Dr Jenny Goodman

Part 2: On Surviving, Living and Giving

How does all this connect with my work exposing the links between pollution and human health? Here’s the connection: electric vehicles are being sold to us as the solution to petrochemical air pollution from cars. Well, they are, as I explain on p 109 of “Getting Healthy in Toxic Times”, certainly less polluting locally. But the price, in terms of other people’s lives, and indeed environmental pollution elsewhere on the planet, is too high. And anyway, there is an alternative: clean, green, cheap, efficient and pleasant public transport, as described on pp 108-111, which would mean fewer vehicles of any kind on the roads.

If you have any money to spare, even a fiver, consider giving it to Survival International , so Tribal Peoples can survive. They are our brothers and sisters. They are also, in a very real sense, our ancestors; we all began as tribal peoples in the forest, and we are all descended from them. There are so few of them left. Let’s help the survivors survive – and live. Let’s give. Thank you.

Learn more about Survival International here: www.survivalinternational.org/

Part 1: On Surviving, Living and Giving

There is so much that needs fixing in our world - and so many wonderful people working hard on doing the fixing. How do you talk to kids about all that is wrong in the world? By always emphasising that for every tragedy and injustice, there are groups of people committed to changing it, and that they are making a difference.
Of course, I get overwhelmed by all the good causes crying out to me. All of them vital, all of them urgent. So how to choose?

Firstly, I guess, by remembering that as a collective we can achieve great things, but as individuals only a little. So that whichever cause we choose to support, someone else has chosen another, so we shouldn’t feel bad that by choosing Good Cause X, we are neglecting Good Cause Y. We simply can’t do everything, so we have to choose whichever speaks loudest and clearest to our heart. My personal favourite cause, my favourite charity, is Survival International for Tribal Peoples .

Survival is the only charity fighting for the rights of uncontacted peoples, living in remote areas like the rainforest, of which they have been the stewards and guardians for tens of thousands of years. These people’s lands, livelihoods and lives are at risk from greedy, unscrupulous companies who want their land for logging or mining. In Indonesia, for example, on Halmahera Island, lives one of the last surviving uncontacted tribes, harming nobody. But there is nickel under their forests, and companies want it to put in batteries for electric vehicles.

The people are being evicted and killed by these mining companies - but Survival International is helping them fight back. (In D.R.Congo, similar companies are extracting cobalt for use in mobile phones. They are using forced child labour, and the kids have no protective gear).

Learn more about Survival International here: www.survivalinternational.org/

A recent review by the FarmingUK Team .uk confirms that organic farming is better for soil health (and therefore for plant health, and therefore for the health of humans and other animals who eat the plants that are grown in the soil). It is also better for “biodiversity”, a rather dry term for what I prefer to call “abundant life, infinite variety”.

Organic soil is alive, as soil is meant to be, teeming with living creatures of all sizes, from bacteria to earthworms, and full of friendly fungi that fix minerals into the roots of the crops. We often misunderstand Darwin, and think that biology is all about competition between species. But it’s more about co-operation; all these species in the soil form a team, and we need to remember that we are part of that team – that ecosystem - too.

The researchers also showed that organic farming involves a vastly reduced use of chemicals – well, that is the whole point of it, after all! Their research was based on over 300 peer-reviewed studies, so is stronger than any one individual study. I know, many of us knew all this already, but it’s good to see the evidence out there in the press, and to know that the message is finally getting through.

Learn more here: www.farminguk.com/news/organic-farming-leads-evidence-base-on-biodiversity-and-soil-health_68710.html

Looking to learn more about food, farming and soil? 🪱

Six Inches of Soil has created a wonderful series of short educational films (available to all on YouTube) for use in schools, colleges, universities and businesses exploring the themes of soil health, regenerative farming and our relationship with the food system.

I highly recommend you check them out via the link below:

www.sixinchesofsoil.org/education

We can't poison the planet without poisoning ourselves.

In this conversation with What The Field?! by @, I share why our health is so closely connected to the health of our soil, water and food, and why looking at the root causes of illness matters just as much as treating symptoms.

We also talk about simple, practical ways to reduce your everyday exposure to environmental toxins, support your body's natural detoxification systems, and make choices that benefit both your health and the planet. Small changes really do add up.

Listen to the full conversation here: www.crowdfarming.com/en/what-the-field/podcast/getting-healthy-in-toxic-times-with-dr-jenny-goodman/

Getting Healthy in Toxic Times with Dr. Jenny Goodman - WTF Dr. Jenny Goodman on pesticides, ecological medicine, and what you can actually do about the toxic load inside your body.

Increase in cancer incidence among the young (Part 2)

Unfortunately, although awareness is growing now, many people of all ages are still eating junk food and failing to take in essential nutrients. People of all ages are exposed to toxic vehicle fumes and to all the poisons in our water, soil and food that I bang on about in my 2024 book, “Getting Healthy in Toxic Times”. So, the crucial question is: what might the younger generations be doing that people in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s are not doing?

They’re on their mobile phones. And other electronic devices. They’re measuring their ‘fitness’ with electronic devices, they’re driving their cars with electronic devices (plenty of old people still use paper maps!), they’re finding out any information they need with electronic devices, they’re watching films and listening to podcasts on electronic devices, they’re filling their homes with Wifi, the kids are sitting in school being irradiated with Wifi, and using electronic devices for ‘learning’ (how on earth did Plato and Aristotle & co manage to learn anything?).

But it could all be a coincidence, right? (Correlation is not causation, I hear you say). So I thought, until I started doing my research for chapter 6 of the above-mentioned book. It turns out that there are thousands of peer-reviewed, independent studies showing that electro-magnetic radiation from these devices does indeed cause cancer. Sorry, some truths are massively inconvenient.

But the GOOD news is, there are safer ways – much safer ways – to use and adapt that technology so that it doesn’t harm us. From ethernet cables to EMF-protective phone cases, I document these at the end of the chapter, and I also explore the key question you may now be asking yourself: “Surely, if this tech was so dangerous, ‘they’ wouldn’t expose us to it?”

Huh. Follow the £.

Alarming but explicable?

Cancer used to be a disease of the elderly. But in the past few decades, we have seen alarming increases in the rate of cancer among young people. “Young” here means under 50; a recent (2025) journal article (link below) says that “People younger than 50 were the only age group to experience a sustained increase in cancer incidence from 1995 through 2021”. However, we also learn that “The rapid increase in the incidence of cancer is among patients under 40 years”.

The first children’s hospice in the world opened in 1982, the year I graduated from medical school. Such a thing was unheard of before.

If you put into any search engine “Increase in cancer among young people/children/adolescents”, you will find a disturbingly large number of papers come up. They’re all documenting the same terrifying trend, although they’re in academic journals, so they don’t use words like “terrifying”. And they all conclude with the same recommendations: we need more screening, earlier diagnosis, and better access to treatment.

Well, yes, of course, that’s important. But most of the articles are not enquiring about the reasons for this shocking trend. Some do mention diet, almost none mention toxin exposure. What is going on?

Part 2 to follow.

Learn more here: www.esmoopen.com/article/S2059-7029(25)01422-X/fulltext

Foraging is a trendy new word for an activity that is as old as humanity itself. Finding stuff to eat. And, in the case of the limeflowers in the photo, stuff to drink. I nearly missed the limeflowers this year, because they seem to flower earlier and earlier every year. (Ditto the elderflowers, which are a couple of weeks ahead of the limeflowers). You don’t need to live in the countryside to do this; I just found the limeflower tree in a local park. But don’t pick them from a tree on a busy main road, because there will be pollution from exhaust fumes on the leaves.

Pick them in the sunshine, not after rain, or they’ll go mouldy. Even if picked in the sun, spread them out to dry somewhere well ventilated, but not in full sun, i.e., not in a greenhouse. Then just store them in a jar, and make tea from them. Limeflower tea has a subtle, delicious taste, and is soothing and calming.

Blackberries – when I was a kid, we picked them in September, when they ripened. We had no idea we were ‘foraging’; we were just picking blackberries. Now they seem to start ripening in July – seasonal chaos! But still just as tasty.

There is, we are told, a fertiliser crisis. Because of war in the Gulf, farmers can’t get sufficient supplies of fertiliser. (Fertiliser is itself a petrochemical, as well as relying on petrochemicals for transport). But what is this stuff which supposedly we can’t farm (and therefore eat) without?

Modern fertiliser is a synthetic product, developed originally from weapons of war; it’s explosive. (Remember Beirut in 2020? A warehouse full of stored fertiliser exploded, killing hundreds, causing widespread destruction). It contains phosphates, nitrates & sometimes a little potassium. That’s it. But we humans also need minerals such as magnesium, calcium, selenium, iron, copper, iodine & zinc. Synthetic fertiliser contains none of these, so the resulting crops are less nutritious. These fertilisers cause plants to have a growth spurt; crops grow fast (quicker harvest, more profit?) but are spindly, with weak cell walls. They are more vulnerable to pests & disease, leading to the use of synthetic pesticides in a chemical intervention cascade typical of industrial agriculture.

Do we really need them? The fertiliser industry would have us believe we can’t feed the world without them. But it’s not true. We’ve fed ourselves for 1000s of years without synthetic fertiliser, using natural fertilisers instead: compost from vegetable waste and manure from animal waste. Together, they contain all the minerals mentioned above, and more, while greatly improving soil structure, protecting against drought and floods, and returning carbon and nitrogen to the soil. (Plants like vetch, peas and beans contain nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots and provide nitrates naturally; that’s why regenerative farmers use them in rotation). I use this approach on my allotment, as do many gardeners & organic farmers. It is perfectly possible to feed the world like this, especially if we can wean ourselves off the junk food for which so much land is wasted growing chemical-drenched wheat and oilseed r**e.

Without synthetic fertilisers, the soil will be healthier, and we will all be better nourished. There is nothing to lose, except perhaps the mega-profits of Big Chem, Big Ag and Big Oil.

In El Salvador and Nicaragua, young agricultural workers who spray Glyphosate on sugar cane crops are dying of what is euphemistically called Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Origin (CKDu). But the origin is not unknown; it’s Glyphosate poisoning. Profit before people, again. More on all this in Dr Stephanie Seneff’s comprehensive book, “Toxic Legacy”.

Now, how to avoid it? Will eating organic save you? Well, it does mean you will avoid 90% of the exposure to Glyphosate, yes. The other 10% has non-food sources, e.g. your local council spraying grass verges, a local farmer spraying his fields, or a local golf course being drenched in the stuff. Also, filter your water, because the water companies don’t remove all the herbicide residues from the water. Don’t spray Roundup on your garden; weeds are better than cancer! You can buy this poison in any supermarket – but you don’t have to.