Everything I Learned in Art School is True: Zinc and Titanium Dioxide Poisoning

On my last case of vomiting today after having taken a 50mg zinc supplement I had this revelation.*

The side effects of Zinc is vomiting and diarrhea which explains my turn for the worse when I got sick a week ago and in deciding to "kick" my cold I'd bought zinc supplements instead of Airborn and Zicam which tend to make me vomit.

My logic being that Airborn contained other ingredients that were the problem and I knew zinc was the main cold fighting ingredient in Zicam and Airborn so I bought zinc supplements. As I know now by all my uncontrollable vomiting I am highly allergic to zinc. Because I'd taken 150mgs my illness took a huge turn for the worse.

Zinc is also found in meat and fish and dental filers by the way. It's time for a serious sit down with my dentist, just when I finally got rid of mercury fillings.

Thinking back to my days in art school zinc was known to be highly toxic in the metal foundry and we were forbidden to use it. My boyfriend at the time found a sheet or two and decided to use it to weld a "jet pack" (I told you this was art school). He got really sick besides being reprimanded and banned from the welding facilities and had to sneak in to do his work at odd hours from then on.

I also recall all the toxic ingredients we were warned about in oil painting such as titanium dioxide used to make white in white paint, one of the most toxic colors. Back then I took it all with a grain of salt because I well I was a painting major and there was no way around getting paint on your skin, and kinda like condoms, it wasn't the same experience using latex gloves. After that I had to switch mediums as I developed more and more rashes and allergies and it was a reasonable explanation for my cat's total kidney failure.

If titanium dioxide is so toxic (see study http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378427406013798) why then is it the main ingredient in vitamins such as the L-carnitine I almost bought from Target yesterday? I realized that's why that brand is two bucks cheaper than one that contains beta carotene as a colorant. And it's in women's make up and most other pills simply for coloring.

There's no getting around Titanium dioxide in oil paint in order to use white, and in acrylics for that matter, but it doesn't have to be in vitamins and kinda defeats the purpose of getting healthy through supplements. Where is the FDA in this matter? Apparently out to lunch as there is zero regulation on supplements or anything else used as a colorant on everything from cold medicine to salmon, cheese and butter (all dyed for consumer preferred colors.) And the problem is no consumer group is asked which product they prefer if they knew the colors created to make products more aesthetically pleasing were highly toxic. (See my other posting on food coloring) I'm sure we'd all be OK with brown vitamins and only slightly pink fish and sorta yellow butter. In DayQuil they could so easily have a bright yellow label and a clear product.
I think about this constantly. We would still think as consumers that DayQuil = yellow liquid = good. My dad used to make the best brown cough syrup when I was a kid, no red or cherry flavor, I think it was just brandy and actual maple syrup.

Anyway, art school is beginning to look more and more like the crucial education it was, even as a chemical laboratory since apparently they don't teach this at ITT Tech.
The average person has no idea what they are putting on their face and ingesting into their bodies, doesn't even read ingredients labels and then years later they suddenly are a sitting duck with cancer wondering how it could have happened. It's seriously something to think about especially since other generations didn't have as much cancer and down syndrome, etc and weren't ingesting as much laboratory modified crap.
It's time to insist we keep the color in our art work and not in our food!

*(Note: the levels of Zinc taken here and reaction to contradict these findings: http://www.ajcn.org/content/51/2/225.short ...but are in agreement with this study: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/8683339)



And if you still aren't convinced here's some related articles on vitamin toxicity:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/258180.stm

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525644,00.html

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Technology/story?id=118252&page=1#.T2d7ccz9cho

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/Health/alternative-health-guru-sues-company-product-claiming-killed/story?id=10499409#.T2d7p8z9cho

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/AlternativeMedicineSupplements/consumer-reports-dirty-dozen-12-risky-supplements/story?id=11309450#.T2d8QMz9cho