How would you like to live a longer, healthier life? I’ve got a little exercise that can help you do just that. You don’t have to diet, you don’t have to exercise and there’s nothing to buy.
Just repeat the following words out loud: uterus, penis, menstruation, testicle, tampon, breast. You didn’t do it, did you? Even if you’re sitting by yourself, you don’t want to say these words out loud. You feel self-conscious and embarrassed. Half of you are fiddling with the volume control on the computer.
I’m not speaking these words just to make you feel nervous. Last week, I spoke about poison. Many of the poisons filling our environment are aimed directly at our reproductive organs. In the last 30 years, we have witnessed surges in the rates of breast cancer and prostate cancer, ovarian cancer and testicular cancer, and a drop in sperm counts.
Industrial poisons in our air and water have been linked to a decline in the age of menarche, or first menstruation, in girls and deformed penises and undescended testicles in boys. Before we can join the battle to reverse these trends, we have to overcome the shame that is wrongly attached to any malady of our reproductive organs and the ignorance that follows close behind it.
The chemical soup of pesticides and industrial waste we have poured on our planet in the past 50 years has included a number of compounds that mimic the action of hormones in our bodies. Among other things, hormones tell our bodies when to become sexually mature, when to begin to menstruate or produce sperm. Hormones switch on the growth of pubic hair, beards and breasts. The blueprint for these changes is encoded in the strands of our DNA, so hormones can be released and bodily change initiated at the appropriate moments of our lives. Hormone-mimicking pollutants interfere with this natural function and begin switching our reproductive organs on and off at random, with hazardous results.
I can think of few subjects confronting us today which equal this in seriousness and yet – I have seen activists who have years of public speaking behind them who have difficulty addressing this issue – because of the words. The corporations that are poisoning us are counting on our complicity of silence to allow them to keep on doing it. And we cannot afford to continue that silence. We must begin to speak these words. We have role models.
A generation ago women were dying of cancer that started in their breasts and spread unchecked because many women were too self-conscious to examine their own breasts. Some women who survived breast cancer kept it hidden, because they didn’t want to admit they had lost a breast. There is tragedy in breast cancer but there is no need for shame. A courageous generation of women has survived breast cancer and is talking about it and is taking action. They have set a pattern for those afflicted in their prostates and their ovaries and their testicles.
So let’s repeat the exercise and this time say the words: uterus, penis, menstruation, testicle, tampon, breast. They are words we can live by.
Words to Live By
How would you like to live a longer, healthier life? I’ve got a little exercise that can help you do just that. You don’t have to diet, you don’t have to exercise and there’s nothing to buy.
Just repeat the following words out loud: uterus, penis, menstruation, testicle, tampon, breast. You didn’t do it, did you? Even if you’re sitting by yourself, you don’t want to say these words out loud. You feel self-conscious and embarrassed. Half of you are fiddling with the volume control on the computer.
I’m not speaking these words just to make you feel nervous. Last week, I spoke about poison. Many of the poisons filling our environment are aimed directly at our reproductive organs. In the last 30 years, we have witnessed surges in the rates of breast cancer and prostate cancer, ovarian cancer and testicular cancer, and a drop in sperm counts.
Industrial poisons in our air and water have been linked to a decline in the age of menarche, or first menstruation, in girls and deformed penises and undescended testicles in boys. Before we can join the battle to reverse these trends, we have to overcome the shame that is wrongly attached to any malady of our reproductive organs and the ignorance that follows close behind it.
The chemical soup of pesticides and industrial waste we have poured on our planet in the past 50 years has included a number of compounds that mimic the action of hormones in our bodies. Among other things, hormones tell our bodies when to become sexually mature, when to begin to menstruate or produce sperm. Hormones switch on the growth of pubic hair, beards and breasts. The blueprint for these changes is encoded in the strands of our DNA, so hormones can be released and bodily change initiated at the appropriate moments of our lives. Hormone-mimicking pollutants interfere with this natural function and begin switching our reproductive organs on and off at random, with hazardous results.
I can think of few subjects confronting us today which equal this in seriousness and yet – I have seen activists who have years of public speaking behind them who have difficulty addressing this issue – because of the words. The corporations that are poisoning us are counting on our complicity of silence to allow them to keep on doing it. And we cannot afford to continue that silence. We must begin to speak these words. We have role models.
A generation ago women were dying of cancer that started in their breasts and spread unchecked because many women were too self-conscious to examine their own breasts. Some women who survived breast cancer kept it hidden, because they didn’t want to admit they had lost a breast. There is tragedy in breast cancer but there is no need for shame. A courageous generation of women has survived breast cancer and is talking about it and is taking action. They have set a pattern for those afflicted in their prostates and their ovaries and their testicles.
So let’s repeat the exercise and this time say the words: uterus, penis, menstruation, testicle, tampon, breast. They are words we can live by.