Period.

  Aside from life saving transfusions, I had no idea how powerful blood can be. Not just any blood...menstrual blood. (Warning: this blog has some taboo words in it and is about a subject a lot of people don’t like to talk about)

  Let’s just look at some interesting facts about a woman’s cycle as we go through the ages.

  The ancient Greeks believed that problems with menstruation could cause blood to accumulate around the heart and the uterus to wander around the body. The term hysteria came from the Greek word for ‘uterus’.

  The Bible says: “‘When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening.” (Leviticus 15.19) Along those lines, the church used to refuse communion to menstruating women.

  We had some kooky notions in the past, but listen to this story.

  Béla Schick was an American pediatrician who became famous for discovering a test for susceptibility to diphtheria. He headed several pediatric departments in New York City and was a professor at Columbia.
  According to various stories on the internet (you trust those don’t you?) Dr Schick asked his receptionist/nurse or housekeeper to arrange a bouquet that he’d received from a patient in a vase of water. She refused. In some stories she eventually gives in and does as he requests. By morning the flowers are dead. She explained that when she is menstruating, flowers wilt when she touches them.

  This was not only interesting…it was almost Biblical.

  A theory was published stating that women secrete a toxin, the ‘menotoxin’, when they menstruate. Alarmingly, this toxin could prevent dough from rising and beer from fermenting. He did some studies with the help of his housekeepers, but more scientists took up the cause.

  A article titled, A PHYTO-PHARMACOLOGICAL STUDY OF MENSTRUAL TOXIN by Macht and Lubin was published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics in 1923. The Abstract said:

1. The blood serum, blood corpuscles, saliva, sweat, milk and other secretions of menstruating women contain a toxic substance characterized by specific pharmacological and chemical reactions.
2. This menstrual toxin or menotoxin is very much more powerful in its effects on plant protoplasm than on animal tissues, so that its nature and properties can be best studied by phyto-pharmacological methods.

Here’s my favorite part:
The experimental data obtained by the authors in the study of menotoxin confirm in a striking degree the empirical observations concerning a menstrual poison prevalent in folklore and handed down in classical literature.

  Another study in 1944 published in JAMA ( a big name in medical journals) showed that menstrual blood was toxic to rats and caused death in 48 hours. One article implied that the menotoxin might be similar to that produced by poisonous toads. (Experimental studies, old and new, on menstrual toxin 1934)

  It wasn’t until 1953 that Dr Bernard Zondek announced that menstrual blood had no more toxicity than any other tissue and that it was bacterial infections, not toxins, that caused rats to die in prior studies.

  Thank goodness that nonsense is cleared up…or is it?

  Vegan health bloggers are claiming that menstruation is the body’s attempt to get rid of toxins and that a heavy period is the result of a toxic diet. The reverse, an absent period-- which can be achieved by dramatic calorie deprivation, indicates a clean diet.

  Good grief. Here we go again.

  As Dr Jen Gunter says, “Menstrual blood is the lining of the uterus (endometrium) that leaves the body when an embryo fails to implant.” and “If menstrual blood were toxic that means human embryos are deposited in a toxic wasteland.” There is no menotoxin. That’s it.

Period.