FRAN ALEXANDER: What's messing with us?

We are what we put into our bodies

"We are what we eat," that reminder we're told as we develop food choices, needs to be expanded to include the idea that we are also what we drink, breathe and touch.

We trust the drinking water in this country to be clean and safe, and assume the same about our air, even when we can plainly see degradation of both. We also seem to have an image of our skin as a barrier that shields and seals our internal selves from the external world. Unfortunately in some cases, this thinking is at best naive and at worst blind denial.

Occasionally an event, like the discovery of high levels of lead in the Flint, Mich., water supply, gets our notice, or we read that pesticide spraying from one field has had detrimental effects on other crops. We realize there is controversy over the use of chemicals in household products, furniture and cosmetics, and we may have second thoughts about using Roundup or other products in the news. We are aware dirty air aggravates asthma and harms our lungs, and that some chemicals, like flame-retardants, can pass through our skin to be absorbed in our blood stream.

What is not comprehended about the chemicals surrounding us in all their forms -- solid, liquid, or gaseous -- is how they become part of us. Sure, we know breathing smoke, coal dust or exhaust from burned petroleum products puts particles into our lungs. And, most of us have experienced illness from drinking or eating something foul, which sent our stomachs and lower regions into rebellion. However, we generally treat such exposures as temporary encounters from which our bodies will escape long-term harm. What is missing from our judgment and from our self-defense is information about what stays inside us and what it is doing.

Back in the early days of fracking for natural gas here in our natural state, some of us were paying attention to this relatively new fossil fuel extraction technology. We learned that multiple chemicals were injected into these drilled wells to aid in the fracturing of rock deep underground, which released gas held in the shale formation.

In trying to learn how the chemicals that returned to the surface would affect wildlife, land, water and people, we researched the limited information available at the time. It was then that "endocrine disruption" entered my vocabulary. And, it was then I realized there are tens of thousands of chemicals in use today that have never had a long-term analysis done on their effects on living things. Like most people, I'd assumed products surely were tested extensively before being marketed, only to find out the opposite happens.

The "precautionary principle" could be called the "look before you leap" principle. Essentially it means the burden of proof that something is relatively harmless should lie first with the party responsible for its creation and not upon those later affected by it. Although some European countries acknowledge the value of the precautionary principle, in our country the burden lies mainly on those harmed to find the science and scientists to prove how they were damaged. Individuals rarely have the means to take on major industries to establish injury. Consequently, it is pretty much an untested product free-for-all out there.

That ignored principle leads me back to endocrine disruption, more easily comprehended as something messing with our hormones. Different organs and glands in our bodies produce hormones that control how our insides work and how we grow, metabolize food into energy, produce insulin, form sleep patterns, regulate blood pressure and sexually develop. Hormones also affect our emotional and intellectual functions.

Scientists studying chemical impacts on humans are finding that even tiny amounts of endocrine-disrupting chemicals can alter the natural development of a fetus, changing its health substantially or permanently. Also, there is a strong possibility that changes can even be passed genetically to a fetus from chemical exposures experienced by its parents and grandparents. And, when that baby grows into adulthood, it too can pass its chemically modified traits to future generations.

Most of us realize fossil fuels are changing the global climate. Most synthetic endocrine-disrupting chemicals are derived from components of fossil fuels or from the processing or burning of them. Unlike climate change denial, it is very difficult to deny that food additives, pesticides, plastics, dyes, etc. are anything but man-made products. And they are changing us even more than the climate.

Commentary on 10/16/2018

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