Book Review: The Hundred-Year Lie

I looked through The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Health by Randall Fitzgerald a few times in the local Borders, but was too scared to buy a copy until a couple of months ago. Now, I'm too scared to finish reading it. This book details how during the last hundred years we've industrialized agriculture and made health care more "scientific," but in the process have filled our landscape and bodies with chemicals, some of which are known to be harmful, and others with unknown long-term effects. What's worse, the effects we do know about are based on the chemicals tested singly, so we don't know about how they may act in combination.

As a recovering materialist, I have a different response to the book than most people probably would. I'm not joining an environmental crusade or pushing alternative medicine. I just have this one point: if we're all just bags of chemicals, as the medical industry seems to think, shouldn't we be a lot sicker than we are given the amount of toxic substances we're exposed to? That we are healthy at all points to something missing in our model. See my posts at my other blog for more details.