Avoiding Everyday Toxins

By Marco Visscher, Ode. Posted November 11, 2005.

Unexpected Toxins

Without knowing it, 35-year-old Jeremiah Holland lost a lot more than weight when he decided to start seriously exercising two years ago. His racing bike helped him trim down from 118 to 90 kilos (260 to 200 pounds). What Holland could never have suspected was that during that period, he was also ridding his body of something else -- something he never knew was there: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), perfluoroctane sulfonates (PFOS), phthalates and a host of other unpronounceable chemical substances that are stored in fat -- and that remain in our bodies for a long, long time. Holland would never have been the wiser if he hadn't been chosen as a test subject in a project conducted by the Oakland Tribune, which studied the effect of toxic chemicals in the human body.

So as not to create too much panic, the editorial staff chose a family that the newspaper's advisory counsel of scientists felt would be at low risk. The family eats organic food, avoids chemical cleaning products, has no carpeting in their house and doesn't buy lots of new furniture and electronic equipment: in short, the newspaper selected Jeremiah Holland and Michele Hammond and their two children Mikaela, age five and 18-month-old Rowan. But as responsible and healthy as their lives seemed, the tests proved that their bodies contained traces of numerous chemicals, some at levels exceeding the legally established maximums. The blood, hair and urine of each family member showed traces of dioxins, mercury, lead, cadmium and the chemicals used for coating pans with Teflon.

What was surprising was the presence of PCBs, which are used in products such as paint, ink, glue and plastic. PCBs can damage the skin and liver, are linked to cancer, birth defects and disruptions to the hormone system and brain development. The list of health risks led to a global ban on the production and use of PCBs in the 1970s, so why are they still showing up in the Holland family?

An even bigger surprise was the strong presence of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), a flame retardant used in all kinds of products from plastics to cell phones. It is estimated that adults in the United States have 36 parts per billion (ppb) of this substance in their blood. Think of that as 36 grains of salt in 50 kilos [110 pounds]of mashed potatoes. But the father had 102 ppb, the mother 138, the daughter 490 and the son 838, more than what would normally be found in the blood of people who work with this substance on a daily basis. Scientists note that laboratory rats start exhibiting problems with their thyroid glands at levels of 300 ppb.

So what can the Holland-Hammond family do with this information? And what can you do? Are these substances in everyone's bodies? Just how toxic are they? How do they get into our bodies? How do we get rid of them? Let's start at the beginning. Yes, chemical substances are everywhere. In remote lakes in Finland, in the Himalayas, at the South Pole -- there's not an outpost in the world they have not reached. Including your body. The reason: poison knows no bounds.

Chemicals are carried along by air and water currents. The pesticides used on a banana plantation in Ecuador, the bleach used in a paper factory in Canada, the fluorine polymers produced in a chemical plant in France: they're spreading across the world, accumulating in the environment and ending up in the food chain. They are then stored in people's fat tissue and slowly released into the body. Admittedly, the amounts in question are miniscule. A couple of "parts per billion" of a substance in your blood means you're talking about pieces of a chocolate bar you're gradually spreading among the 740,000 inhabitants of San Francisco. That's not a lot of chocolate, but poison is still poison, even in such tiny amounts.

New technologies have made it now possible to detect chemicals in increasingly low doses. But the chemical industry reassures us there is absolutely no reason to panic. Fred vom Saal thinks there ís reason to panic. In a study of rats and mice, this Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri, proved that even minimal doses of a natural or synthetic hormone can have lasting effects on reproduction and fertility. And he showed how minimal doses of one of the most widely used chemicals -- bisphenol A, which is used in the production of plastic -- imitate or in fact block hormonal functions. Vom Saal reports, "The low doses are the hardest part of the story. We're talking about 0.1 parts per a trillionth of a gram in a milliliter of blood, and still we're seeing profound changes we can't explain in a different way."

Through his study Vom Saal discovered that a slight increase in the female hormone estradiol in male mice foetuses leads to an enlarged prostate. This may provide an explanation for the spectacular increase in prostate problems among men, and a surprising one considering that most medicines prescribed for prostate cancer contain estradiol.

Marco Visscher is a Senior Editor at Ode.

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