The creation of an anti-environmental myth

By Aaron Swartz

Sometimes you find mass murderers in the most unlikely places. Take Rachel Carson. She was, by all accounts, a mild-mannered writer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—hardly a sociopath’s breeding ground. And yet, according to many in the media, Carson has more blood on her hands than Hitler.

The problems started in the 1940s, when Carson left the Service to begin writing full-time. In 1962, she published a series of articles in the New Yorker, resulting in the book Silent Spring—widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The book discussed how pesticides and pollutants moved up the food chain, threatening the ecosystems for many animals, especially birds. Without them, it warned, we might face the title’s silent spring.

Farmers used vast quantities of DDT to protect their crops against insects—80 million pounds were sprayed in 1959 alone—but from there it quickly climbed up the food chain. Bald eagles, eating fish that had concentrated DDT in their tissues, headed toward extinction. Humans, likewise accumulating DDT in our systems, appeared to get cancer as a result. Mothers passed the chemical on to their children through breast milk. Silent Spring drew attention to these concerns and, in 1972, the resulting movement succeeded in getting DDT banned in the U.S.—a ban that later spread to other nations.

And that, according to Carson’s critics, is where the trouble started. DDT had been sprayed heavily on houses in developing countries to protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Without it, malaria rates in developing countries skyrocketed. Over 1 million people die from it each year.

To the critics, the solution seems simple: Forget Carson’s emotional arguments about dead birds and start spraying DDT again so we can save human lives.

Worse than Hitler?

“What the World Needs Now Is DDT” asserted the headline of a lengthy feature in the New York Times Magazine (4/11/04). “No one concerned about the environmental damage of DDT set out to kill African children,” reporter Tina Rosenberg generously allowed. Nonetheless, “Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind.”

It’s a common theme—echoed by two more articles in the Times by the same author (3/29/06, 10/5/06), and by Times columnists Nicholas Kristof (3/12/05) and John Tierney (6/05/07). The same refrain appears in a Washington Post op-ed by columnist Sebastian Mallaby, gleefully headlined “Look Who’s Ignoring Science Now” (10/09/05). And again in the Baltimore Sun (“Ms. Carson’s views [came] at a cost of many thousands of lives worldwide”—5/27/07), New York Sun (“millions of Africans died . . . thanks to Rachel Carson’s junk science classic”—4/21/06), the Hill (“millions die on the altar of politically correct ideologies”—11/02/05), San Francisco Examiner (“Carson was wrong, and millions of people continue to pay the price”—5/28/07) and Wall Street Journal (“environmental controls were more important than the lives of human beings”—2/21/07).

Even novelists have gotten in on the game. “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted,” explains a character in Michael Crichton’s 2004 bestseller, State of Fear (p. 487). “[DDT] was so safe you could eat it.” That fictional comment not only inspired a column on the same theme in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald (6/18/05), it led Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.) to invite Crichton and Dr. Donald R. Roberts, a longtime pro-DDT activist, to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

But other attacks only seem like fiction. A web page on JunkScience.com features a live Malaria Death Clock next to a photo of Rachel Carson, holding her responsible for more deaths than malaria has caused in total. (“DDT allows [Africans to] climb out of the poverty/subsistence hole in which ‘caring greens’ apparently wish to keep them trapped,” it helpfully explains.) And a new website from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, RachelWasWrong.org, features photos of deceased African children along the side of every page.

Developing resistance

At one level, these articles send a comforting message to the developed world: Saving African children is easy. We don’t need to build large aid programs or fund major health initiatives, let alone develop Third World infrastructure or think about larger issues of fairness. No, to save African lives from malaria, we just need to put our wallets away and work to stop the evil environmentalists.

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy.

For one thing, there is no global DDT ban. DDT is indeed banned in the U.S., but malaria isn’t exactly a pressing issue here. If it ever were, the ban contains an exception for matters of public health. Meanwhile, it’s perfectly legal—and indeed, used—in many other countries: 10 out of the 17 African nations that currently conduct indoor spraying use DDT (New York Times, 9/16/06).

DDT use has decreased enormously, but not because of a ban. The real reason is simple, although not one conservatives are particularly fond of: evolution. Mosquito populations rapidly develop resistance to DDT, creating enzymes to detoxify it, modifying their nervous systems to avoid its effects, and avoiding areas where DDT is sprayed — and recent research finds that that resistance continues to spread even after DDT spraying has stopped, lowering the effectiveness not only of DDT but also other pesticides (Current Biology, 8/9/05).

“No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored,” Carson wrote in Silent Spring. “The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. . . . Resistance to insecticides by mosquitoes . . . has surged upwards at an astounding rate.”

Unfortunately, her words were ignored. Africa didn’t cut back on pesticides because, through a system called the “Industry Cooperative Program,” the pesticide companies themselves got to participate in the United Nations agency that provided advice on pest control. Not surprisingly, it continued to recommend significant pesticide usage.
When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it seemed as if this strategy was working. To take the most extreme case, Sri Lanka counted only 17 cases of malaria in 1963. But by 1969, things had once again gotten out of hand: 537,700 cases were counted. Naturally, the rise had many causes: Political and financial pressure led to cutbacks on spraying, stockpiles of supplies had been used up, low rainfall and high temperatures encouraged mosquitoes, a backlog of diagnostic tests to detect malaria was processed and testing standards became more stringent. But even with renewed effort, the problem did not go away.

Records uncovered by entomologist Andrew Spielman hint at why (Mosquito, p. 177). For years, Sri Lanka had run test programs to verify DDT’s effectiveness at killing mosquitoes. But halfway through the program, their standards were dramatically lowered. “Though the reason was not recorded,” Spielman writes, “it was obvious that some mosquitoes were developing resistance and the change was made to justify continued spraying.”

But further spraying led only to further resistance, and the problem became much harder to control. DDT use was scaled back and other pesticides were introduced—more cautiously this time—but the epidemic was never again brought under control, with the deadly legacy that continues to this day.

Instead of apologizing, the chemical companies went on the attack. They funded front groups and think tanks to claim the epidemic started because countries “stopped” using their products. In their version of the story, environmentalists forced Africans to stop using DDT, causing the increase in malaria. “It’s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident,” complains Tim Lambert, whose weblog, Deltoid, tracks the DDT myth and other scientific misinformation in the media.

Front and center

Perhaps the most vocal group spreading this story is Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM). Founded in 2000 by Roger Bate, an economist at various right-wing think tanks, AFM has run a major PR campaign to push the pro-DDT story, publishing scores of op-eds and appearing in dozens of articles each year. Bate and his partner Richard Tren even published a book laying out their alternate history of DDT: When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story.

A funding pitch uncovered by blogger Eli Rabbett shows Bate’s thinking when he first started the project. “The environmental movement has been successful in most of its campaigns as it has been ‘politically correct,’” he explained (Tobacco Archives, 9/98). What the anti-environmental movement needs is something with “the correct blend of political correctness ( . . . oppressed blacks) and arguments (eco-imperialism [is] undermining their future).” That something, Bate proposed, was DDT.

In an interview, Bate said that his motivation had changed after years of working on the issue of malaria. “I think my position has mellowed, perhaps with age,” he told Extra!. “[I have] gone from being probably historically anti-environmental to being very much pro–combating malaria now.” He pointed to the work he’d done making sure money to fight malaria was spent properly, including a study he co-authored in the respected medical journal the Lancet (7/15/06) on dishonest accounting at the World Bank. He insisted that he wasn’t simply pro-DDT, but instead was willing to support whatever the evidence showed worked. And he flatly denied that AFM had ever received money from tobacco, pharmaceutical or chemical companies.

Still, AFM has very much followed the plan Bate laid out in his original funding pitch to corporations: First, create “the intellectual arguments to make our case,” then “disseminate these arguments to people in [developing countries]” who can make convincing spokespeople, and then “promote these arguments . . . in the West.” The penultimate page gives another hint that stopping malaria isn’t the primary goal: “Is the DDT problem still relevant?” is listed as an “intellectual issue to be resolved”—once they got funding. (When asked for comment on this, Bate became upset and changed the subject.)

Bate continues to insist that resistance isn’t much of an issue, because its primary effect is to keep mosquitoes away from DDT-covered areas altogether. Instead he claims “resistance was a useful device by which it was easy to pull the plug” on an anti-malaria campaign that was failing because of administrative incompetence. “You’re not likely to see an aid agency [admit this],” he said when asked for evidence. “I’m not sure what you want me to say. If you read enough of the literature, you get that strong impression.” But few experts aside from those affiliated with AFM seem to have gotten the same impression.

DDT’s dangers

These myths can have serious consequences. For one thing, despite what is claimed by the right, DDT itself is quite harmful. Studies have suggested that prenatal exposure to DDT leads to significant decreases in mental and physical functioning among young children, with the problems becoming more severe when the exposure is more serious (American Journal of Epidemiology, 9/12/06; Pediatrics, 7/1/06), while the EPA classifies it as a probable human carcinogen.

For another, resistance is deadly. Not only has DDT’s overuse made it ineffective, but, as noted, it has led mosquitoes to evolve “cross-resistance”: resistance not only to DDT but also to other insecticides, including those with less dangerous environmental effects.

And perhaps most importantly, the pro-DDT line is a vast distraction. There are numerous other techniques for dealing with malaria: alternative insecticides, bed nets and a combination of drugs called artemisinin-based combination therapy, or ACT. ACT actually kills the malaria parasite fast, allowing the patient a quick recovery, and has a success rate of 95 percent (World Health Organization, 2001). Rollouts of ACT in other countries have slashed malaria rates by 80 to 97 percent (Washington Monthly, 7/06).

But such techniques require money and wealthy nations are hesitant to give it, especially when they think they can just avoid the whole problem by unbanning DDT. “DDT has become a fetish,” says Allan Schapira, a former senior member of the malaria team at the World Health Organization (Washington Monthly, 7/06). “You have people advocating DDT as if it’s the only insecticide that works against malaria, as if DDT would solve all problems, which is obviously absolutely unrealistic.”

As a result, senators and their staff insist that DDT is all that’s necessary. And the new director of WHO’s malaria program, Arata Kochi, kicked off his tenure by telling the malaria team that they were “stupid” and issuing an announcement that “forcefully endorsed wider use of the insecticide DDT” while a representative of the Bush administration stood by his side. Half his staff resigned in response (New York Times, 9/16/06).

There are genuine issues with current malaria control programs: incompetent administration, misuse of funds, outdated techniques, a lack of funding and concern. And, much to their credit, many on the right have drawn attention to these problems. Africa Fighting Malaria has frequently called for more effective monitoring, and conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Ok.) has used his influence to fight corruption in anti-malaria programs.

But the same Tom Coburn recently held up a bill honoring the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s birth on the grounds that “millions of people . . . died because governments bought into Carson’s junk science claims about DDT” (Raw Story, 5/22/07). Even AFM’s Bate was quoted as finding this a bit too much, pointing out that Carson died in 1964, just two years after Silent Spring was published (Washington Post, 5/23/07). But apparently getting a few digs in at the environmental movement is just too hard for conservatives to resist.

From FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, September/October 2007

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3186

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer

The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.

The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report on Thursday, warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.

I’ve read an advance copy of the report, and it’s an extraordinary document. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals.

Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.

In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ ”

It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel. Established in 1971, this is a group of three distinguished experts who review America’s cancer program and report directly to the president.

One of the seats is now vacant, but the panel members who joined in this report are Dr. LaSalle Leffall Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Both were originally appointed to the panel by former President George W. Bush.

“We wanted to let people know that we’re concerned, and that they should be concerned,” Professor Leffall told me.

The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary.

“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

Industry may howl. The food industry has already been fighting legislation in the Senate backed by Dianne Feinstein of California that would ban bisphenol-A, commonly found in plastics and better known as BPA, from food and beverage containers.

Studies of BPA have raised alarm bells for decades, and the evidence is still complex and open to debate. That’s life: In the real world, regulatory decisions usually must be made with ambiguous and conflicting data. The panel’s point is that we should be prudent in such situations, rather than recklessly approving chemicals of uncertain effect.

The President’s Cancer Panel report will give a boost to Senator Feinstein’s efforts. It may also help the prospects of the Safe Chemicals Act, backed by Senator Frank Lautenberg and several colleagues, to improve the safety of chemicals on the market.

Some 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and they include Democrats and Republicans alike. Protecting ourselves and our children from toxins should be an effort that both parties can get behind — if enough members of Congress are willing to put the public interest ahead of corporate interests.

One reason for concern is that some cancers are becoming more common, particularly in children. We don’t know why that is, but the proliferation of chemicals in water, foods, air and household products is widely suspected as a factor. I’m hoping the President’s Cancer Panel report will shine a stronger spotlight on environmental causes of health problems — not only cancer, but perhaps also diabetes, obesity and autism.

This is not to say that chemicals are evil, and in many cases the evidence against a particular substance is balanced by other studies that are exonerating. To help people manage the uncertainty prudently, the report has a section of recommendations for individuals:

¶Particularly when pregnant and when children are small, choose foods, toys and garden products with fewer endocrine disruptors or other toxins. (Information about products is at www.cosmeticsdatabase.com or www.healthystuff.org.)

¶For those whose jobs may expose them to chemicals, remove shoes when entering the house and wash work clothes separately from the rest of the laundry.

¶Filter drinking water.

¶Store water in glass or stainless steel containers, or in plastics that don’t contain BPA or phthalates (chemicals used to soften plastics). Microwave food in ceramic or glass containers.

¶Give preference to food grown without pesticides, chemical fertilizers and growth hormones. Avoid meats that are cooked well-done.

¶Check radon levels in your home. Radon is a natural source of radiation linked to cancer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06kristof.html

(A version of this article appeared in print on May 6, 2010, on page A33 of the New York edition.)

PESTICIDES AND PARKINSONS and HOW I KEEP THE CRITTERS OUT

DR. AL SEARS      http://www.alsearsmd.com

When you think “organic,” you probably have a picture in your head of produce – organically grown fruits and vegetables.

But I want you to know about organic pesticides because of the growing evidence that chemical pesticides are linked to Parkinson’s disease.

In a study published by the journal Archives of Neurology, researchers were looking at people’s occupations, and how likely they were to get Parkinson’s disease.
What they found shocked them.

There was almost no increased risk for Parkinson’s regardless of what kind of work people did. But they did find that anyone who used at least one of eight different kinds of pesticides was more than twice as likely to get Parkinson’s.

And if you used the insecticide permethrin, you were three times more likely to develop the disease.1 Permethrin is a common insect killer widely sold for use on clothing. It’s also put in a pharmaceutical cream meant to be rubbed on the skin to kill mites.

Another study by the University of California at Berkeley found that people exposed to maneb, a common pesticide used in gardens, were 75 percent likelier to develop Parkinson’s.2

Then there are the findings of the huge Agricultural Health Study. Have you heard about it? They closely follow about 90,000 licensed pesticide applicators and their spouses, and monitor them for illnesses. Researchers published results showing that people who used commercial herbicides/pesticides like rotenone or paraquat developed Parkinson’s disease 2.5 times more often than non-users.3

These pesticides damage your cells. Rotenone, for example, impairs the ability of your mitochondria to make energy. And paraquat increases oxygen-induced damage to cells.
Some of the cells hardest hit by these pesticides are in an area of the brain that is also damaged by Parkinson’s.

ALTERNATIVES

If you’d like to avoid this kind of damage from pesticides and keep your brain working just as well as it does right now, here’s what I recommend:

•    Stay away from products that claim to be “eco-friendly” or “natural,” when they clearly are not. 

For example, avoid synthetic pyrethroids. They’re similar to pyrethrins, which are natural insect-killing extracts from the flower chrysanthemum. But pyrethroids are created in a lab. Permethrin, which I mentioned earlier, is one of them.

•    Also, stay away from “geraniol.” It’s billed as natural because it’s made from roses, lemons and geraniums, but it’s been banned in Europe because of its toxicity to humans.
Here’s what to use instead:

1.    In my garden, I use neem oil to keep out pests. This extract from the fruit of the neem tree has been used for pest control in parts of Asia and India for over 2,500 years. It’s completely non-toxic. When the Environmental Protection Agency went to test neem for toxicity, it found zero reactions, even at the highest exposure.

In fact, you can use any part of the tree for pest control – the twigs, the leaves or the berries. The tree will grow in Florida. In other places and colder climates, I’ve seen it grown indoors in pots. Even sitting in a pot, it’ll serve to keep the bugs out. You can take a couple leaves and put them in your cabinets to keep cockroaches out. Or you can fray up the ends of the stems (so that the twigs are like brushes) and leave those around to work, too.

2.    I also get rid of the critters that try to crawl into my house with a pesticide that uses diatomaceous earth. It causes the pests to wither up and die.

3.    For a bug spray that’s good for spot use if I do see bugs in the house, I like to use a mint and herbal oil spray. It kills bugs within a few minutes and even smells pleasant, unlike those chemical sprays.

4.    For hard-to-kill bugs, look for pesticides with natural pyrethrins, which are made from chrysanthemums. They act fast, aren’t toxic to pets and degrade within a day.

5.    There are also bug baits made with boric acid, from the mineral boron. These aren’t toxic to people or pets either, and are great for getting rid of ants.

We are increasingly learning that in addition to the illnesses caused in living people by a variety of chemical substances – just check out the long and tragic list to the right (‘Categories’) – substances implicated in these illnesses seem to be able to damage fetuses, whose DNA is altered, and they are born with greater predispositions toward, in the case of this study, asthma.

“…The researchers noted that Treg cells are important for other autoimmune disorders, so the implications of this study could go beyond asthma.”

“The link between diesel exhaust and asthma could simply have been that the particulates were irritating the lungs. What we found is that the problems are more systemic. This is one of the few papers to have linked from A to Z the increased exposure to ambient air pollution with suppressed Treg cell levels, changes in a key gene and increased severity of asthma symptoms.”

Air pollution’s effect on asthma

BERKELEY — Exposure to dirty air is linked to decreased function of a gene that appears to increase the severity of asthma in children, according to a joint study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

While air pollution is known to be a source of immediate inflammation, this new study provides one of the first pieces of direct evidence that explains how some ambient air pollutants could have long-term effects.

The findings, published in the October 2010 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, come from a study of 181 children with and without asthma in Fresno and Palo Alto.

The researchers found that air pollution exposure suppressed the immune system’s regulatory T cells (Treg), and that the decreased level of Treg function was linked to greater severity of asthma symptoms and lower lung capacity. Treg cells are responsible for putting the brakes on the immune system so that it doesn’t react to non-pathogenic substances in the body that are associated with allergy and asthma. When Treg function is low, the cells fail to block the inflammatory responses that are the hallmark of asthma symptoms.

The findings have potential implications for altered birth outcomes associated with polluted air, much the same as those noted for the effects of cigarette smoke.

“When it came out that cigarettes can cause molecular changes, it meant the possibility that mothers who smoked could affect the DNA of their children during fetal development,” said study lead author Dr. Kari Nadeau, pediatrician at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of allergy and immunology at Stanford’s School of Medicine. “Similarly, these new findings suggest the possibility of an inheritable effect from environmental pollution.”

Forty-one participants came from the Fresno Asthmatic Children’s Environment Study (FACES), a longitudinal study led by principal investigator Dr. Ira Tager, professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, and co-principal investigator S. Katharine Hammond, UC Berkeley professor and chair of environmental health sciences. The researchers also recruited 30 children from Fresno who did not have asthma.

“I’m not aware of any other studies that have looked at how chemicals can alter cells so early in the regulatory process, and then connected that effect to clinical symptoms,” said Tager. “There are people who still question the direct link between air pollution and human health, but these findings make the health impact of pollutants harder to deny.”

Fresno was chosen because it is located in California’s Central Valley, where trapped hot air mixes with high traffic and heavy agriculture to create some of the highest levels of air pollution in the country. It is also a region known for its high incidence of asthma: Nearly one in three children there have the condition, earning Fresno the nickname, “The Asthma Capitol of California.”

The researchers compared the participants from Fresno with 80 children, half with asthma and half without, in the relatively low-pollution city of Palo Alto, Calif. The children were matched by age, gender and asthma status, among other variables. The children were tested for breathing function, allergic sensitivity and Treg cells in the blood.

Daily air quality data came from California Air Resources Board monitoring stations. The researchers calculated each child’s annual average exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), a byproduct of fossil fuel and a major pollutant in vehicle exhaust.

The study found that the annual average exposure to PAH was 7 times greater for the children in Fresno compared with the kids in Palo Alto. Levels of ozone and particulate matter were also significantly higher in Fresno.

Not surprisingly, the study found that the children in Fresno had lower overall levels of Treg function and more severe symptoms of asthma than the children in Palo Alto. For example, the non-asthmatic children in Fresno had Treg function results that were similar to the children with asthma in Palo Alto.

The study authors correlated increased exposure to PAH with methylation of the gene, Forkhead box transcription factor (Foxp3), which triggers Treg cell development. Methylation effectively disables the gene’s function, leading to reduced levels of Treg cells. The connection between Treg function and the severity of asthma symptoms held for children in both groups.

While previous studies have found associations between pollution — especially motor vehicle exhaust — and an increased risk of developing asthma, few have traced its molecular pathway so completely, the study authors said.

“The link between diesel exhaust and asthma could simply have been that the particulates were irritating the lungs,” said Nadeau. “What we found is that the problems are more systemic. This is one of the few papers to have linked from A to Z the increased exposure to ambient air pollution with suppressed Treg cell levels, changes in a key gene and increased severity of asthma symptoms.”

The researchers noted that Treg cells are important for other autoimmune disorders, so the implications of this study could go beyond asthma.

Other co-authors of the study are Dr. John Balmes, UC Berkeley professor of environmental health sciences; Elizabeth Noth and Boriana Pratt, UC Berkeley researchers at FACES; and Cameron McDonald-Hyman, research assistant at Stanford University’s School of Medicine.

The National Institutes of Health, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the American Lung Association helped support this research.

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/24239

Felix Gru¨n and Bruce Blumberg
Departments of Developmental and Cell Biology (F.G.) and Pharmaceutical Sciences (F.G., B.B.), University of California Irvine, Irvine, California 92697-2300

Summary:

Obesity and obesity-related disorders, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, are epidemic in Western countries, particularly the United States. The conventional wisdom holds that obesity is primarily the result of a positive energy balance, i.e. too many calories in and too few calories burned. Although it is self-evident that fat cannot be accumulated without a higher caloric intake than expenditure, recent research in a number of laboratories suggests the
existence of chemicals that alter regulation of energy balance to favor weight gain and obesity. These obesogens derail the homeostatic mechanisms important for weight control, such that exposed individuals are predisposed to weight gain, despite normal diet and exercise. This review considers the evidence for obesogens, how they might act, and where future research is needed to clarify their relative contribution to the obesity epidemic. (Molecular Endocrinology 23: 0000–0000, 2009)

The complete article in PDF:

Obesogens

From Birke Baehr, eleven years old. Are you listening, Monsanto? No. But the rest of us should.

In a study reported in Environmental Health, scientists reported that breast cancer risk was doubled in the 25% of women who reported the highest use of cleaning products as compared with the 25% who reported the lowest use. In other words, cleaning products contribute to cancer.

The study: http://www.ehjournal.net/content/9/1/40

Quotes from the study:

Background

Household cleaning and pesticide products may contribute to breast cancer because many contain endocrine disrupting chemicals or mammary gland carcinogens. This population-based case-control study investigated whether use of household cleaners and pesticides increases breast cancer risk.

Results

Breast cancer risk increased two-fold in the highest compared with lowest quartile of self-reported combined cleaning product use and combined air freshener use.

Conclusions

Results of this study suggest that cleaning product use contributes to increased breast cancer risk.