All of the above and more parallel the onset of the Metabolic Syndrome. Metabolic Syndrome is the common denominator worsening everything. It’s a moving target, subject to ineffective systems of medicine and denial of the environmental role connected to its presence. But we're a stubborn species. Even with incontrovertible data supporting planetary changes from bigger ozone holes to disappearing forests to diminishing species to fouled food supplies, even though we live with a cascading waterfall of pollutants and chemicals that compromise every aspect of our lives, we’re still standing in the forest and missing the trees. We walk about with no clothes insisting we are not naked, that the diseases we now confront are almost – what -- a natural course of events -- a manifestation of inherent destiny? The way life was meant to be?

I don't think so. This is an extremely unnatural course of events. The actual cause, the root of our epidemics is environmental toxins that precipitate inflammation which in turn cause cellular destruction and tissue degeneration.

Simultaneously, toxins confuse our brain and thus so disrupt our bodies’ signaling systems. This brain-body signaling snafu causes us to morph into strange apple-shaped weaklings. But, for all the attention paid to what looms as the clear source of our escalating epidemics one would think we just came to this concept yesterday.

On October 3, 1996, Theo Colburn had this to say in his speech at the State of the World Forum in San Francisco:

"Every one of you sitting here today is carrying at least 500 measurable chemicals in your body that were never in anybody’s body before the 1920's…We have dusted the globe with man-made chemicals that can undermine the development of the brain and behavior, and the endocrine, immune and reproductive systems, vital systems that assure perpetuity… Everyone is exposed. You are not exposed to one chemical at a time, but a complex mixture of chemicals that changes day by day, hour by hour, depending on where you are and the environment you are in…In the United States alone it is estimated that over 72,000 different chemicals are used regularly. Two thousand five hundred new chemicals are introduced annually —and of these, only 15 are partially tested for their safety. Not one of the chemicals in use today has been adequately tested for these intergenerational effects that are initiated in the womb."

"Dis-ease" is no stranger. We’ve been through the plagues and the locusts and the famines and the wars, a host of global afflictions. But if you took a snapshot in time you’d note a dramatic change in the profile of this "dis-ease". Back in 1980, for example, the picture reflects acute illness, infections, and a smattering of chronic illness. Fast forward to 2009, to the new disorders now prominent in the lexicon of modern medicine. The picture now reflects a host of chronic illness in terms of degenerative diseases that are spinning out of control. Profiles of patients being seen in medical care venues have changed from those in which acute conditions once predominated to those in which now chronic diseases predominate.

Doctors used to see clear, cause-and-effect conditions that allowed us to intervene in a simple and proper way. Our patients came in hurting and left feeling better. We gave an antibiotic for a specific infection, sutured a wound, set a cast for a broken bone. Now, our health facilities are filled with diagnostic challenges that don’t seem to be simple and which in fact are far from simple. We don’t understand them and we don’t cure them. We ‘manage’ them with drugs or surgical interventions. We apply a pill to the problem, we apply a knife to the problem but there’s no end, no resolution, only ongoing management. It’s what I call ‘business as usual’. And all the while the epidemics worsen, get bigger, and become more and more unmanageable.

Have you noticed that you are seeing more and more people who have morphed into the ‘apple shape’? Their belly is usually large and out of proportion to the rest of their body. Their arms, legs, and butt seem under sized. In medical speak its called central obesity. Folks, this is a killer shape. You don’t want it!

You won’t see this shape in the centerfold of Playboy or Playgirl magazines; places you may not wish to be either.