Digesting Proteins

In general the toxicants that biomagnify are going to be associated with lipids, not with proteins. Fatty meat, milk, and eggs are going to be more likely to contain these chemicals than lean meat and most plant products. It's not the protein content you should be comparing, but rather the lipid content.

DDT and other POP's (persistent organic pollutants) are interesting in that they can circulate on a truly global scale. You can imagine the earth as a chromatographic column with the atmosphere and water as mobile phases and soil as the stationary phase and use this to explain the incredibly high concentrations of these chemicals in the 'pristine' polar regions.

Also toxins are natural products like snake venom or spider venom or red tide toxins. Pesticides and other man-made products are toxicants.
 
John Connellan said:
Also B vitamins I believe, are very important in maintaining health as they are necessary in making the bodies most important antioxidant - glutathione. Remember, cholesterol and certain fats are also believed to be important for the body! Im just trying to justify my bad habits of eating at Macs and KFC.

mmm chicken!!!
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Yep. Fats are needed to manufacture hormones and neurotransmitters, and to help the body absorb certain fat-soluble vitamins, among other functions. Cholesterol is needed for building of various bodily building blocks, but it is not essential like certain amino acids and vitamins, meaning, your body makes it all its own in the liver. So, excess cholesterol in your food is not needed and not a good thing, really. But certain amounts of fat are needed. (all things in moderation, of course.)

There are cases of female athletes who have extremely low body fat and have ceased menses. This is because their body is unable to produce the necessary amounts of hormones.
 
Skylark said:
Also toxins are natural products like snake venom or spider venom or red tide toxins. Pesticides and other man-made products are toxicants.
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You have to remember that most toxins at these concentrations can easily be detoxified in our liver which has evolved to do a remarkable job. Its only when they reach such a high level in the blood that the become toxic that u have to worry. This rarely happens (except in cases on the news!).
 
Over millions of years, our livers have evolved the ability to detoxify an immense variety of compounds. Unfortunately they have only very recently been exposed to man-made compounds. Highly chlorinated chemicals for example, are quite resilient to biological detoxification. In fact that resilience is a requirement for biomagnification. Over an individual's lifetime, very low level exposure to these chemicals result in the deposition of these chemicals in adipose tissue with an ever-increasing body burden over time.
 
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