The modern obsession with avoiding "contamination" is nicely expressed here:

quoted:

Just as moral purity was viewed as a key to deeply longed for religious salvation, food purity is viewed as the key to our contemporary longed for salvation, a long life free of disease.

There have always been rules around food purity, of course, from religious restrictions to vegetarianism, but those rules have multiplied to embrace organic food, to include fears of genetically modified food (GMOs) and to insisting that the cure to various unexplained ills like autism lie in ever more bizarre restriction diets.

Simply put, many people believe that they can eat their way to preventing and curing disease. And our obsession with purity goes beyond what adults eat to a near religious conviction that breast milk is both preventive and curative for diseases ranging from whooping cough to cancer and everything in between.

The American obsession with purity has expanded to an obsession with purity of the entire body (with the notable exception of sexual purity). Just as religious acolytes in earlier time purified their bodies for worship by asceticism, fasting and scourging, contemporary Americans “purify” their bodies with unmedicated childbirth, vaccine refusal, and cleanses that purportedly remove the “toxins” from their bloodstreams.

The irony is two-fold. First, much of what is viewed as “pure” is actually contaminated or flat out dangerous. Anti-vaxxers are obsessed with avoiding the “contaminants” in vaccines and thereby leave themselves wide open to infection with deadly microorganisms.

Natural childbirth advocates are obsessed with the purity of birth “unhindered” by interventions, thereby leaving their babies and themselves open to the far greater risk of death from childbirth itself. And the only thing toxic in the bodies of most “cleanse” devotees is their gullibility and lack of basic knowledge of human physiology.

The second irony is even more trenchant. It seems that environmental purity may lead to more disease, not less. A certain amount of “contamination” appears to be necessary for proper functioning of the immune system. Purity may, paradoxically, trigger auto-immune diseases.

AUTHOR:
Amy Tuteur, MD

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