Environmental

Childhood Obesity Statistics: Contributions of a Forgotten Chemical

April 20, 2015 by James Bogash

environmental chemicals and obesity — absurdovruslan / Dollar Photo Club

Calories in, calories out. Seems to be a simple enough equation for weight loss or maintenance. Or, at least it used to be.

Make sure your son or daughter stays active. Throw out any Kellogg’s breakfast cereals and keep them away from fruit juice. These recommendations are simple enough and makes sense for keeping the rising obesity tide in children at bay.

But somewhere along the process the equation changed.

When you took math class, you were dealing with numbers you understood and could work with. But what if the equation your teacher put in front of you had numbers that weren’t even on the page? Makes absolutely no sense, right?

But when it comes to health, this is exactly what is happening. As society and manufacturing have progressed we have introduced chemicals into the environment that can have a very strong impact on your risk of chronic disease. It’s no longer about watching the calories you eat and making sure you stay active. The equation now contains chemicals in the environment that are affecting your health. And not in a good way.

Many are aware of the more common chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic water bottles, thermal register receipts and soda cans. Teflon in non-stick cookware. Flame retardants in your clothing, mattress and furniture.

But if in casual conversation I asked your thoughts about dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene I’m pretty sure you’d give me a blank look and steer the conversation to politics. Unless, of course, you’re a biochemist for DuPont.

If instead I asked you if you had ever heard of DDT used as a insecticide in farming, that glossy look in your eyes would disappear and you’d become more and more animated as you recall the damage this chemical did to animals in the environment and how it was banned from use in the US in 1972.

The rest of the world was a little slow to catch on. DDT was banned worldwide during the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) on May 21, 2002, going into effect in 2004. Over a decade ago. Little did we know just how tough it was for Mother Nature to degrade and get rid of DDT.

With this in mind, if you knew that dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene was a breakdown product of DDT, things would make a little more sense. And your cause for concern would go up.

Here in the US, 40+ years after DDT was banned, almost all of us have breakdown products of DDT that can be found in our blood. Scary.

The DDT ban is not so new in Europe and given how long it takes for DDT to clear from the environment it’s hard to imagine that this is not having an effect on our kid’s health.

As if this wasn’t enough to worry about, phthalates are incredibly common in our lives. That “new shower curtain smell” or the new car smell likely indicates that phthalates are present. Many “fragrances” have phthalates embedded within them. Think about how many household items you use on a daily basis that have a scent to them. It’s likely that phthalates are at work.

All of these environmental chemicals have been shown to contribute to chronic disease. Top of the list is obesity. But just how much do these chemicals contribute? Just a little? A lot?

This is the exact question posed in this particular study. In it, a panel of researchers used models to estimate the potential that dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene, BPA, phthalates and other chemicals were contributing to childhood obesity. Then they went further, determining the costs related to healthcare expenditures due to these chemicals. Here’s what they found:

The panel identified a 40% to 69% chance that dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene caused 1555 cases of overweight at age 10 (in 2010) with associated costs of $36.7 million.
There was a 20% to 39% chance that dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene caused 28,200 cases of adult diabetes with associated costs of $12.5 billion.
The panel also identified a 40% to 69% chance that phthalate exposure caused 53,900 cases of obesity in older women and $232 billion in associated costs.
Phthalate exposure had a 40% to 69% chance of causing 20,500 new cases of diabetes in older women with $907 million in associated costs.
Prenatal bisphenol A exposure had a 20% to 69% chance of causing 42,400 cases of childhood obesity with associated lifetime costs of $2.16 billion.

These are estimates, but they are based on what it known about how much these chemicals contribute to poor health. Unless you take these chemicals into account for the equation of your good health, the solution won’t balance.

In everything you do, you need to pay attention to the chemicals you may be exposed to and do your best to avoid them whenever possible.

BPA in Plastic Water Bottles; Toxic as Ever

December 23, 2014 by James Bogash

IS PLASTIC REALLY THAT DANGEROUS TO OUR HEALTH??

The dangers of Bisphenol A (BPA) have been known for years, and the FDA recently came out and admitted that, well, maybe it’s not that good for us…You’ve also slowly seen the retail side of things slowly proclaim that their products are now BPA free. Strong move in this direction in baby products (after decades of it’s use!!) and water bottles. What we are NOT seeing is the education that many canned goods contain BPA as a lining to protect the metal. So those canned green beans you’re planning on having for dinner? Not only do they not have any nutritional value left, but they’re likely loaded with BPA. Plastic water bottles remain the biggest likely exposure, though. This is magnified by the concept that every needs to have instant access to bottled water every waking hour of the day. See how much this has done for our health now that everyone lugs around plastic water bottles?

Heavy Metals and Heart Disease: Your Hidden Exposures

December 17, 2014 by James Bogash

When I first saw this article, I was worried that my album collection from the 80’s had to go. But upon deeper reading I realized that the danger extends far beyond Tesla and Warrant.

While most of us are aware that heavy metals are not good for us, for the vast majority, our understanding of exposures is limited to playing with the old mercury-based thermometers and maybe not living next to a smelting plant. Beyond that, however, the general public’s understanding of where heavy metal exposures come from is shallow.

If you’d like to stay in the dark, then stop reading right now. If, however, the last time you had a good scare was watching Poltergeist and you’re ready for more, then I’d like to direct you to this particular study. In it, researchers looked at four heavy metals (lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic) to see how much they contributed to heart disease. While the end results varied across the different studies that the researchers looked at, here is an overview of what they found:

With lead, those with the highest levels were 252% more likely to die from any cause, 563% more likely to die of cardiovascular causes and a whopping 837% more likely to die from ischemic heart disease.
With cadmium, every 2-fold increase is linked to a 28% higher risk of death from any cause, 21% higher risk of dying of heart disease.
For mercury, there is a 69% higher risk of a heart attack, a 290% higher risk of having heart disease and a 230% higher risk of dying from any cause. The authors also note that the effects may actually be even stronger, since much of our mercury exposure comes from fish, which has a protective effect, likely blunting some of the damaging effect of the mercury.
Higher levels of arsenic are linked to a 71% higher risk of dying from coronary artery disease and a 303% higher risk of dying from a stroke. These risks were generally higher for diabetics.

While the details of these association vary (based on the study looked at, what body tissues were used to check heavy metal levels, men versus women, etc…), it is very clear that heavy metals are NOT good for our vascular system and should be avoided as much as possible.

But this is the problem, isn’t it? How can you avoid exposure if you really don’t know where those exposures are coming from? The obvious ones like not smoking (cadmium), not camping outside of a smelting plant in a third-world country (lead and cadmium) and not using a straw to suck up the silvery stuff from the broken thermometer are easy. It’s the hidden ones that will sneak up on you.

Luckily, this same study gives a great overview of common sources of exposure to these 4 heavy metals. Here’s a summary from the article:

Lead: Food, water, air, gasoline additives, food-can soldering, lead-based paints, ceramic glazes, drinking water pipe systems, folk remedies. In general, pretty much everywhere. Another common source is from environmental dust. Simply taking your shoes off at the door may lower your exposure.
Cadmium: Contaminated food (leafy vegetables, grains, organ meats, and crustaceans), drinking water, inhalation of polluted air, occupational exposure in industries, tobacco smoke. For most non-smokers, exposure to cadmium is mostly from foods raised or grown on contaminated soil. It is likely that organic products (meat as well as plants) will be lower in cadmium.
Mercury: Contaminated fish, meat and organ tissue of marine mammals or feral wildlife, dental amalgams, skin-lightening creams, antiseptic facial products, mercury-containing laxatives or diuretics, teething powders, latex paint. These exposures are easier to identify but not necessarily avoid (i.e. you got amalgam fillings 20 years ago, you LOVE high-mercury fish like yours truly…)
Arsenic: Contaminated fish, tobacco smoke, arsenic treated wood, ingestion of high-arsenic drinking water. A big problem here is that much of the water used for organic farms may be contaminated with arsenic, so that even if all organic principles are followed, arsenic levels may be higher for this reason.

So, if you just avoid all these sources of heavy metal exposure listed above, you should be fine. Cause you’ll be DEAD from not eating, drinking or breathing.

Your best bet is to minimize your exposures where ever you can on top of eating a high-quality diet loaded with lots of protective compounds that can help detoxify some of these heavy metals out of your system or at least mitigate some of the damage heavy metals cause. And with the New Year right around the corner, it always makes sense to start out the year with some type of physician-oriented detox program to do the best you can clearing out some of the accumulated garbage from the prior year.

Important Reason You Need to Improve Thyroid Function During Pregnancy

August 8, 2014 by James Bogash

It seems like everyone’s got thyroid problems these days. Luckily, there’s a prescription for that and you don’t need to worry your pretty little head over something as minor as a major organ going kaput in your twenties.

While I am, of course, being facetious, the attitude exists in medicine today that we can easily treat thyroid problems with thyroid replacement hormone like Synthroid or levothyroxine is completely backwards. If it was your heart or kidneys or lungs that just stopped working at 25 the medical establishment would run thousands of dollars in tests to determine why. For some reason the thyroid gland is treated completely different.

Maybe it’s because we have medications that seem to do a great job replacing the lost or diminished hormone levels. The scary thing is that the reasons for thyroid hypofunction or failure can be very serious and if your doctor does not spend the time to dig for answers (or worse–is not even aware there are answers…) your health can be at risk.

I have heard Dr. Jeffrey Bland refer to the thyroid as the “yellow canary of the human body” when it comes to environmental toxicity. This means that, when you are exposed to toxic chemicals, whether from heavy metals, flame retardants, stress, food allergies or pesticides in your water supply, your thyroid is the gland screaming out to you that something is wrong first. It’s your early warning to clean up your body and restart your thyroid.

But alas, we ignore that and medicate. Even worse, we treat labs values and not the patient themselves. How often have you heard from friends or family members that his or her doctor said the lab numbers (usually only TSH is checked) were good and so there was no reason to adjust thyroid hormone levels? Yet the patient is constipated, depressed and dragging his or her feet every hour of the day. Doesn’t seem to make sense.

The studies linking environmental toxins and thyroid dysfunction are quite common (you can read about many of them in previous blog articles that can be read by clicking here). But of particular concern is the compound ammonium perchlorate in drinking water. It is used in the manufacture of rocket fuel, ammunition and fireworks and has been discarded in large quantities in Nevada since the 1950s. This has led to contamination of the Colorado River as it picks up perchlorate from the soil. From there, it can last in water for long periods of time.

Unfortunately, perchlorate is known to block the action of thyroid hormone. This obviously creates a problem and has been shown to create thyroid problems. Luckily, you can just take your Synthroid and ignore the fact that a known environmental toxins continues to run through your bloodstream and body tissues.

Just to demonstrate that the approach that most physician take for thyroid problems is dead wrong, I present this particular study. In it, researchers looked at the pregnancies of 21,846 women. Of these, 487 were hypothyroid during pregnancy. In these 487 women, first trimester perchlorate levels were evaluated. In those who showed the highest 10% of perchloarate levels, the children’s IQ was assesses at 3 years of age. Here’s what they found:

Perchlorate was detectable in all women and iodine levels were low.
Those moms in the highest 10% of perchlorate levels had a 314% higher risk of having her child’s IQ being in the lowest 10%.
Here is the important point: thyroid hormone therapy did not have an impact of perchlorate on offspring IQ.

This article is not about the IQ levels of the children. This article illustrates that merely medicating the lab findings of an altered TSH does nothing to fix the problem. With the thyroid, there is a very high likelihood that something is wrong. Whether it’s prediabetes, stress, nutritional deficiencies or exposure to common toxic chemicals, it needs to be identified and addressed.

Maybe you can’t manage to get all the flame retardants out of your life (besides–who wants to risk bursting into flames at work?), but paying attention to where your exposures are and doing your darnedest to reduce these exposures is still going to pay off. This is the only way to address it.

So, the next time your doctor tells you that you have thyroid problems and you ask him or her for what environmental exposures might be causing the problem and all you get is a blank stare, it might be time to find a new doctor.

Soda Stream Reviews: Why You Need to Get One

August 5, 2014 by James Bogash

For years now I have written about the health dangers of chemicals in plastics such as BPA. It is clear that plastics are not good for your health.

Here is how it went in my household…

Being a very strong advocate for tea, we had been drinking tea for years (you can read how we prepare tea in a prior blog post that can be read by clicking here). Our preferred brands were Republic of Tea and Teavana and we went through a lot of tea.

I think, in the back of my mind, if I had taken the time to think of it, I would have known that the pesticide levels in tea are among the highest you can find. Coffee and tea, to be specific. The coffee part we already had covered—we only buy organic coffee for the home and office.

But it took a blog post by Vani Hari (aka the Food Babe) to wake me up to the fact that pesticide levels in tea were a grave concern. In a review of certain brands of tea, some 98% of Teavana samples had pesticides detected. I posted this concern on Teavana’s Facebook page and, while they did answer, you could hear the tap dancing in the background as they avoided answering the actual question.

So this led to a shift to only organic teas, which became a problem because the flavors available were not nearly as good. Tazo has a few that are fantastic, but the selection is limited. Luckily, I recently found ESP teas with a very large selection of organic teas (white, black, herbal and rooibos) in great flavors.

Prior to the discovery of ESP, as an alternative, we added in sparkling water. LaCroix, Seagrams, Perrier, Safeway brand. The concept is great. No calories, no artificial sweeteners (although you DO have to be careful not to be tricked into buying the ones with artificial sweeteners) and still provides that exciting fizz.

This is the way it went for the next 2 years or so until the next epiphany.

My son, who is currently 8, was looking for ways to generate some additional revenue besides his salary for feeding the dogs and vacuuming, s0 we discussed saving aluminum cans. This was when I realized just how many cans we were actually going through in any given week.

And started to realize just how high the potential BPA exposure was from this consumption. You see, many cans, both aluminum and steel, are coated with BPA on the inside to create a lining between the food product and the can itself.

In a blog post I did a little while back on BPA exposure from credit card transaction receipts (which can be read by clicking here), one of the participants in the study had to be excluded because his BPA level was over 27 TIMES higher than everyone else’s after drinking 4 cans of beverages.

This is obviously a concern and created quite a conundrum in our family.

Luckily, this problem was solved by the Soda Stream Crystal. I am wary of all plastics, so the typical Soda Stream containers were not a good option. But the Soda Stream Crystal is all glass, alleviating this concern.

So last week we became the proud owners of our new Soda Stream Crystal. And that’s when the fun began. We bought extra glass bottles to hold the sparkling water we made (the Soda Stream glass replacement bottles are quite pricey) and continue to find creative ways to add flavors.

Here’s a few ideas:

Soda Stream sells My Essence, which are raspberry, orange and lemon-lime flavored essences.
Organic vanilla extract
Orange extract can also be purchased separately.
Coconut extract
We have yet to add pulverized fruits into the drink, but this can be done quite easily, so long as you limit it to just a small amount of the fruit for flavor only.

I’m sure in time I’ll have some more ideas. Overall, though, it’s been a fun experience, very inexpensive once the initial Soda Stream equipment is bought and most importantly, BPA-free.

Patients ask me all the time how to go about reducing exposure to toxic chemicals in their environment. The first step is identifying these exposures. The next step is doing something about it. Moving to the Soda Stream Crystal in addition to your organic tea consumption is a fantastic step in protecting your long-term health.

Buying BPA Free Water Bottles? Critical Fact to Know

July 10, 2014 by James Bogash

We live in a toxic soup. In an attempt to avoid at least SOME of the pollutants, many have become dilligent about avoiding Bisphenol A (BPA) in plastics.

I first wrote about BPA in canned goods as early as 2001 and have been a vocal advocate for avoiding its use as much as possible. It took some time and pressure from consumers, but the plastics community responded by coming out with everything in a BPA-free version. It’s now widely accepted (by everyone EXCEPT the EPA) that BPA is bad for our health and you will see no labels on the front of baby bottles proudly proclaiming that they still load their plastics with BPA.
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Scary Difference Between Healthy and Unhealthy Obesity

June 20, 2014 by James Bogash

pesticides and obesity — Photo courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremybrooks/

I have covered the difference in “healthy” versus “unhealthy” fat in a recent article that can be read by clicking here.

While rare in today’s society, it IS possible to have the purely storage form of fat (think hibernating bear) that has not yet turned against you and set you on the path for diabetes, heart disease and cancer. After all, our body stores fat for a rainy day. While humans don’t hibernate, throughout the vast majority of our fight for survival, starvation has been the norm. The ability to capture excess calories when available was a boon to survival.

Enter today’s lifestyle with no “hardship” for most of us in the industrialized world. The calories are everywhere and the quality is questionable. Do not EVER confuse the 100 calories in a kids’ size fast food french fry and the 100 calories in 3 servings of vegetables. Regardless of what you hear from some of the weight loss programs, a calorie is NOT a calorie.

Beyond the concern over the quality of the calories we take in and the exercise we do, what factors play a role in deciding whether our fat is going to be “healthy” or “unhealthy?” The answer is one of the scarier ones we face.

Toxicity from our environment.

For me, I think this is the scariest because it is subtle. The clothes you are wearing, the air you’re breathing, the plastic water bottle you drank, the mattress you sleep on, the new car smell in your new car and the non-organic bell peppers you ate with your salad. The exposures are literally everywhere and are usually silent. Sure, the “new shower curtain smell” is easily recognizable, but what about the BPA in the plastic water bottle you’re drinking from because you thought it was good for you? Tasteless and odorless.

Persistent organics pollutants, or “POPs,” are chemical compounds that are almost entirely man-created and are difficult to degrade in either the environment or our bodies. As a result, they accumulate inside your body and lead to all kinds of nasty things like cancer, obesity and diabetes.

While the list of POPs is extensive, there are some that top the list of the most common and they fall into 3 categories:

Pesticides: aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex, toxaphene;
Industrial chemicals: hexachlorobenzene, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); and
By-products: hexachlorobenzene; polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDD/PCDF), and PCBs.

In case you’d really like to stay in tune with the research and worldwide advocacy of POPs, then the Stockholm Convention website is the best place to start.

Overall, though, it is clear that exposure to POPs is a bad thing, and this article is yet another one that clarifies just how extensive the problem is. In it, researchers looked at the difference in POPs levels between women who were obese but metabolically healthy (based on risk factors for heart disease and prediabetes) and obese and unhealthy. Here are the details:

They looked at 21 different pollutants.
Unhealthy obese women had higher levels of 12 POPs which was 40% higher than the healthy obese group.
Specifically, there were 470% higher levels of total dioxin- and non-dioxin-like PCBs (used in industrial uses and plastics).
Trans-nonachlor levels (an insecticide) were 610% higher.

There are uncountable numbers of POPs that we are exposed to on a daily basis and some are more strongly associated with chronic diseases than others. But the associations between certain POPs in this study and obesity are scary.

Overall, this means that you need to examine the chemicals you are exposed to every single day and do your best to avoid or reduce your exposure to these chemicals. As an example, feel free to check out this article on the use of diatomaceous earth for pest control.

Common Wallet Item Ups Diabetes, Obesity Risk

March 17, 2014 by James Bogash

We live in a toxic sludge and Resistance is futile. There is no good argument against this statement, but you can at least start with awareness.

Knowing where your toxic environmental exposures are can at least minimize the impact. Many would prefer to live blissfully unaware that he or she is surrounded by chemicals well known to create health hazards. The thyroid gland alone is known as the “yellow canary” of the human body, affected by toxins long before other systems of the body. Didn’t you ever wonder why your thyroid gland just “gave out” in your twenties??

In the case of environmental chemicals creating harm, what you don’t know WILL kill you.

Top of the list of these chemicals is Bisphenol A, or just BPA. Notoriously associated with plastic water bottles and the linings of aluminum cans (yes–just in case the mercury, artifical sweeteners and high fructose corn syrup wasn’t enough to destroy your health…) and most soup cans. There are clear associations between BPA exposure and obesity, diabetes and certain cancers (mainly hormonally driven cancers like breast). It’s not good.

So just avoid plastic water bottles and cans and you’ll be OK, right? Turns out it may not be quite that easy. This particular study goes into a very common exposure that, if you’re aware of it, will allow you to make some changes to lower your exposure.

Thermal cash register receipts. Yup. Those near-ubiquitous curly sheets of paper that we all have because we all use plastic to pay for just about everything in life these days. In the study, 24 students handled register receipts for two hours and, one week later, performed the same set of activities with nitrile gloves. Here’s what they found:

Prior to exposure, 83% had BPA in urine samples; this jumped to 100% after handling receipts.
Urine levels jumped from an average of 1.8 micrograms/L to 5.8 after exposure.
One participants, after drinking 4 cans of beverage, was excluded. The urine level was 49.3.
There was no rise in urine BPA levels with the use of gloves.

These are some scary findings. First, the massive increase after drinking canned beverages should put everyone on alert. Second, there is a very real increase in your body’s exposure to BPA after handling register receipts. So what can we all do to lower our risk other than wear blue nitrile gloves around everywhere we go?

Obviously, reducing our exposure to these receipts is first and foremost. For our office, although we are dealing with maybe 10 receipts per day and not hundreds, the concern is there. Handling the receipts with dry hands rather than when wet or greasy can lower your absorption of the BPA. Do not recycle thermal receipts as the BPA may get incorporated into the recycled paper. Wash your hands after handling receipts and never use an alcohol-based hand cleaner, as this will increase BPA absorption through the skin.

And, for god’s sake, never gnaw on your receipts.

Follow these simple guidelines can help cut your risk of exposure. But, as I mentioned, you need to be aware of how you are being exposed before you can begin to protect yourself.