So this trend has been going on for a while now, I looked a bit into it about 5 years ago here's what I found:
- Tons of popular and legal products/chemicals are "endocrine disruptors"[1] (fancy term for mess with hormones).
- The FDA/EPA doesn't deny that, they don't themselves even really require tests for long-term health effects in humans (too difficult). Instead they give animals a 1000x+ dose and look for immediate drastic effects (this is abbreviated "LOAEL"). That's the reason we have a xenoestrogen in the lining of soda cans (BPA), because we're trusting that tiny doses must be negligible, which isn't necessarily a valid assumption [2].
- The attitude on a lot of chemicals is "Safe until proven guilty," but when some of these chemicals are suspect (e.g. pesticides) instead of a public announcement they are pulled from public use quietly prior to the point of definitive evidence. New/similar ones can be introduced with presumption of safe until proven guilty. (Search PFOAs if you want to get a sense of how ineffective our protection mechanisms are)
I came to the conclusion a radically new model is necessary, the EPA/FDA need to design models to test for fertility effects, perhaps multigenerationally, in their studies (fruit flies?) quickly.
My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming.
I've heard on a few podcasts that this is how European countries do this. We need to stop letting for-profit companies gamble with the health and longevity of the species in the interest of profits.
You are right that this is a much better approach. The problem is Europe also has low sperm counts and are also being exposed to endocrine disruptors in the same way as the rest of the world. So whatever whitelist approach they are using does not seem to be saving them from this problem.
There's however a huge difference in what's being actually prescribed and what's not. Anti-Depressants and strong pain medication isn't as easy to get as in the us as in Germany.
How many destitute families are you sheltering in your home?
The world is polluted, and heating up. The most obvious parameter of that is this: the sheer number of people.
You can like people and be on board with the idea that there is such a thing as too many people in one place at one time. The extreme example of that is crowding incidents in which people die, like the one in Seoul this Halloween. No, it's not always "the more, the merrier".
Buildings, vehicles, and various structures and equipment which support or carry people all have maximum occupancies.
> My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming.
I don't want to diminish the importance of a paradigm shift in how regulators treat various chemicals, but I don't think this will be anywhere near as severe and immediate threat as climate change.
Ultimately, if there is a substantial pool of people who's fertility is not adversely impacted by some yet to be identified chemical, then it will be those people who's genes will pass on. Within a generation we as a species will have developed resistance to at least the impact on fertility by some unregulated chemical.
In both cases, a substantial part of this pool depends on the modern institutions and global supply chains for survival, which are existentially threatened by both climate change and population reduction.
Which could be an issue by itself, as whatever mutation confers resistance to it could have side effects, unless it's some enhanced degradation of toxins or something.
But what if it's some other random thing that also gives people heart attacks?
Spot on. There is substantial amount of companies/people profiteering from climate change fearmongering, so we may expect the trend not to go down very fast
I get the sense we (as in all of us collectively) are not taking it seriously enough. I wonder where this "fearmongering" is happening. A lot of stuff that is happening (the Western US drought that seems to be the worst in a millenium plus the consequent heavy use of groundwater, triple dip la nina, etc.) seem like they should worry us more than they actually are.
What you describing is your personal perception, based (like most of us) on what is circulating in media.
Objectively, “climate change” was happening on this planet allegedly since it was born 4.6 billion years ago. It’s a natural course of things.
To understand the scope of fear mongering you can look what “priests” were saying 10 years ago and how much of their predictions came out as true. It’s quite interesting. They use shortness of human memory.
> Objectively, “climate change” was happening on this planet allegedly since it was born 4.6 billion years ago. It’s a natural course of thing
By this logic, plenty of species have died out in the 4.6 billion years of earth and so we should do nothing about the demographic crisis in many countries. After all it’s all just life and life will go on.
And that’s true. What can you do to avoid “demographic crisis”? Thinking you (or we as a society) can change course of things is very flattering, however flowed it is.
You can try to change global things like earth orbit or natural course of time with same result.
To understand how stupid “climate change” ideas are, you can simply look if it’s preachers are doing anything following their preachings. They fly private jets and then tell regular people about “offsetting carbon footprint”.
It’s all about money and power, nothing else. Climate change is of no interest to them.
On the other hand, people in more industrial countries are exposed to different chemicals (BPA, FPOAs, flame retardants, food additives, etc.), than people in more agrarian countries (field chemicals, like fertilizers and pesticides). These chemicals are all harmful, but it's hard to blame a single class of them for a global problem.
If I had to pick a truly universal issue, I would say childhood and young adult obesity. Surprisingly, obesity is growing rapidly even in countries where hunger is also a problem.
As someone who is too lazy to do their own research on this topic....did you happen to find which products generally contain the most endocrine disruptors?
My partner and I recently embarked on a journey to replace as many products in our lives that contain endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC's) as we could. It's _really_ hard.
You have to carefully read product labels, 99.9% of products don't contain any info about EDC's, you have to specially seek out ones that are labeled as phthalate-free, BPA-free, etc.
Biggest offenders are in the kitchen and bathroom. Shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, perfume, are big offenders. There are special versions of these products you can find but they don't usually work as well. Most things that are scented have phthalates. Pretty much any food that comes in a flexible plastic container, most dairy and eggs have it as well (dairy because of the flexible plastic tubing used when pumping milk).
Good grief, just trying to find products that are unscented is a nightmare. So many say "unscented" on the front, then have "parfum" or something in the ingredients.
"Unscented" is basically a lie. Most things that are "unscented" actually have masking agents to cover the scent of the product. You want to look for things that have "no added scent" on the label.
Even some papers are lined with BPA, or similar products. The reactant acid in thermal paper is often bisphenol A (BPA). A good reason to go without getting a receipt.
Also - products which would not reasonably be produced with, say, "phtalate" - would probably not be labeled phtalate-free anyway. So one first needs to know which "X-free" labels to look for.
"etc" in my comment was meant to be other types of chemicals people don't necessarily like. Example: many deodorants that are phthalate-free are also free of aluminum, because people likely to be concerned about phthalates are also likely to be concerned about aluminum, even though aluminum is not an EDC (some people are worried about it being a carcinogen I think). I was just saying here that products with "X-free" are correlated with also being phthalate-free.
But yeah, specifically the thing to look for is "phthalate-free".
They'll be in basically all of the plastic around you - since the chemicals do a good job at plasticizing (making plastic less brittle).
If you want a more thorough list, the NIH compiled this
---
What are some common endocrine disruptors?
Bisphenol A (BPA) — used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, which are found in many plastic products including food storage containers
Dioxins — produced as a byproduct in herbicide production and paper bleaching, they are also released into the environment during waste burning and wildfires
Perchlorate — a by-product of aerospace, weapon, and pharmaceutical industries found in drinking water and fireworks
Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) — used widely in industrial applications, such as firefighting foams and non-stick pan, paper, and textile coatings
Phthalates — used to make plastics more flexible, they are also found in some food packaging, cosmetics, children’s toys, and medical devices
Phytoestrogens — naturally occurring substances in plants that have hormone-like activity, such as genistein and daidzein that are in soy products, like tofu or soy milk
Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) — used to make flame retardants for household products such as furniture foam and carpets
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) — used to make electrical equipment like transformers, and in hydraulic fluids, heat transfer fluids, lubricants, and plasticizers
Triclosan — may be found in some anti-microbial and personal care products, like liquid body wash
> Phytoestrogens — naturally occurring substances in plants that have hormone-like activity, such as genistein and daidzein that are in soy products, like tofu or soy milk
Your comment doesn’t explicitly say that Phytoestrogens are only present in soy, but it should be clear that such compounds are extremely common, even though people tend to single out soy (largely because soy has been the most studied for potentially positive health reasons).
Phytoestrogens are present in many different grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, vegetables, etc [0]
The problem with going for BPA free products is that they tend to use alternatives that probably have the same issue as BPA they just haven't been tested to the same degree yet.
note that the evidence for phytoestrogens being endocrine disruptors is exceptionally weak. it's essentially 1 study from the 1940s on sheep that has since been contradicted by a number of human studies.
If I recall correctly, the best way to avoid immediate exposure to this class of chemical was to avoid heat your food inside plastic containers (typically in a microwave) as this can mobilise some of the more volatile endocrine-disrupting compounds into your meal.
Through history, only a mass of people have forced a change. That's not possible until you start changing first. And when people around you notice, educate them. It will take time, eventually it will happen.
- Tons of popular and legal products/chemicals are "endocrine disruptors"[1] (fancy term for mess with hormones).
- The FDA/EPA doesn't deny that, they don't themselves even really require tests for long-term health effects in humans (too difficult). Instead they give animals a 1000x+ dose and look for immediate drastic effects (this is abbreviated "LOAEL"). That's the reason we have a xenoestrogen in the lining of soda cans (BPA), because we're trusting that tiny doses must be negligible, which isn't necessarily a valid assumption [2].
- The attitude on a lot of chemicals is "Safe until proven guilty," but when some of these chemicals are suspect (e.g. pesticides) instead of a public announcement they are pulled from public use quietly prior to the point of definitive evidence. New/similar ones can be introduced with presumption of safe until proven guilty. (Search PFOAs if you want to get a sense of how ineffective our protection mechanisms are)
I came to the conclusion a radically new model is necessary, the EPA/FDA need to design models to test for fertility effects, perhaps multigenerationally, in their studies (fruit flies?) quickly.
My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2203/dose-response....