A Japanese whale monger, desperate to prop up sales despite the fact that most brick-and-mortar stores don’t want to carry their product, has resorted to selling whale meat from vending machines:
Even if you’re able to set aside the moral/ethical issues of killing critters that a lot of people regard as having high intelligence, I’m pretty sure it’s just plain not good for you:
What a crying shame that whales have so much of our pollution inside them. I do recall the analysis of dolphins swimming off of NY, the alive and swimming dolphin itself would be considered toxic waste. It sounds like whales may be headed that way as well. We need to clean up our act big time.
Whale meat again? 
Out of vending machines no less? I can just imagine, after a 12-hour power outage overnight, what the area would smell like in the morning. How grotesque! I’m on the verge of illness just thinking about it. 
If Melinda Mae can do it, sign me up too.
It’s especially sad that Japanese consumers don’t even like whale meat that much; the government just props up the industry to buy votes from whaling communities.
Any animal at the top of a food chain (and baleen whales eat krill, which are animals and thus already above the bottom of the food chain, and non-baleen whales are carnivores), or any very large animal that eats a lot food, or any long lived animals (and whales live decades, perhaps over a century in some cases) will have more toxic crap in them than small, short-lived herbivores. Whales are big, eat a lot, are NOT the bottom of the food chain, and live a long time. Therefore, toxic build up is to be expected.
People can have a surprisingly high load of toxic crap in them, too - we are also long-lived and often eat at the top of the food chain. But we don’t eat other people (outside of a very few rare circumstances) so it’s not of such concern.
But… maybe it should be. That is why you should have some concern for what you’re eating.
Mercury is more of a problem for sea creatures than land-based ones. So with the exception of people who eat a lot of mercury-laden seafood, I would expect a 70-year-old human body to contain far less mercury than that of a 70-year-old whale.
Several years ago, one of my Facebook friends (a former co-worker) took a cruise to Greenland and Iceland, and reindeer steaks and whale meat lasagna were indeed on the menu.
She ate a lot of salads on that voyage, because she wasn’t adventurous enough to try either, even though she knew both were legally harvested.
I guess Rudolph got even about that “wouldn’t let Rudolph join in any reindeer games” thing.
Don’t know where, don’t know when…
This is different from the toxins the naturopathic healers propose to get rid of, which scientists say don’t exist? These are scientific toxins? (Not sarcastic. Sincere question)
Yes, “scientific toxins”. People can, depending on what they eat or drink, have unhealthy levels of things like arsenic, mercury, lead, pesticides, etc.
I know of one instance where a woman was advised to NOT breast-feed her child due to fears of passing on heavy metals and other bad stuff to her baby through her milk. Of course, the child already had some exposure from the pregnancy, but apparently her milk had levels of nasty stuff that exceed safe guidelines (she’d been heavily exposed to defoliants during the Vietnam war, which is where it’s believe she picked up the load of nasty stuff in her body).
Ever heard of lead poisoning? There are plenty of other toxic elements and compounds out there, synthetic or natural, that can bio-accumulate and cause health problems.
Here’s an extreme case:
One interesting thing they found is that a pregnant woman may be symptomatic, but can give birth to a child with mercury poisoning because the placenta is good at drawing mercury out of the mother’s blood and concentrating it in the child.
Minamata was an acute health crisis. I was wondering about chronic toxicity instead, because Broomstick’s post seemed to imply that humans are chronically toxined up.
I used to be totally into naturopathy, fasting, cleanses, etc. to get rid of “toxins.” Now the scientific skeptics have persuaded me such toxins don’t really exist / if they did exist, the body is efficient at getting rid of them, so either way, cleanses and purges are useless. That seemed to imply that we don’t go around chronically toxined up. But if we do, medical science has got to have a way to get rid of such toxins. And I go round and round in this circular path of thought.
I just wanted to clear this up, because I must be misunderstanding something, somewhere, and if I misunderstood Broomstick’s post, my apologies to her.
Back in my active-practice days, with one exception, every case of lead poisoning I was involved in treating was in a dog. Apparently dogs really like the taste of lead paint, and their hoomins caught them licking up the powder or chips in a house they were renovating, and their vet tested the creature and ordered some (usually) Chemet from us. This has to be given via tube, regardless of the species, because it smells and tastes so bad.
This is what chelating agents are for.
If I’m being honest, yes, I’d try some whale.
Here’s whale steak on a menu from the 50s:
Nothing wrong with eating reindeer. They are not endangered. There are lots of them. And they are tasty.
IMHO, no one should be harvesting whales but indigenous people using traditional methods.
Let me try this again.
There are trace amount of toxic substances in the environment. This has always been the case because the real world is messy. In response, creatures have evolved various ways of dealing with these things and in general, in their natural environment, critters do an OK job of this. This is why all that “detox” and “cleanses” from the naturopathic/New Age/woo-woo types are unnecessary - you have a liver and kidneys and various enzymes that perform the detoxing your body needs. A couple billion years of evolution have worked out a lot of this, as opposed to whatever new fad is making the round on social media.
Now, all critters that eat also, inadvertently, consume some unneeded or unpleasant stuff from the environment. Some of these things can accumulate to some degree in the body, but usually not to toxic levels. However, as you go up the food chain these things become more and more concentrated. In some cases, the animal has even evolved to make use of these things: as an example, monarch butterflies don’t produce the poison/toxin that make them taste horribly awful to potential predators, even to the point of inducing vomiting in birds. They absorb this toxin from the milkweed leaves they eat as larva. Instead of being sickened, they purposely accumulate this for their own needs. Some species of poison arrow frog and puffer fish do likewise, utilizing a toxin in their diet as a defense. In other instances - mercury or arsenic, as examples - the stuff is just bad for life as we know it. Fortunately, mercury and arsenic are not common in most earthly environments. (Mostly - there are exceptions but we’ll skip that for a bit). Your body can deal with the tiny amounts found in normal environments (assuming no toxic spills due to civilization and chemistry).
Most humans (vegans aside) eat from the top of the food chain. Meaning anything nasty in our food will become concentrated in our bodies. Whatever Bad Stuff the cows in our area eat - traces of lead in the soil, or traces of arsenic in the water - can now be detected in minute amounts thanks to the wonders of modern science. And slightly greater amounts will be found in the bodies of the people who eat the cows or drink their milk. Again, for the most part, our own bodies can handle this.
The problem is when our bodies can’t handle it. Maybe our water supply becomes contaminated with lead - a single glassful consumed by someone traveling through the area might not be a problem, but people living there and drinking many, many glassfuls, using it in their cooking, in their coffeemaker… You might wind up in a situation where the quantity of the Bad Thing entering the body exceeds the ability of the body to eliminate it before symptoms appear. This is what happens with heavy metal poisoning. Yes, there are medications that can help your body eliminate this stuff at the maximum possible rate, but it still might take awhile to get the toxin down to safe level again.
Then there are “forever chemicals” that can get into the food chain and, well, they don’t break down over time, or with exposure to sunlight, or whatever, and don’t really go away. They’re everywhere now, and while in minute amounts they don’t have an effect (just like the minute amounts of, say, uranium found in Himalayan Pink Salt isn’t enough to cause problems if you eat reasonable amounts) they can be concentrated in the food chain just like anything else.
So, for most people none of this is a problem, but sometimes a person gets a big dose/exposure. In those cases yes, they need to be “detoxed” but that’s a medical procedure and not something you’d want to do at home with juicing or fasting. And, because it may take a long time to get rid of these things you can wind up with long-term and/or chronic effects.
An example of this is Chloracne, and there’s really no treatment other than treating/relieving the symptoms while the body very slowly tries to eliminate the toxin. But few people encounter this problem. Mercury poisoning is another bad one, and one that is possible to achieve via diet if you eat too much from ocean predators (whale and dolphin meat are apparently very high risk, but people have achieved mercury poisoning from eating too much contaminated tuna, which is why mercury levels in sea food are a Big Deal). But, again, mercury poisoning is something that requires actual medical attention, not fasts or juice cleanses or whatever.
And finally - some “actual toxins” tend to be stored in fat. In such instances, symptoms might not appear until the person starts to lose weight due to the body breaking down fat stores for energy. In such cases, a “cleansing fast” could induce symptoms rather that “cleansing” a person or improving their health. In such cases weight lose needs to be gradual so as to avoid greater amounts of Bad Stuff in to the blood stream than the body can handle. Engaging in fad diets/fasts can actually cause the problem to worsen in such cases.
Does that help?
I remember an old MAD magazine cartoon that said something like “Your doctor wants you to eat more fish for health reasons, and you consume enough mercury to kill a whale!” and the patient’s X-ray shows their spine transformed into a thermometer.