to handle being sprayed directly with this glyphosate toxin.

The herbicide glyphosate would take off in 1996 as a direct crop treatment. Before that moment, you had to spray weeds directly and you had to keep the residues very low or else the corn crop would die.

With the advent of genetically-modified corn and beyond, we suddenly could spray the entire field directly — the food that we were eating — with these chemicals, and allow for the food to continue to be delivered.

And so, genetic modification of our crops has led to an explosion of the use of these chemical compounds in our food. And the result was high residues in not just soil systems, but water systems, because these are water-soluable toxins.

So the water-soluable toxins of glyphosate would get integrated into our freshwater runoff from the farms, wound up in our river systems, which would ultimately end up in oceans.

The whole time, you have evaporation going on, which allows the glyphosate to be present in the air you breathe and ultimately in the clouds that would then come down in rain.

That entire hydraulic cycle would become contaminated with this glyphosate chemical.

Glyphosate is now the most ubiquitous antibiotic on earth. It kills bacteria, fungi, protozoa, parasites. It kills the stuff it touches. And in so doing, it has denuded the diversity of life within our soil and water and air systems.

In the United States today, for example, 85% of the rain that we see and 85% of the air we breathe is contaminated with Roundup. This extraordinary fact has led to the phenomenon that we are all expressing this chemical within our systems.

In some recent clinical trials that we’ve done in our laboratory, we were measuring the effects of glyphosate on human systems, and measuring the ability of bacteria and fungi, through their communication network, to repair the damage done by this chemical.

So we brought in a bunch of people, studied their blood and urine, etcetera, and we could not find a single person that wasn’t peeing Roundup.

— Dr. Zach Bush, MD, Healing Secrets: The Wisdom of your Microbiome

Filter Your Water

One of the first things we did was filter our tap water in the kitchen. We had one for the refrigerator but had gotten off schedule with filter replacements. This is a great first line defense you can do to remove toxins from your system.

Best Practices

● Filter your water.

● Set up calendar reminders on your phone so you don’t forget to change the filter regularly.

● Buy the replacement filters in a multi-pack so you can change them with no delay.

The Deets

We used the Pur system, which attaches to the faucet and gets in the way 98% of the time.

It had good ratings, and we purchased through Amazon.

The Drawbacks

The filters that attach to the faucet will slow the flow of water, which is a pain when you’re trying to fill a large pot to boil pasta. We are looking at under-mount systems right now, though they have their own drawbacks (under sink leaks, hard to change filter without contortionist moves).

I’ll update as we learn more.