Page 2 - Autoimmune Diseases Around the World

food. The mom and dad would be cooking and the grandparents would be at the table right next
to us helping the kids with their homework. Just a lovely setting. And, for 75 cents, we would get
an amazing Thai meal.”

“Now, at the same time, right down the street, you’d see more well-to-do Thai people,” says Dr.
Bilstrom. “In particular, the Thai teens would all be sitting together eating at Kentucky Fried
Chicken, for the unheard of price of over five dollars, rather than eating in their traditional way.
In that part of the world, too, most people really can’t afford those types of meals. But, with that
added income, they are now eating in a much less traditional way, and that also goes for
McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.”

“The body is fantastic at healing, so if you’re going to try to make the body healthy, you don’t
have to be perfect,” says Dr. Bilstrom. “Again, you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be
perfect enough. As far as not being perfect, my wife, Jody, and I did eat at Pizza Hut during that
trip to Thailand. But let me say, we both asked ourselves, ‘how can we resist trying a squid pizza
at Pizza Hut?’ That’s not the type of food we’re going to want to eat all of the time, but you
don’t have to be perfect.”

Higher levels of toxicity
In addition to the way people are eating today, there comes a great deal of change to immune
systems along with the toxicity and changes in environment. What is being seen in Asia and
Southeast Asia is as the economy has changed, the food has changed, the environments changed.
“It turns out that the rates of increase in autoimmune disease perfectly mirror the rates of change
in the economies and the environments in these countries.

As an example of the types of toxicity in the Western world, or industrialized nations, there is a
scary kind of toxicity that is building in the developing world, highlighted on the following map:

https://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/

On the “toxmap-classic” there is a map of the U.S. and on this map are little tiny blue dots that
represent identified toxic release sites. U.S. facilities in different industry sectors must report
annually how much of each chemical is released to the environment and/or managed through
recycling, energy recovery and treatment, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency. A “release” of a chemical means that it is emitted to the air or water, or placed in some
type of land disposal.

“It’s important to understand that if there are a lot of identified toxic release sites, there are also
going to be a lot of unidentified toxic release sites,” says Dr. Bilstrom. “The big red squares on
the toxic map are superfund clean-up sites. Some of these sites have been cleaned up, but a lot of
them have not been.”

As the maps also indicate, the Eastern portion of the U.S. is almost completely covered in little
blue dots and big red squares as well as the entire Pacific Coast of California. When you see that,
you should begin to understand the extent of the toxicity the human body has to deal with, which
we didn’t have to deal with even a few decades ago.