Body Toxins and Our Children

The real impact of this video comes from the fact that these ten Americans, at the time of the analy­sis, had yet to be born. And the num­ber of chem­i­cals found in their umbil­i­cal cord blood was astounding—287 of them, to be pre­cise. There were 28 dif­fer­ent waste byprod­ucts of the sort that are emit­ted from incin­er­a­tors and smoke­stacks, 47 con­sumer prod­uct ingre­di­ents such as flame retar­dants, and 212 indus­trial chem­i­cals and pes­ti­cides banned a full 30 years before the sam­ples were taken.

What kind of dam­age are these par­tic­u­lar chem­i­cals capa­ble of caus­ing? According to the video, 134 of them have been found to cause can­cer in lab­o­ra­tory stud­ies or in peo­ple; 151 are asso­ci­ated with birth defects; 154 can cause hor­mone dis­rup­tion; 186 are asso­ci­ated with infer­til­ity; 130 are immune sys­tem dis­rup­tors; and 158 are neu­ro­tox­ins such as lead, PCBs and mer­cury, which can have pro­found effects on a devel­op­ing child. (You might have noticed that that these fig­ures add up to more than the num­ber of chem­i­cals found; this is because many of them have mul­ti­ple toxic effects.)

Of course, one prime defense from chem­i­cal com­pa­nies is that many of these chem­i­cals show up as parts per bil­lion in the sam­ples taken; such tiny amounts could hardly be con­sid­ered harm­ful. As Cook points out in 10 Americans, these tiny amounts are in fact com­mon­place in med­ica­tions we see around us—or, at the least, adver­tised on television—every day. One dose of Albuterol, at 2.1 parts per bil­lion, will stop an asthma attack. One dose of hor­mones from NuvaRing, a com­mon con­tra­cep­tive, is nearly 100 per­cent effec­tive at 0.035 parts per bil­lion. The nor­mal dose of the anti­de­pres­sant Paxil is 30 parts per bil­lion, as it is for Cialis, a treat­ment for erec­tile dys­func­tion in men.

Cook and the Environmental Working Group delib­er­ately set out to make the video a dra­matic state­ment. “We felt there needed to be sto­ry­telling that helped peo­ple under­stand why the issue of toxic chem­i­cals was so impor­tant and per­sonal,” Cook told Organic Connections. “We had done the research to demon­strate toxic chem­i­cal pol­lu­tion in peo­ple, includ­ing the dra­matic find­ings we devel­oped from the first broad-based test­ing of these chem­i­cals in umbil­i­cal cord blood. As my col­leagues and I were look­ing at dif­fer­ent pre­sen­ta­tion meth­ods, we thought of [Apple Computer CEO] Steve Jobs, who per­forms won­der­ful pre­sen­ta­tions at the annual events when he launches new Apple prod­ucts. There are not a lot of words on the screen; there are beau­ti­ful images, video—all that sort of thing. Al Gore, of course, per­fected it in An Inconvenient Truth, which we had seen him do on stage years before the movie. Those became some of our mod­els. We wanted to tell a story about toxic chem­i­cals, so we came up with that presentation.”

The pre­sen­ta­tion itself has become quite pop­u­lar, spurring increas­ing requests for Cook to appear live. He has now made that same pre­sen­ta­tion before Congress, at Duke University, and to the Centers for Disease Control, among many others.

The Point

Every such pre­sen­ta­tion has an ulti­mate pur­pose. In the case of 10 Americans, that pur­pose is to raise money in sup­port of EWG’s efforts with what was for­merly titled the Kid-Safe Chemical Act, now known as the Toxic Chemicals Safety Act.

“This is the law that gov­erns toxic indus­trial chem­i­cals,” Cook explained. “These are the types of chem­i­cals that end up in things like our makeup and our cars and our appliances—pretty much every­thing in our econ­omy. For over 30 years this law has been on the books and has been rec­og­nized as tooth­less. This updated Toxic Chemicals Safety Act, now in the House of Representatives, is the first attempt in 30-plus years to rewrite this envi­ron­men­tal law that has done so lit­tle to pro­tect us from toxic chem­i­cals that are pro­duced in this coun­try or imported from abroad and end up in our every­day lives. In fact they end up in our bod­ies, as our stud­ies have shown.”

The act would effec­tively reverse the safety require­ments cur­rently man­dated of chem­i­cal com­pa­nies. At present, any chem­i­cal can be mar­keted that has never been found unsafe. It is then up to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, with lim­ited resources, to demon­strate that a chem­i­cal is dan­ger­ous before it can be taken off the mar­ket. The Toxic Chemicals Safety Act would make it so that chem­i­cal com­pa­nies would have to prove a chem­i­cal meets safety stan­dards before putting it into wide­spread use.

“All in all it’s a really impor­tant advance­ment,” Cook said. “It would be one of the strongest pub­lic health statutes in the world, if it became law, and we’re right at the begin­ning of the debate on it.”

Where to Start?

After see­ing 10 Americans, pre­vi­ously unin­formed con­sumers will likely be anx­ious to detox­ify their children’s envi­ron­ments. Cook advises tak­ing it one step at a time.

“I’m a par­ent, and we’ve got a lot of par­ents here at EWG,” said Cook. “I always tell par­ents not to try and cleanse their entire lives right off the bat because they might burn out pretty quickly on this effort. First they should focus on diet for a month or so and really look at what they’re eat­ing, what they’re feed­ing their kids. Look around under the sink at clean­ing sup­plies, what they’re using there. They should be thought­ful obvi­ously around the home—for exam­ple, on improve­ment projects that involve paint­ing, use low-VOC paint. With drink­ing water, they should be care­ful about what’s com­ing out of their tap. Consumers can go to our web­site and look up the tap water con­t­a­m­i­nates. Simple coun­ter­top fil­ters are not very expen­sive and can often deal with things like lead and other con­t­a­m­i­nates that peo­ple don’t want to have in their bod­ies. So they can kind of go through a step-by-step process. We have a num­ber of guides on our web­site that can help peo­ple to a greener, health­ier lifestyle.

“The prob­lem with so many toxic chem­i­cals is they’re very dif­fi­cult to avoid,” Cook con­cluded. “I mean, even if you buy organic milk, you’re going to find some dioxin in there because it’s in the envi­ron­ment. Also with some organic pro­duce items, if they’ve been pro­duced on land that used to grow cot­ton, and DDT was applied to the land before it was banned in 1970, traces of that DDT are still in the soil and it’s taken up by the plants. So there are a num­ber of things you can’t avoid, and that’s why we need the gov­ern­ment to take action to deal with legacy prob­lems like DDT and, more impor­tantly, the tens of thou­sands of chem­i­cals that we haven’t con­trolled yet, and in some cases haven’t even studied.”

The Environmental Working Group web­site is an invalu­able resource both for reduc­ing envi­ron­men­tal tox­ins and for pur­chas­ing safe prod­ucts. It can be found at www.ewg.org.