Better living through chemistry?
Our economic system and society as we know it are highly dependent on fossil fuels and cheap, abundant synthetic chemicals. One chemical industry estimate shows that chlorinated synthetic chemicals and their by products make up forty-five percent of the global GNP. It’s taken over sixty years to get ourselves into this mess, so turning the ship around now is no easy task.
Currently, there are approximately 100,000 synthetic chemicals on the market worldwide with 1,000 additional new compounds being added each year. It’s nearly impossible to really know what effect all of them have on humans and ecosystems until the damage is already done. When we globally release millions of tons of synthetic chemicals into the environment, we are experimenting with highly complex systems that we will never fully understand. It’s foolish of us to assume we’re not putting ourselves and our children at risk by continuing to gamble with so many unknowns. Many researchers believe that prenatal exposure poses the greatest hazard. Over the past sixty years, “synthetic chemicals have become so pervasive in our bodies and the environment that we can no longer define a normal, unaltered human physiology.”
Overconfidence and the “Unsinkable Titanic Syndrome”
We haven’t learned our lesson since the sinking of the famous ship almost 100 years ago. Public health officials in the 1950s thought in terms of classical poisoning and judged chemicals safe if they did not cause death or obvious disease in those exposed to high concentrations. Unfortunately there have been several examples since then of new assuredly safe wonder chemicals that turned out to be nightmares decades later like CFCs, DDT, PCBs, DES, and thalidomide. We were told that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were blessings of progress and some of the safest chemicals ever invented. It took more than forty years before suspicion began to suggest otherwise.
The history of DDT is not much different. The development of the pesticide was considered such an achievement of human progress that its inventor was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1948.
After being introduced in 1929, PCBs seemed to be without fault boasting safety and utility. They’re nonflammable and stable and showed no hazardous effects on initial toxicity tests. Even though evidence of toxic effects began to emerge in workers as early as 1936, PCBs remained on the market for thirty-six years before serious examination surfaced publicly about the safety of this wonder chemical. Scientists found PCBs everywhere they looked – in soil, air, water, animals, and humans. We humans carry PCBs in our body fat and pass it on to our babies. Finally, in 1976 the U.S. banned the manufacture of PCBs after 3.4 billion pounds had been released into the environment globally over half a century.
In the late 1930s, leading researchers and gynecologists were abuzz about a new wonder drug called diethylstilbestrol or DES. They believed this synthetic estrogen would have a host of potential uses. In no time at all, DES was being given to pregnant women to help reduce miscarriages and premature births. Eventually, DES came to be promoted for ALL pregnancies with claims that it produced bigger and stronger babies. Doctors also used DES freely to suppress milk production after childbirth, to alleviate hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms, and to treat acne, prostate cancer, gonorrhea, and even to stunt growth in girls who were becoming unfashionably tall. College clinics uninhibitedly handed it out as a “morning after pill” while farmers used tons of it to fatten-up their livestock. At the time of the DES explosion, medicine fell victim to the myth that developing babies were protected by the placental barrier as if it were some sort of impenetrable shield. Until the DES experiment, scientists believed a drug to be safe unless it caused immediate and obvious malformations. Aside from sexual deformity and negatively impacting fertility, researchers eventually found that prenatal and neonatal exposure to synthetic estrogens like DES can make the developing fetus more vulnerable to certain cancers later in life. Prenatal exposure to DES has also been linked to higher rates of major depression and other psychiatric disorders.
Both of these wonder chemicals lived up to our expectations for a short period of time until we realized the invisible damage they would leave behind. What we did not know about these chemicals ended up being more important than what we did know. As history has shown, the lag time before negative effects emerge can give us a false sense of safety if we’re not careful.
Making Choices
As individuals, we must make choices that reduce the synthetic chemical legacy we are passing on to our children. It’s especially important to limit what children are exposed to as they grow and develop and to protect women from accumulating toxins prior to pregnancy. It’s the day-to-day choices we make as consumers that will have the most dramatic effect.
The Impact of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals
Being at the top of the food chain certainly has its disadvantages when it comes to toxin exposure. Through the process of biomagnification, the concentration of a persistent chemical (like PCBs) that resists breakdown and bioaccumulates in body fat can be 25 million times greater in a top predator (like a human) than in the originally contaminated source (possibly a body of water, etc.) for example. In certain scenarios, toxins can act like hand-me-down poisons and can even be passed on to offspring. These fat-loving toxins all acted on the endocrine system which guide critical phases of prenatal development and regulate other vital internal processes. Hormones are extremely potent chemical messengers, and even tiny changes can have devastating lifelong effects in developing babies or young children; effects that may not be obvious for years.
So many questions with so few answers, but it’s a subject that shouldn’t be ignored. For decades, safety standards were based on whether or not a given chemical caused cancer or death. No one really gave much thought to how foreign chemicals can trick the body and disrupt its own chemical messengers or hormones. We don’t know how many man-made chemicals scramble the body’s chemical messages, because the tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals created since WWII have not been systematically screened. By the late 1990s, researchers had identified over fifty synthetic chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system to some degree including DDT, PCBs, and dioxin.
Researchers say that the average human sperm count has dropped by almost fifty percent between 1938 and 1990 while the incidence of testicular cancer has risen sharply. It’s the youngest men that have the lowest overall counts and the most malformed sperm. Declining sperm counts are probably not the only result of these chemicals, because animal studies show that contamination levels sufficient enough to affect sperm counts also impact brain development and behavior. Aside from lead and mercury, health authorities have been slow to take action when it comes to exposure to other toxic chemicals.
Think for a minute about your family and friends and the people you know. If you’re like me, I can easily think of a handful of couples that have fertility issues. I would feel safe to say that most of you reading this would have a similar response. Has it always been this way, or is something else going on? Well, it’s certainly not scientific to come to any sort of conclusions by only looking at what’s happening around you, so let’s look at this from a different perspective. Between 1976 and 2006, the number of births per 1,000 women has remained fairly steady while the percent of childless women aged 40-44 has doubled from 10.2% to 20.4%. Does this mean that twice as many women were not able to conceive? What could possibly account for such a dramatic change in the number of childless women? Unfortunately statistics just give us numbers and not the “why” behind the numbers. If this was the result of a cultural shift, we would expect that the number of births per 1,000 women would also have declined. There are many variables that could account for these results, but it still raises an eyebrow in my opinion.
Even though our exposure to hormone-disruptors like DDT has decreased, our exposure to other hormone-disrupting chemicals has profoundly increased. Just think about how much plastic has replaced glass and paper in food packaging over the last few decades. Thanks in part to accidental discovery, we now know that some of the chemicals that leach from plastics into our food are hormonally active. This doesn’t mean that all plastics are hormone-disruptors, but it’s not always easy to know the good from the bad.
We humans lack evolutionary history with these synthetic estrogen mimics which fundamentally differ from plant-based estrogens or “phytoestrogens”. The bottom line is there are crucial differences between natural and synthetic hormone mimics. Our bodies are able to more easily break down and excrete the naturally-based estrogens, while many of the synthetic estrogen mimics resist normal breakdown and accumulate in the body putting us at risk for low-level, long-term exposure. It’s this accumulation that’s the biggest cause for concern, and some people are bound to be more sensitive than others.
It’s important to note that estrogen mimics are only one type of hormone disruptor. Breast cancer awareness is partly the reason why so much attention is focused on estrogen-mimicking chemicals, since research has shown that estrogen exposure increases the risk of breast cancer. Some advocacy groups claim that exposure to synthetic chemicals is to blame for the steady one percent per year increase in breast cancer rates since WWII. The jury is still out.
Synthetic chemical compounds bombard the adrenal glands that regulate stress hormones more than any other organ. The thyroid gland is another common target. Synthetic chemicals can also disrupt hormones by impeding normal liver processes. These systems are so delicate and intricately linked that it’s very difficult to really grasp the whole story of how synthetic hormone-disrupting chemicals affect our bodies. Earl Gray, a reproductive toxicologist at the EPA’s Health Effects Research Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, says evidence shows that humans and animals generally respond in the same way to hormone-disrupting chemicals, so it’s important to take the effects you see in animal studies seriously. Hormone-disruptors act as broad-spectrum menaces that threaten to harm fertility and development.
The Government’s Role
Let’s all take a deep breath and find a happy place for a moment. When it comes to the subject of the environment, there seems to be quite a bit of political tension. Somehow it always becomes a partisan issue, which is very unfortunate. My personal political views are pretty conservative, and I feel that somewhere along the way, environmentalism became synonymous with global warming and liberalism. If we as individuals and as a society continue down this path of arguing over who’s right and who’s wrong, we’ll never get anywhere. Honestly, I couldn’t be more sick and tired of hearing two sides banter back and forth about polar bears and carbon footprints. What I’m most concerned about is my own personal health and the health of my family. I believe that by taking care of my home, everything else should fall into place. Whether the climate is changing at the hand of man or not, we all benefit from making more responsible choices.
I’m not in favor of the government mandating which light bulbs I should use or which car I can drive, but I do think more needs to be done when it comes to regulation of chemical manufacturers. There are many components of the government that are necessary, and certainly many that are not. For now, we’ll focus on the necessary parts. Take the FDA for example. Pharmaceuticals undergo rigorous testing to ensure safety before they can be sold to consumers, and it’s still not a perfect system. There are countless examples of medications that have been pulled from the market for safety concerns that arose in spite of all the safety testing, but imagine if there was no FDA. Think of all the risk you would assume. Would you be willing to take medicine that had undergone little to no testing? Would you be willing to give it to your children?
Our current system for regulation of chemical manufacture is very inadequate, and to an alarming degree, synthetic chemicals are considered safe until proven otherwise. In a sense, that makes us and our families the lab rats and guinea pigs. At the very least, we need to set standards for our most defenseless citizens such as children and unborn babies. Current safety standards are calculated as risk to a 150 lb. adult male. Government regulation of toxicity testing only enforces chemicals be assessed by themselves with little to no consideration given to the hodgepodge that we’re really exposed to in our consumer products. The government also needs to take action to amend trade secret laws, because consumers have a right to know what’s in a product they may purchase. We have to be informed in order to make smart decisions. Through a combination of making better personal choices and appropriate government action where necessary, we can reduce our risks of toxic chemical exposure.
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