When we eat, drink and use personal care products, we consume small amounts of pesticides every day. It’s hard—if not impossible—to avoid. The air we
breath at work or at home is full of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). Fumes from airplanes, trucks, trains and cars, wood-burning
fireplaces, industrial pollution from factories and refineries, VOC and solvent emissions from new carpet, paint and many household cleaning fluids, all
emit toxic odors in varying degrees and quantities. Yes, like it or not, we are all exposed to thousands of dangerous chemicals every day.
We know these pesticides and HAPs are not good for us. Our nose tells us. Our bodies tell us. But, eliminating these chemicals is not going to happen any
time soon as they are too ubiquitous and too important for our society to function. Food and drug companies, as well as our government, have recklessly
disseminated thousands of chemicals without adequate testing on humans.
How are chemicals tested today?
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees a large array of products such as food, drugs, and cosmetics (and much more) that affect the health and
life of American citizens. According to fda.gov, “Companies and individuals who manufacture or market cosmetics (for example) have a legal responsibility
to ensure the safety of their products. Neither the law nor FDA regulations require specific tests to demonstrate the safety of individual products or
ingredients. The law also does not require cosmetic companies to share their safety information with the FDA.”
According to the United States President’s Cancer Panel (USPCP), “Some scientists maintain that current toxicity testing and exposure limit-setting methods
fail to accurately represent the nature of human exposure to potentially harmful chemicals.” Below are six flaws in current testing methods and some of
their unfortunate effects.
Less chemicals does not equal less toxicity
According to Andre Leu, President of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture, “ Our current scientific method used in toxicology is highly flawed because it makes this assumption: lower dosage = lower poisonous effect.
This linear relationship has become the basis for determining the average daily intake (ADI) of many chemicals. At ultra-low levels of dosage, the chemical
is considered too low to cause any health problems.
However, in a 2012 peer reviewed journal Endocrine Reviews, Vandenberg, et. al. showed that there were hundreds of published studies documenting
the exact opposite, i.e. that chemicals became MORE toxic at low and often the lowest doses. It further concluded that
“Experimental data indicate that endocrine disrupting chemicals and hormones do not have any observable adverse effects or threshold doses, and therefore no dose can ever be considered safe.” That means that the tiniest amounts are harmful whether we see any immediate effect or not
or whether they exceed threshold limits set by the government or industry standards.”
Andre Leu explains this counterintuitive concept in his book, The Myths of Safe Pesticides this way: “Many scientists assume a chemical is
relatively safe if it’s found in parts per million in the standard toxicology test, but at parts per billion or trillion they can act much like hormones.
This is because at very low levels they could attach to hormone receptors, whereas at higher levels of dosage they were ‘ignored’ by the hormone receptors.
If and when these chemicals attach themselves to the hormone, they send signals to the endocrine system to act as a hormone, or as an antagonist to the
hormone, or block the normal functioning of the hormone and act as an endocrine disruptor.”
"Hormone receptors can be likened to locks in a door of the cell wall and a very small hormone acts like the key. In large doses, the chemical molecule
is the wrong size and shape to fit into the lock, but the same chemical in a much smaller molecule can fit right into the receptor and unlock the door
sending a false signal to the cell or block normal hormone signals, thereby disrupting the normal f