I had a general comment about toxic materials but I'm putting it here because I'm very familiar with this type situation:

>Beyond diet it's physically taxing, especially considering that my industry, and every industry touching it worked some variation of swing shifts and if not that, 24/7 on-call. That alone is extremely taxing and has prolific long-term implications. Alcohol and drug abuse are commonplace, whether licit or illicit substances. And there's a huge emotional layer to it as well, if that isn't obvious. Mind you these are the people paid by the companies that keep your lights and heat on, transport all your food and fuel...

Looked at your profile and see your admission from "someone who sorta bootstrapped from a pretty shitty starting position"

Really there's not much difference between overwork to recover more completely from disaster, compared with ambition to make faster progress when opportunity exists.

This is the kind of situation where things like drugs are never the answer, seems like sometimes the toxic effects of chemicals are on steroids when the "setting" does not allow for much recovery between toxic exposures. If the medical benefit were not clearly in excess of the toxic load or significant side-effects I would not want to take the pill.

Each pharmaceutical is like any other consumer product. It didn't used to be as bad when mass-marketing direct to patients was still widely recognized as too unethical for serious consideration.

Once a consumer product reaches the most satisfying rapid market saturation on its own merit, the main way to continue the bonanza is to create desire among the nonengaged consumers who don't actually need the product but who can be convinced that it might be nice to have anyway for some reason or another. By then anybody with any interest at all knows it's already popular and accepted.

Then after the drugmakers and insurers got into a fortuitous spiral (for the corporations) on prices the incentive got even more extreme. Even though the insurers have to pay more for each dose, they just raise the premiums and "everybody wins".

Plus there are still really not enough doctors to go around but it used to much worse. However in the 21st century I think doctors are much more likely to recommend a simple pill (or more than one these days) rather than a more complex treatment.

Also when doctors were spread much thinner people went to them much less often, long ago it was like only going to the doctor when you needed to be cured of a cold or flu or broken arm or something.

So they got the exam, took one bottle of medication, got over the cold, and they were cured.

Then it was discovered there was no cure for the common cold. OTC approaches to treat symptoms proliferated with mass-media television and it was seen consumers would continuously purchase more pills on their own initiative to treat the same disorders which had not had that scale of returns in the form of doctors' prescriptions.

The prescription-industrial complex was going to have to advertise to compete.

Attitudes began the gradual change to continuing visits and ongoing treatment for more & more conditions, not just the things that would be expected to require a continuing lifetime of medication, such as insulin.

And a whole generation of doctors who have been influenced by very persuasive drug companies that have carefully built a reality distortion field where any tendency to discontinue medication once prescribed has been de-emphasized like never before.

>I opted for vegetarianism

I don't think the full risk is known when it comes to steroids in meat or pesticides in vegetables, but looks like vegetarians these days are more conscious of avoiding toxic additives than average, so this may be the safer move for that reason alone.