Unacceptable Levels: A Filmmaker’s Empowering Toxic Journey

“I was drink­ing a glass of water one night at a restau­rant where I was work­ing,” Brown told Organic Connections. “There was one thing about it I noticed right away. We’re sup­posed to drink eight glasses of water a day, but this thing smelled and tasted like a swim­ming pool. I thought, ‘How could this pos­si­bly be okay?’

“Then I read that there are ‘accept­able lev­els’ of chlo­rine and other con­t­a­m­i­nants in water. I for­got about it until my wife had her sec­ond mis­car­riage, and that’s when my mind went back to that glass of water. I started think­ing, what could con­ceiv­ably be in that? Could there be some­thing that causes adverse health effects, or at least adds to them?”

Toxic Journey

The film fol­lows Brown’s inves­ti­ga­tion; he was learn­ing as he went, and the viewer is learn­ing with him. “This really was a jour­ney,” he said. “It was a step-by-step process for all of us.” Along the way, Brown inter­views a long list of experts on the sub­ject, includ­ing Ken Cook, pres­i­dent and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, and leg­endary con­sumer activist Ralph Nader, among many others.

Unacceptable Levelsbrings us sev­eral notable lessons from history—lessons not taught in school. For exam­ple, at the end of World War II there were plenty of peo­ple who had been trained in organic chem­istry, along with numer­ous inno­va­tions in the field. Coincidentally, there was a huge demand in soci­ety for con­ve­niences. The two met like a per­fect storm. This has led us to today’s world, in which there are some 80,000 chem­i­cals in our com­merce, from our food to face cream to paja­mas and far beyond. Ninety per­cent of our every­day products—including such unre­lated items as personal-care prod­ucts, car­pet clean­ers and non­stick pans—are petro­leum based.

Another story told is about a sub­stance the major­ity of us have grown up tak­ing for granted: flu­o­ride. It is in our tap water and in most dental-care prod­ucts. The film shows that it orig­i­nally entered our envi­ron­ment in 1945, as a result of being leaked by a plant engaged in ura­nium pro­duc­tion as part of nuclear research. Rather than address the issue as a prob­lem, sev­eral gov­ern­ment agen­cies pro­posed to “clean up the rep­u­ta­tion” of flu­o­ride and were given the green light to pilot it in the water of sev­eral cities. The rest is almost rewrit­ten his­tory, as through adver­tis­ing, flu­o­ride became the pre­ven­ta­tive cure-all for den­tal care. 

A fur­ther shock­ing rev­e­la­tion con­cerns “sewer sludge.” Tens of thou­sands of ele­ments removed in sewage treat­ment were deemed, in the 1970s, to be too toxic to dump in the ocean, put into land­fills or incin­er­ate. This won­drous mix was renamed “biosolids,” approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, and today is given away free and spread gen­er­ously on farm­land all across America.

The doc­u­men­tary touches on many other rel­e­vant top­ics, includ­ing bot­tled water, pes­ti­cides, plas­tics, and lev­els of chem­i­cals found in the aver­age child.

Rise in Illnesses

Coincident with the sharp rise in chem­i­cal use in vir­tu­ally every aspect of life—including in the grow­ing of our food—has been an astound­ing esca­la­tion in dis­ease. In the past 35 years the inci­dence of can­cer has jumped 27 per­cent. Autism rates have also climbed dra­mat­i­cally; a small exam­ple is seen with one teacher inter­viewed dur­ing the film who observed an increase from an aver­age of 3 autis­tic stu­dents in her class to 29.

Click any image to enlarge.

A large part of the rea­son for chem­i­cals not being directly linked to mal­adies is the delay in effect. In the doc­u­men­tary, Ken Cook points out that it is only through the legacy of chem­i­cals that have been in our envi­ron­ment over many years that we are now able to start mon­i­tor­ing their results. A large dose of a chem­i­cal at one point can lead to can­cer a con­sid­er­able time later. Hence cau­sa­tion is very hard to prove.

Poison Cocktail

Another rea­son for the dif­fi­culty of proof, as demon­strated in the film, is the low lev­els of indi­vid­ual chem­i­cals from dis­parate sources. In safety tests, chem­i­cals are only tested one at a time. But as Brown indi­cates, they have a cumu­la­tive effect on our bod­ies. As an anal­ogy, he points out that no doc­tor would pre­scribe a drug for a patient with­out find­ing out what other drugs that patient is taking.

Interestingly, Brown dis­cov­ered while mak­ing the movie that this kind of iso­la­tion between sources extends even to the experts in var­i­ous fields. “The one thing that I found to be most amaz­ing is that when I would inter­view somebody—let’s just say I was inter­view­ing some­body at the Rodale Institute and talk­ing to them about food—they didn’t know any­thing about the personal-care prod­ucts indus­try,” Brown said. “Or when I would talk to some­one in the personal-care prod­ucts indus­try, they didn’t know any­thing about flame retar­dants. And I’d talk to peo­ple about flame retar­dants and they didn’t know any­thing about flu­o­ride. So as I was doing these inter­views, I was edu­cat­ing all of them while they were edu­cat­ing me.”

Empowerment

As the infor­ma­tion given in the film can seem a bit over­whelm­ing, at the end Brown is quick to point out that an indi­vid­ual should start to take action one area at a time. “One reac­tion most peo­ple have in learn­ing about these things is that they’re over­whelmed,” he said. “That’s okay; they should be. It’s a lot to take in. But this infor­ma­tion also empow­ers peo­ple so that they can say, ‘You know what? I need to make a change and I need to start today.’”

For Brown, his dis­cov­er­ies while mak­ing Unacceptable Levels had a pro­foundly per­sonal effect. “I look at my kids today and I feel very good,” he con­cluded. “Maybe, because of the choices that my wife and I are mak­ing, we have set them on a tremen­dous course where their lives can be fuller and their time here can be a lot longer. I don’t want to see my kids at any point with a ter­mi­nal illness—and I know all par­ents feel like that. We all want to avoid that, and that means mak­ing bet­ter choices. That’s what I want to try to get across to par­ents. We’re all in this one together.”

For more infor­ma­tion, includ­ing how to see the movie, please visit www.unacceptablelevels.com.