You Are What You Wear

In Memoriam: U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D – NJ).

Sen. Lautenberg fought valiantly to reform the weak laws protecting consumers in the US from chemical incursions in their lives. He introduced the “Safe Chemicals Act of 2010”, which was defeated, but followed up with the “Chemical Safety Improvement Act” which has been endorsed by the New York Times, the Washington Post and has bipartisan support at this time. It caps eight years of work by Senator Lautenberg to fix the nation’s broken chemical law (the TSCA) which has been proven ineffective and is criticized by both the public health community and industry. Thank you Senator Lautenberg.
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You are what you wear.

I don’t mean like in “the clothes make the man” kind of way, but in the “our bodies absorb chemicals found in our environment” kind of way.

The new science of biomonitoring has enabled scientists to take the guesswork out of the effects of toxic exposure in blood, urine, breast milk, semen and all the other parts of us where chemicals tend not to flush out. It has brought home the truth in the saying that we are what we wear – or eat, sit on, breathe, rub up against or drink. The “environment” is not “out there” as David Suzuki reminds us: We are the environment and it is us.

Since 1999, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has tested Americans every two years in order to build a database of what are called “body burdens,”(1) in order to help toxicologists set new standards for exposure and definitively link chemicals to illness, or else decouple them. The study attempts to assess exposure to environmental chemicals in the general U.S. population – and the more chemicals they look for, the more they find: The CDC started with 27 worrisome chemicals in 1999 and now tests for 219. Their findings have shown that no matter whether you’re rich or poor; live in the center of a city or a pristine rural community; east coast, west coast or in between; are elderly or newborn; Republican, Democrat or Socialist – you have BPA in your blood, as well as polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDE)s – which can retard a fetus’s neurological development; perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) – which impairs normal development; perchlorate – which can keep the thyroid from making necessary hormones and methyl tert-butyl ethers (now banned in most states) and mercury.

And the correlation between chemicals to illness seems to be on the rise(2) – certainly from studies done linking various chemicals to human disease and illness, but also because the spectrum of both “rare” and “common” illnesses is on the rise. The National Institutes of Health defines a rare disease as one affecting 200,000 or fewer Americans. Yet 25 – 30 million Americans suffer from one of the nearly 6,800 identifiable rare diseases. That compares to the 40 million Americans with one of the three “major” diseases: heart disease, cancer or diabetes.

Specifically with regard to fabrics: over 2,000 chemicals are used in textile processing, and these include some of the most toxic known (lead, mercury, arsenic, formaldehyde, Bisphenol A, PBDE, PFOA). There are no requirements that manufacturers disclose the chemicals used in processing – chemicals which remain in the finished fabrics. Often the chemicals are used under trade names, or are protected by legislation as “trade secrets” in food and drug articles – but fabrics don’t even have a federal code to define what can/cannot be used because fabrics are totally unregulated in the U.S., except in terms of fire retardancy or intended use. It’s pretty much a free-for-all.

What they’re finding is that this chemical onslaught seems to be changing us. Using a computer-assisted technique called microarray profiling, scientists can now examine the effects of toxins on thousands of genes at once (before they could only study 100 at a time at most). They can also search for signs of chemical subversion at the molecular level, in genes and proteins. This means that we are beginning to understand how even small doses of certain chemicals may switch genes on and off in harmful ways during the most sensitive period of development.

In a talk at the National Academy of Sciences, Linda Birnbaum, the head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program, called toxicogenomics (the study of how genes respond to toxins) the “breakthrough” that pushed the study of poisons beyond the “obvious things,” that is, the huge doses that led to “death or low birth weight.”(3) Scientists are developing new ideas about how chemicals can, in effect, re-program animals and humans to be more susceptible to certain diseases—and to pass that susceptibility on to their offspring. This theory is known as the “developmental origins of health and disease” (DOHad) , and is now an emerging field.

So why not seek products – fabrics, soaps, cosmetics, perfumes, deodorants, food – that don’t contain chemicals that harm you – or your children or grandchildren?
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(1) What is a “body burden”: Starting before birth, children are exposed to chemicals that impair normal growth and development. Exposures continue throughout our lives and accumulate in our bodies. These chemicals can interact within the body and cause illness. And they get passed on from parent to child for generations.
(2) World Health Organization; http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/en/index.html
(3) Shulevitz, Judith, “The Toxicity Panic”, The New Republic, April 28, 2011