Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Your toxic body

Did you know that you have toxic, man-made chemicals in your body? By toxic, I mean exactly that - carcinogenic, neurotoxic, or developmentally toxic. Of course, we can forever rely on our esteemed government to regulate the use of chemicals, right? Or how about benevolent industrialists that make products to make our lives better than ever before? Well, consider this. There are more than 100,000 chemicals in use in the US - cosmetics have at least 5,000 chemicals, and more than 3,200 are added to food. Of these chemicals, only around 650 have been studied carefully enough for the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists to set workplace air-quality guidelines for them. Of those 100,000 chemicals, only about 900 have been studied for carcinogenicity. Only 300 chemicals out of the 100,000 have been assessed for reproductive or developmental effects or birth defects. And while all contaminants (or chemicals) in our water that may have any adverse health affects are covered by the Safe Water Drinking Act, both Congress and the US EPA have had to establish priorities for developing drinking-water regulations, given the enormous number of potential contaminants (or chemicals). So when Mark Stevenson went to get himself tested for the chemicals present in his body, should he have been surprised to find around 100 chemicals in detectable amounts in his body (some estimate that our bodies carry at least 700 contaminants/chemicals)? I don't think he should have...

How does this make you feel? Maybe it makes you feel really bad and terrible. Wait, well, how does this make you feel? Practically no woman, anywhere in the world, can now nurse their child without feeding them polycholorinated biphenyls, which have entered the women's bodies after having been transported thousands of miles by wind and water, through their breast milk. You think that is bad? How does this make you feel? Actually, children not only ingest chemicals from breast milk, they are exposed to them even in the womb.

"In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group. The umbilical cord blood of these 10 children, collected by Red Cross after the cord was cut, harbored pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.


This study represents the first reported cord blood tests for 261 of the targeted chemicals and the first reported detections in cord blood for 209 compounds. Among them are eight perfluorochemicals used as stain and oil repellants in fast food packaging, clothes and textiles — including the Teflon chemical PFOA, recently characterized as a likely human carcinogen by the EPA's Science Advisory Board — dozens of widely used brominated flame retardants and their toxic by-products; and numerous pesticides.

Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests. The dangers of pre- or post-natal exposure to this complex mixture of carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins have never been studied."

We all suffer from what is called 'body burden.'

I'll deal with the implications of all of this next time, and what needs to be done to move away from this toxicity.

11 comments:

  1. This article is very chemically ignorant in this guy's opinion......mostly a bunch of scare tactics without any teeth, you can't test all chemicals for carcinogenity that exist

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  2. Many of the people I respect most in science and health think of all chemicals/toxins as having something akin to a therapeutic window (http://www.addforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=73478). For ALL chemicals, below a certain concentratio...n there is unlikely to be any effect, there is an intermediate concentration where there are some negative effects (for a medicine these would be the side effects that accompany the therapy), and a high concentration where the chemical causes death. It is strange to me and other people in science when people assume that man made chemicals are inherently so much more frightening than natural chemicals, which also have a similar threshold of toxicity. Just because something is man made doesn't make it more dangerous. Natural chemicals bioconcentrate, cause cancer, and have acute toxicity (hence "everything in moderation"). It is true that very little is known about the long term exposure most chemicals but I don't think you are taking the right approach.

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  3. Matthew, first of all, I am surprised to hear that *you* think the article was about me trying to scare people as a "tactic." The issues are inherently scary, and I believe that sugar coating things by saying "we are uncertain about the imp...acts of the use of chemical/compound X" is the same sort of dangerous thinking that has led to all sorts of ecological disasters that affect the health and integrity of not only the natural world, but people, too. Climate change is a case in point.

    Second, I think you missed the point of the statistics. I want to point out that there are several issues of trust and authority that arise through something like the continued use and development of chemicals, especially if they are unregulated, and will continue to be so. More than three thousand chemicals are introduced into the US every year WITHOUT study. Even if one of those, 0.033% of 3000 chemicals, is carcinogenic in small quantities, and the government either can't keep up with the quantities used, or is complicit in its use, in the end, it is you and me that is drinking this chemical from our water, or your and my child may be born with it in its body.

    Third, I study physical chemistry, and so know about chemicals, and I know that there are naturally toxic chemicals. But there is absolutely no denying that it is scary when PCBs are present in our tissues and bodies, chemicals that are toxic in part per trillion quantities...and not only our bodies, for we live close to industrial sources, but even people thousands of miles away from industrial sources. PCBs are man-made, completely and totally. That is a class of compounds that has been used in the US for decades, with the government only later realising its effects. What other classes are being used that are *potentially* bad for nature and us?

    The issue is that we are willing to let people do things to us, you and me, without a even a moderate assessment of impacts. How is it that we can just let this happen? In the end, if a chemical is non-toxic, go ahead, use it. But don't mess with me by using it first, then apologise for the harm it caused. This is not right. This is scary.

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  4. If you can show me a single source that demonstrates in any scientific way that PCBs are toxic at a parts per trillion level I will concede the rest of the debate. From what I have read, the regulations are set at 2 PPM and even that concentration hasn't been linked to any known problems. Over time I have come to believe that most regulations regarding chemical safety are overly strict; so what you are saying is in direct opposition to what I believe. I could probably argue this for quite some time but for the sake of brevity I will give only one example. One might expect that chemists and chemical engineers would have an increase in cancer because of their increased chemical exposure to countless compounds (many of which are suspected carcinogens); when one looks at the data they have a lower incidence than expected for their income and education level. This says to me that (1) man made chemicals are not as scary as many people think (I breath in countless potential carcinogens everyday) (2) the specialized knowledge that chemical practitioners have appears to give them a distinct advantage in identifying how to avoid cancer (apparently we know what we are talking about) (3) it is not unreasonable to believe that many of the unnatural compounds we are exposed to could actually reduce the likelihood of developing cancer, which could help to explain why people who work with chemicals don't have more cancer.

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  6. I know the fact that I am picking on the PPM versus PPT seems nit picky and tangential but I think it is really where many of our disagreements start. You don't seem to think that the numbers are important, just the principles, whereas I th...ink one often ends up telling the wrong story if you ignore the numbers. Yes DDT, PCBs, heavy metals, alkyl mercuries, and asbestos are scary (rightfully so!), but they are also the scariest unnatural chemicals we have been broadly exposed to (note: heavy metals are not just a man made problem) . Despite being the scariest, I think if you read the literature on these compounds carefully you will be surprised to find that they aren't as toxic as you might expect given the level of regulation and advertisement. Additionally, I think if you look at the history of natural extracts you will find many more toxic examples with essentially no government regulation (i.e. natural isn't always the solution - many natural pesticides are EXTREMELY toxic). I think when people get caught up in natural versus unnatural (another thing we disagree about a lot) I think they are really getting caught up in semantics. Just because we make a chemical in a lab instead of extracting it from a natural source doesn't make it functionally any different. Additionally, I apologize if it ever sounds like I am talking to you like you don't know any science, I simply don't want to assume we have had the same background.

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  7. You think too much... life has sustained itself for millions of years on this planet ... and will sustain itself for millions more... that's the thing about biomater - it evolves... may be the homo sapien species will go extinct... but some... other species might take over as the dominating intelligent life form... do you really really really care? Isn't being happy the ultimate point of being alive? and that's all that matters at the end?

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  8. ‎... ohhh and I am not disagreeing with anything u say... I just think the focus of minimizing entropy should be on minimizing the chaos in the mind... than on matter (in fact you clear the chaos in your mind.. and matter shall automatically follow)...

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  9. The scary part is that these chemicals are ubiquitous in everything from our mattresses to baby bottles, cosmetics, and food! Most americans just trust that the FDA and other regulatory bodies wouldn't allow chemicals to be used if they ca...used harm, right? We think they're going to keep us safe! But the truth is exactly as you state in your post - these chemicals are introduced WITHOUT testing! If we later discover they are harmful, oops! The use of the precautionary principle, widespread in Europe, has unfortunately not caught on here. Imagine, having to test chemicals for safety before we put them in our products! Why, that would take forever and cut into our corporate profit! Why do you want to hurt our businesses by having them test some silly man-made chemicals, that's downright Un-American!

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  10. Here's an interesting link on the subject- http://civileats.com/2011/04/26/our-deadly-daily-chemical-cocktail/

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  11. Interesting thread here, Darshan. As someone who's working this area and personally had home products tested for toxicity, what I see in this debate is the classic standoff happening right now between risk-based vs hazard-based approaches to chemical management, and the precautionary principle vs. "innocent until proven guilty". Industry (and it looks like "Matthew L") argues strongly for the risk-based and "proven guilty" approach. This is what is codified in the extremely ineffective Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and is why the act has successfully removed only 3 chemicals from the market and - most recently - was too weak to even remove asbestos. "Risk-based" means that we'll argue forever about PPT vs PPB and how much exposure is harmful for a 200-pound male vs. pregnant woman. Industry loves this debate, as it lasts forever with no conclusion. And, of course, it assumes that the dose makes the poison, excluding the impacts of timing and the new science looking at different hormonal impacts at different levels, etc. The hazard-based approach looks more at chemical structure and inherent hazards of chemicals. So, for example, you would look at something like PCBs, DDT, PBDEs from a chemical standpoint, see the inherent hazard, and then put the burden on industry to prove that it's safe before it gets to market (precautionary principle). This is more closely aligned with the European system and is why many products deemed "unsafe" in Europe are on the shelves here. This works for substances like lead - we can argue forever over an acceptable level of brain damage from lead. The fact is that there is no "safe" level of lead that's been found.
    So, I could go on here, but my point is that we reach a level of "body burden" in large part because the chemical industry's power has ensured a risk-based approach with an extremely high threshold for action. While impacts are often unknown for years or decades, there's no question that hazardous chemical pollution of our bodies and ecosystems is increasing, and that we are feeling the impacts to our human and ecological health.

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