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To give a personal narrative, I once met an American scientist
who was a senior epidemiologist, and who had done a major study
on the effects of Agent Orange. This was a defoliant which was
sprayed on large areas of the jungle in Vietnam during that war.
The purpose was to strip the leaves off the trees so that the
pilots could target the Viet-cong enemy fighters beneath in the
jungle. Unfortunately, Agent Orange had very bad effects on people
too, including many American soldiers who were fighting in the
jungle, who the pilots couldn't see and didn't have enough information
about. When the US guys got home, some of them were extremely
ill, but others (sometimes even those from the same platoon, with
almost identical exposure) were fine. The epidemiologists have
studied this - why were some fine and others dying, and their
theory uses vectors:- if different vectors all added together
and passed over a threshold, the results were disastrous. If they
didn't cross the threshold, the person was fine. The vectors are
not really measurable, but one can imagine an equation like:
Exhaustion + Stress + Fear + Hunger + Smoking + Stomach Infection
+ Agent Orange = Disaster threshold
If there were only 5 factors, the threshold would not be reached,
and there would be no problem, so some of the people exposed to
Agent Orange were not ill at all..
The 'Gulf War Syndrome' cases seem to be similar.
These were both caused by short-term exposure to one or more
dangerous poisons, in a combination of circumstances - it was
impossible to define a clear cause and effect relationship between
one chemical and the illness that the person suffered, and vectors
seem to explain this best.
With the changes that have happened with food, we are looking
at exposure over decades to maybe 100 changes which are divergent
from 'the natural'. This includes major changes in crop protection,
animal diseases, genetics, harvesting, food processing, etc. Each
individual change has been tested and found to be harmless, firstly
by testing on animals, then by small-scale trials with people.
From a 'scientific viewpoint', immersion in '100 changes' over
decades amounts to a "great experiment", where perhaps
95% of the UK population are being experimented on, and the remaining
5% form the control group for the experiment. Even with Agent
Orange, we do not have much exact knowledge about the vectors
involved, adn the same is certainly true of the 100 changes/10
decades picture.
My advice would be to try to be one of the control group, although
the human constitution seems remarkably strong
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