136 Achieving pH Balance to Treat Specific Ailments
to eliminate carbon dioxide, not toxic waste. While they harbor mac-
rophages and other white blood cells that devour germs and dust, unlike
the liver and the lymph glands, the lungs can’t neutralize toxic waste.Industrial Pollutants and Lung Disease
According to the American Lung Association, in 2008, 35 million
Americans now have chronic lung disease. It is now the United States’
number three killer and accounts for one in six deaths. The implication
in these and similar statistical research studies is that cigarette smoking
is the chief culprit. However, the role that pollutants other than tobacco
smoke play in lung disease should be the subject of more research
studies.
The problem with focusing most research on the harmful effects of
cigarette smoking is that the latter has acquired a monopoly on the
public’s and Congress’s attention. It’s the tobacco companies that have
to issue a warning on their cigarette packs and whose product is highly
taxed to discourage customers. This lets other air-polluting industries
off the hook. They can spew pollutants into the air without having to
take the consequences because the tobacco industry has taken the heat
off them.
However, research studies carried out over the decades in which
industrialization expanded by leaps and bounds and the automobile was
introduced indicate that industrial air pollutants are even more respon-
sible than cigarette smoking for the startling increase in emphysema,
lung cancer, and asthma. Dr. Eugene Houdry, an inventor and lifetime
researcher of the petroleum industry, stated that the nearly 2,000 per-
cent increase in lung cancer between 1914 and 1975 corresponds with
the increase in gasoline consumption.^8 Strengthening the connection
between lung cancer and the burning of petroleum are statistics show-
ing that lung cancer decreased 35 percent between 1941 and 1945 during
World War II, when gasoline was rationed. This establishes vehicular
exhaust as a major factor in lung cancer and brings up the possibility
that if cars hadn’t been invented, lung cancer might be rare.
Emphysema, like lung cancer, is attributed almost solely to smok ing.
Yet emphysema was rare until around 1960, although during the previ-
ous thirty years, smoking was even more prevalent than it was after the