Health and Disease and the Environment

How did the environment and all people become polluted with toxic chemicals?
I offer my understanding of the variety of factors leading to this toxic condition. There is no culprit, no evil force, or person, or group responsible for the polluted conditions. Rather, the current environmental conditions grew out of new technologies and changes in society.

New technical capabilities emerged from the expansion of industrial research and development after WWII. Thousands of chemists were set to work on every conceivable kind of new material. NASA’s mission to the moon in the mid 1960s gave a great impetus to science and technology. There was a large increase in the number of scientists and engineers available to work in industrial and medical enterprises.

People and industries wanted the new products. People liked the new plastics products that were less expensive than the wood or metal products they displaced. Farmers were happy with the pesticides that eliminated (or controlled) insects and fungi, thus increasing yields. DDT virtually eliminated mosquitoes and malaria in the U.S. Women loved nylon stockings, which were superior to silk stockings and cost less. PVC pipe was cheaper and easier to work with than steel pipes. Fluorochemical plastics like Teflon made possible “non-stick” cookware.

New products earned billions of dollars, and corporations used their political muscle to shape legislation to their liking. Crop pesticides, home pesticides, Nylon, Teflon, Dacron, Lexan, Plexiglass, PVC, fiberglass, vinyl “synthetic leather,” and others became huge dollar items of commerce. Possible hazards of the new materials were investigated with the goal of persuading federal regulatory agencies that there were no health hazards, or the hazards were minimal. Corporations were able to guide former executives into top positions in the USDA, FDA, EPA regulatory agencies.

The long-term dangers were not known. Rachael Carson’s 1962 warning was ignored; in fact it was strenuously refuted by corporate spokesmen. Because of the effectiveness of DDT, it was looked upon as a miracle substance, and millions of pounds were sprayed throughout the world. It was not realized that the new chlorinated organic chemicals (e.g., DDT and PCBs) persist for years and decades in the environment, and the concentration in bodies of animals increases as it moves up the food chain. Chemists were accustomed to paying attention to the immediate possible toxic nature of new materials, but they generally were not conscious of the possibility that a chemical with no bad short-term (i.e., acute) effects could have bad long-term (i.e., chronic) effects. Toxicologists also focused only on short-term toxic effects. New materials were assigned a toxicity number, LD₅₀ that indicated the dose of the substance that quickly killed 50% of the test group.

The medical profession was focused on infectious diseases and genetic causes of chronic disability conditions. As the medical profession evolved, its attention was on curing illnesses and diseases caused by microbes. Medical researchers did continue to work on vaccines for prevention of illnesses, but this work was complex with only occasional pay offs. With the emergence of genetics as a discipline (after Crick and Watson’s elucidation of the structure of DNA), a whole new industry developed to find genetic causes of diseases.

It is difficult to develop practical screening tests for the identification of long-term hazards from new chemicals. Chronic diseases and illnesses necessarily require long-term testing. This means testing over the life span of small animals used to simulate effects in humans. This is slow and expensive work, usually requiring autopsies to discover the reasons for illness or disease. Looking for diseases in organs of lab animals is difficult, but discovering subtle risk effects like disruption of hormones or damage to the immune system, or neurodevelopmental disorders in new born is much more difficult. So called in vitro tests (in test tubes and culture dishes) are extremely difficult to develop and certify. The Ames test (with bacteria) for carcinogenic activity is one such test. Sufficiently sensitive analytical tests for trace amounts chemicals did not exist. Earlier tests were cumbersome, often lengthy, and costly, and were generally only able to detect parts per thousand concentrations of the chemical.

Federal regulation was weak to non-existent. With the rise of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act), all industrial scale chemicals had to have labels describing the nature of the hazard, but this referred only to acute toxicity. The old agencies did not have missions to deal with the surfeit of new chemicals. Although new regulatory agencies (e.g., EPA) and new congressional acts (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 and the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976) were created, their enforcement power was politically limited.

Fortunately, the situation has improved in many ways. The forces responsible for these improving conditions will be discussed in the next blog article.

National Women’s Health Week is around the corner – May 13-19 – and women are still being given the same old platitudes: eat nutritious foods, exercise regularly, maintain a desirable weight, exercise, and get regular physical check ups. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services encourages women to:

• Visit a health professional to receive regular checkups and preventative screening.
• Get active.
• Eat healthy.
• Pay attention to mental health, including getting enough sleep and manage stress.
• Avoid unhealthy behaviors such as smoking and not wearing a seatbelt or bicycle helmet.

Big wow! Women who are not living in caves already know these things. Yes, these are all good, but they not enough to assure women’s health and freedom from devastating diseases – such as breast cancer and ovarian cancer. These sage tips also have no special advice for pregnant women, to assure the health of their newborn infants. Nowhere does the official advice mention having an appropriate weight, i.e., avoiding obesity. My blog articles of 8/11/2011, 9/01/2011, and 3/23/2012 offer information and advice on this issue.

Experts have stated that 70% of breast cancer cases appear to be rooted in environmental causes, and more than 200 chemicals are known to cause tumors. One in three women will have breast cancer sometime in their lives. One in 54 boys will be afflicted with autism, which has increased 80% since 2002. There is a growing awareness of the exquisite sensitivity of the developing brain to toxic chemicals. Scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine have shown that autism can be linked to prenatal exposures to pesticides, methyl mercury, flame retardants, and other common chemicals.

Women are not being told how to prevent breast cancer, and they are not being told how to prevent neurodevelopmental disorders in children, e.g., autism. This is appalling! So called “preventative screenings” usually do not prevent a disease; rather they indicate the early presence of a disease condition so that doctors can prescribe medicines or surgeries to hopefully cure the unhealthy condition. It is much better to have a life style that actually prevents a disease! The official advice does not mention the importance of keeping toxic chemicals out of women’s bodies. This is, of course, the main advice of my blog articles.

It has been brought to my attention that soda with natural sugar (sucrose) is available in many stores in the brand, Hansens Natural Soda. Hansens also produces a diet soda without aspartame; it uses sucralose as the sweetener.

My previous article, “More on Obesity,” described the down side of drinking a substantial amount of soda sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), namely adipose fat, i.e., fat around the waist. Over a length of time, such consumption also contributes to high blood pressure, and high HDL cholesterol. What’s a person to do?

You can drink less soda, or drink diet soda, which has no HFCS and almost no calories. However, you may wonder about the artificial sweeteners that are used in diet sodas. The main sweetener is aspartame. (It is also in “NutraSweet” and “Equal” packages.) Aspartame is a synthetic product made from two natural amino acids, aspartic acid and phenylalanine. During digestion, aspartame is decomposed back  these two natural ingredients. Aspartame has been approved for consumption by the U.S. FDA, the U.K. Food Safety Standards Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, the Health Agency of Canada, and others. So you would assume that it is safe. But life is not that simple.

Long-term studies (birth to death) with rats whose water contained varying amounts of aspartame were conducted by the Italian Ramazzini Foundation. Those studies indicated that aspartame, in the experimental conditions used, is a carcinogenic agent that caused three different kinds of cancers. Several scientists have expressed concerns that a jump in the amount of phenylalanine in the blood from drinking 12 to 24 ounces of diet soda could interfere with dopamine neurotransmitters in the brain. These and similar results convinced Dr. Samuel Epstein, Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, to state that aspartame should be banned.

Not all agree with these judgments. Obviously the FDA does not agree. Scientists in the department of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Maryland reviewed the experimental literature on aspartame and cancer. They stated, “The studies provide no evidence to support an association between aspartame and cancer in any tissue. The weight of evidence is that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption.” A review of the safety of aspartame by The (European) Scientific Committee for Food concluded that “despite targeted animal studies, no consistent effects of aspartame on neurotransmitters or their precursors have been observed.” After a review of the literature, the French institute, AFSSA, concluded that aspartame is not genotoxic (i.e., carcinogenic) and it is not associated with the appearance of brain tumors. But they are silent about subtle effects that might arise from excessive phenylalanine in the brain.

With all toxic or possibly toxic substances, one must consider the dose. For example, the elements selenium and manganese are required in minute amounts in the diet, yet a large dose is toxic. The relevant facts here are as follows. The acceptable daily intake of aspartame set by scientists at the FDA is 50 mg/kg of body weight per day. For a 175 pound person this daily limit would be 4000 mg (milligrams). A 12 ounce bottle or can of soda contains about 200 mg of aspartame, therefore, a person would have to drink twenty 12 ounce bottles of soda to reach the FDA limit. Nevertheless, be aware that federal agencies have previous set limits that were later greatly lowered.

A few sodas are sweetened with a different artificial sweetener, Sucralose. This is a modified form of plain ole sugar. Three of the chemical groups of sucrose are replaced by chlorine, which makes the molecule essentially indigestible (but still very sweet to the taste buds, 600 times sweeter than sucrose). It passes out of the body unchanged, and is entirely eliminated within five days.

What should a person do with such conflicting statements on the safety of aspartame and sucralose? My recommendation is to stick with natural ingredients. Unfortunately, it is hard to find sodas made with plain ole sucrose as the sweetener; perhaps specialty sodas carried by natural foods stores. But you say, “Sucrose contains calories.” Yes is does. So it would be reasonable to simply consume only moderate amounts of soda made with plain ole sugar.