Safe Chemical Act of 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq55QvyN3a8&feature=youtu.be

On April 14, 2011, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) released a video announcement introducing the "Safe Chemicals Act of 2011" and launching a new chemical safety reform push.

Do you think it has a chance? Will it work?

The Alchemy Of Grooming

This article, The Alchemy of Grooming: Go green with your makeup with DIY cosmetics, pointed me back to a website that I've explored before. The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is a "coalition effort launched in 2004 to protect the health of consumers and workers by securing the corporate, regulatory and legislative reforms necessary to eliminate dangerous chemicals from cosmetics and personal care products." You can find all sorts of information there about what's in your products, cosmetic laws, and which companies are making your health a priority.

They have lots of suggestions about how you can get involved, one of which is making your own cosmetics or hosting a cosmetic-making party with your friends. In their Get Crafty section, there is a long list of DIY Recipes. Recipes include those for lips, face, acne, hands and feet, body and bath, deodorant, hair care, face paint and Halloween makeup.

Perhaps one of the easiest recipes:

Red Wine and Honey Bath

The red wine and the honey together clarify and moisten. From the Spa at Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa, Asheville, N.C.

Ingredients:
4 cups of red wine 
1 cup of honey

Instructions:
Add wine and honey to bath.

  Don't forget to drink a glass of the wine too!

I-131 And Your Thyroid

There is much focus on the ongoing events in Japan and the possible threat of radiation exposure. If a cloud of radiation is carried our way via the jet stream, one of the threats is I-131 (a radioactive form of iodine). Iodine and its relationship with our bodies is quite unique! Your thyroid cells are the only cells in your body that will uptake iodine into them. Also, your thyroid cells do not differentiate between safe iodine and radioactive iodine.

But what is your thyroid and why is it so important? Your thyroid gland is butterfly shaped and sits in the front part of the neck below the Adam's apple. It works in symphony with the rest of your endocrine system controlling the metabolism of every cell in your body.

Just as I starved myself of iodine before my I-131 treatment so that I would uptake as much radioactive iodine as possible, given a nuclear disaster you would want to flood your body with iodine so that your cells would be satiated in their need for iodine. Dosing yourself with iodine-rich foods or taking tablets like potassium iodide (KI), do not prevent radioactive iodine from entering your body, nor do they protect organs other than the thyroid gland. Flooding your system with iodine also does not reverse thyroid damage that has already occurred.

Another good way to get the needed iodine is through diet. For some, this may be a very traditional diet.

After any sort of radioactive exposure you want to be eating seaweed and algae along with almost any type of commercial heavy metal chelating formula to bind radioactive particles and help escort them out of the body. Whether you’re worried about depleted uranium, plutonium or other isotopes, this is the wise thing to do which can possibly help, and certainly won’t hurt. Many nutritional supplements have been developed for the purpose of detoxifying heavy metals, most of which contain the algaes and plant fibers and other binding substances. Basically, an anti-radiation diet should focus on the following foods:

· Miso soup
· Spirulina, chlorella and the algaes (kelp, etc.)
· Brassica vegetables and high beta carotene vegetables
· Beans and lentils
· Potassium, calcium and mineral rich foods
· High nucleotide content foods to assist in cellular repair including spirulina, chlorella, algae, yeast, sardines, liver, anchovies and mackerel
· cod liver oil and olive oil
· Avoid sugars and sweets and wheat
· A good multivitamin/multimineral supplement

Yet another benefit of the sea vegetables rarely discussed is their high mineral content, which is a bonus in the case of radioactive exposure. Consuming natural iodine, such as in the seaweeds, helps prevent the uptake of iodine-131 while iron inhibits the absorption of plutonium-238 and plutonium-239. Vitamin B-12 inhibits cobalt-60 uptake (used in nuclear medicine), zinc inhibits zinc-65 uptake and sulfur is preventative for sulfur-35 (a product of nuclear reactors) incorporation by the body.

But can you get too much iodine? It is important not to over-consume iodine as it has a relatively narrow range of intakes that reliably support good thyroid function (about 100 to 300 micrograms per day). Someone consuming large amounts of iodized salt or seaweeds could overdo it. Excessive iodine has a complex disruptive effect on the thyroid and may cause thyroid dysfunction. I liked this summary here. 

So, be safe my friends and don't panic. Make informed choices!

12 Natural Cleaning Recipes

The labels on most household products read like the periodic table violently collided with a bowl of alphabet soup. What are those ingredients, and what might they do to our homes, our pets and our loved ones? A foolproof way to know what’s in your cleaning products is to make them yourself. It’s easy and economical, with the added benefit of reducing your household’s carbon footprint by creating less packaging waste and less pollution from manufacturing and shipping. 

I certainly serve up a lot of information about the toxic chemicals in our environment which can be quite daunting and depressing. But here is a good resource that will help you actually eliminate those toxins and create your own safe cleaning products. Natural Home Magazine has put out this comprehensive article, The Easy-Breezy, Breathing-Easy Cleaning Arsenal: 12 Natural Cleaning Recipes which provides a safe list of ingredients to use, recipes and a list of toxic ingredients to ditch.

Shopping List
With these 15 items, you can clean just about anything.
■ Baking Soda: scrubbing, whitening
■ Beeswax: polishing wood
■ Borax (sodium borate): removing stains/disinfecting
■ Club Soda (or any unflavored fizzy water): lifting stains
■ Cornstarch: absorbing stains
■ Hydrogen Peroxide: disinfecting, removing stains
■ Lemon: removing stains and odors
■ Liquid Dish Soap:  sudsing power
■ Olive Oil: polishing wood
■ Pine Oil: cleaning soft wood floors
■ Plant Essential Oils: chemical-free fragrance (do a sniff test before buying to make sure you’re not sensitive to the fumes)
■ Salt: scrubbing
■ Toothpaste: polishing metal
■ Washing Soda (sodium carbonate): scrubbing, removing stains and cutting grease
■ White Vinegar: disinfecting, removing stains

Ukiah Co-op Newsletter Feature

Toxic Smarts, as a regular column, will be featured in the Ukiah Co-op Newsletter.

March/April 2011 Article Title:
Roundup Revolt - GMO Alfalfa Deregulated

Check it out on page 6!

Mind Games

The recent Orion magazine article, Mind Games, was a good read. Sandra Steingraber, also the author of Living Downstream, painted an all too familiar picture about how toxic chemicals are impairing children's ability to learn. The article is lengthy but this excerpt from the end was certainly noteworthy and does well to reach people on a personal level.

AS PARENTS, we can only do so much to protect our children from the brain-disrupting chemicals that lurk in every part of the Earth’s dynamic systems— its water cycles, air currents, and food chains. Faith and Elijah spend their days in a school full of equipment and furniture that no doubt contain brominated flame retardants (which, according to a 2010 study published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, is linked to lower scores on tests of mental development among children exposed in utero). They ride home on a diesel-powered bus. They fly around town on bicycles — or scooters or skateboards— to flute lessons, piano lessons, the public library, passing by pesticide-treated fields and lawns as they go. And when we lie together in the dark at the end of the day, I sometimes wonder how their brain architecture might have been — might still be — irreversibly altered, even if only slightly, by brain-damaging chemicals that are still allowed to be manufactured and sold, that are constantly pouring out of smokestacks and tailpipes, that are used as ingredients in everything from lipstick to gasoline. I sometimes think about these things when I watch one or the other of them erase a hole through a frustrating homework assignment and start over again.

So don’t give me any more shopping tips or lists of products to avoid. Don’t put neurotoxicants in my furniture and my food and then instruct me to keep my children from breathing or eating them. Instead, give me federal regulations that assess chemicals for their ability to alter brain development and function before they are allowed access to the marketplace. Give me a functioning developmental neurotoxicant screening program, with validated protocols. Give me chemical reform based on precautionary principles. Give me an agricultural system that doesn’t impair our children’s learning abilities or their futures. Give me an energy policy based on wind and sun. 

Because I can do the thinking and research associated with making the right school choice for my children. I can help them with multiplication tables and subject-verb agreement. I can pack healthy school lunches. But I can’t place myself between their bodies and the two-hundred-plus identified neurotoxicants that circulate freely through the environment we all inhabit.

Clorox Cleanup?

Wow! Clorox has surprisingly released the lengthy list of fragrance ingredients that they use in their products. You've got to check out the list of Clorox's 1,219 fragrance ingredients here. Hmmm.....what's the catch? Clorox didn't bother to mention which fragrance ingredients are in which products. Well, I guess the good part for me is that I don't use any Clorox products!

Enviroblog's What's Inside: Clorox Shares A Little summaries the recent development:

The company no longer mentions polycyclic musks on the list of chemicals it never uses because the company - unfortunately - reneged on its promise to phase them out. Its just-released list of fragrance ingredients includes two of them, Galaxolide and Tonalide. Both have been linked to hormone disruption and breaking down cellular defenses against other toxic exposures. Research has also shown that these chemicals accumulate in people's bodies and turn up in blood and breast milk.
A third musk compound with potential for hormone disruption and cell damage is also on Clorox's list of approved fragrance ingredients: musk ketone. High blood levels of musk ketone in women may be associated with gynecological abnormalities, including mild insufficiency of the ovaries and compromised fertility.
The Clorox fragrance list includes a few other troubling ingredients:

• Acetaldehyde - a possible human carcinogen, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• Oxybenzone - a hormone-disrupting chemical commonly used in sunscreens that has been detected in the bodies of 97 percent of Americans and is linked to low birth weight in baby girls
• Phenol and Benzyl Alcohol - both neurotoxins
• Triethanolamine - a chemical that can cause asthma to develop in otherwise healthy individuals.

When will enough be enough?

Green washing at its best.

Dear President Obama: Stop the American Cancer Epidemic

CALL TO ACTION!

From the blog Crazy Sexy Life is a short update about the President's Cancer Panel urging Obama to recognize the significance that "nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated."

Sign the petition here to President Obama.

 Article Highlights:

Right now, it’s perfectly legal for body-care products and other household goods sold in the U.S. to contain chemicals known to cause cancer and other diseases, with no warnings to consumers. This has been the story since the advent of synthetic chemistry in the mid 20^th century. Since that time, American industries have released billions of tons of unregulated synthetic substances into the environment  – chemicals that are now all over our homes and inside our bodies.

Since that time, we’ve seen the dramatic increase of unexplained cancers – to the point that 1 in 2 American men and 1 in 3 women are now expected to get some type of cancer in their lifetimes.

The panel urged President Obama “most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

“The American people—even before they are born—are bombarded continually with a myriad of combinations of these dangerous exposures,” warned the cancer panel.

The Pollution In Newborns

I hope this article, Body Burden — The Pollution in Newborns, would cause any parent or parent-to-be to take a more in-depth look at the toxic world around us and develop strategies for creating a less toxic living environment for their young one. There's more than just eating well that you need to consider!

Article Highlights:

Not long ago scientists thought that the placenta shielded cord blood — and the developing baby — from most chemicals and pollutants in the environment. But now we know that at this critical time when organs, vessels, membranes and systems are knit together from single cells to finished form in a span of weeks, the umbilical cord carries not only the building blocks of life, but also a steady stream of industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides that cross the placenta as readily as residues from cigarettes and alcohol. This is the human "body burden" — the pollution in people that permeates everyone in the world, including babies in the womb.

In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals.

Among the tested chemicals are eight perfluorochemicals used as stain and oil repellants in fast food packaging, clothes and textiles — including the Teflon chemical PFOA, recently characterized as a likely human carcinogen by the EPA's Science Advisory Board — dozens of widely used brominated flame retardants and their toxic by-products; and numerous pesticides.
Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests. The dangers of pre- or post-natal exposure to this complex mixture of carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins have never been studied.

Early Exposure More Harmful:

Chemical exposures in the womb or during infancy can be dramatically more harmful than exposures later in life. Substantial scientific evidence demonstrates that children face amplified risks from their body burden of pollution; the findings are particularly strong for many of the chemicals found in this study, including mercury, PCBs and dioxins. Children's vulnerability derives from both rapid development and incomplete defense systems:

• A developing child's chemical exposures are greater pound-for-pound than those of adults.
• An immature, porous blood-brain barrier allows greater chemical exposures to the developing brain.
• Children have lower levels of some chemical-binding proteins, allowing more of a chemical to reach "target organs."
• A baby's organs and systems are rapidly developing, and thus are often more vulnerable to damage from chemical exposure.
• Systems that detoxify and excrete industrial chemicals are not fully developed.
• The longer future life span of a child compared to an adult allows more time for adverse effects to arise.

I've just stumbled upon a wonderful book titled Poisoned For Profit - How Toxins Are Making Our Children Chronically Ill. Although I have not read this book throughout, I've looked at it at the local book store (Mulligan Books) and found it be a wonderful read, full of good details. IF YOU ARE A NEW PARENT OR A PARENT-TO-BE, YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK! It's certainly on my to-be-purchased book list! Let me know if you've read it and what you thought of it!

Atrazine: Endocrine Disruptor Linked To Genital Changes And Sexual Preference

This interview, Endocrine Disruptors Linked To Genital Changes and Sexual Preference absolutely fascinated me and is giving me visions of the future human race unable to reproduce because the female genome has been lost! You can either read the transcription of the broadcast or listen to it with the link at the top of their webpage.

Scientists are continuing to sound the alarm about some common chemicals, including the herbicide atrazine. So, what is Atrazine? 

Atrazine is used to stop pre- and post-emergence broadleaf and grassy weeds in major crops. The compound is both effective and inexpensive, and thus is well-suited to production systems with very narrow profit margins, as is often the case with maize. Atrazine is the most widely used herbicide in conservation tillage systems, which are designed to prevent soil erosion. 

Its use is controversial due to widespread contamination in drinking water and its associations with birth defects, menstrual problems, and cancer when consumed by humans at concentrations below government standards.^[1] Although it has been excluded from a re-registration process in the European Union,^[2] it is still one of the most widely used herbicides in the world.

Highlights from the endocrine disruptor interview:

AHERN: To explain what he meant by "feminized" Hayes brought me back to his office and pulled up a picture on his laptop of a frog that had been exposed to the herbicide.
HAYES: This is an animal that looked like a female on the outside. But on the inside it had large testis, so these are testis, and this is an oviduct. So, this is the equivalent of a man with a uterus.
AHEARN: These frogs aren't just behaving like females – they're actually producing eggs and when those eggs are fertilized by normal male frogs, the babies grow up to be seemingly normal frogs. Let me say that again: the male frogs are having babies. And there are consequences. HAYES: ...because they don't have a female chromosome the females that are genetically males can only produce other males so 100 percent of their offspring would be males.
AHEARN: And more male frogs means fewer babies down the road. Hayes says this might be one reason that populations of frogs and other amphibians all over the world are going down.

AHEARN: The reproductive problems Hayes is seeing in his specimens aren't limited to frogs. Studies on rats, reptiles and even human cells exposed to atrazine showed similar results. Recently, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey found intersex fish in one third of the waterways they tested across the United States.
And atrazine is not the only chemical to blame for causing widespread reproductive health problems. It's a member of a family of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors.

COLBORN: They're in plastics. They're in our toys, the children's toys. If you go to your kitchen sink and under your bathroom sink and look at the cleaning compounds that are there. The cosmetics. The toiletries. They're just about in everything because they've made every one of these products much nicer. They last longer. They're preservatives. They're fire retardants.
AHEARN: The endocrine system is made up of a series of glands throughout the body that control the hormonal messages that direct development. By imitating natural hormones– such as estrogen and androgen – endocrine disrupting chemicals prevent the body from sending and receiving those messages. Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco, broke down some basic human developmental biology for me. He says in the womb, we all start out developing as girls.
ROSENTHAL: If you consider the gonads, which basically is the other name for the testis or the ovaries, in any baby - either boy or a girl – that, basically, these gonads are pre-programmed to become ovaries unless there's an overriding signal that tells them to become testis.
AHEARN: If you're a boy that over-riding signal comes from a gene on your Y-chromosome. It tells your gonads to become testis, instead of ovaries, and to start producing testosterone and androgen. Those hormones then travel through the body and hook up with receptors in cells.
ROSENTHAL: That sets off a chain of events inside a cell. It's like if you need a key and an ignition to start a car right, so the key goes into the ignition and then the whole thing can turn and the car goes on.
AHEARN: The car "going on" would equate to normal development of a fetus. Now picture some chewing gum in the ignition. The key won't fit. The car won't start – or, as Rosenthal explains - normal masculine development won't proceed.
ROSENTHAL: If there is some agent, some environmental disruptor that interferes with the normal functioning of the Androgen Receptor then it's very likely that in a male there will be incomplete masculinization of the external genitalia.

HAYES: People go, well, it's frogs. I go, yeah but look, the estrogen that works in this frog is exactly, chemically exactly, the same as the estrogen that regulates female reproduction. Exactly the same testosterone that's in these frogs regulating their larynx or their voice box or their breeding glands or their sperm count is exactly the same hormone in rats and in us.

AHEARN: So, what about us? Could endocrine disruptors be having feminizing effects in humans?

AHEARN: Talking about problems with reproductive health is something society has never handled well. And perhaps because most hypospadias can be corrected with surgery, very few doctors have raised questions about the underlying causes of this birth defect.

But endocrine disrupting chemicals show up in almost 100 percent of the population, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and many of these chemicals are known to disrupt normal reproductive system development in animals - think back to Tyrone Hayes' frogs here.

So I asked Dr. Theo Colborn, who's been studying endocrine disruptors for over 30 years, if she thought our environmental exposures could be affecting our reproductive health. Or more specifically, given what we're seeing with hypospadias, I asked her, do you think we are feminizing our baby boys?

COLBORN: I definitely do. I think there's a certain percentage that are definitely being affected and there's no denying it.