If you aren’t familiar with the term “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” or don’t know which chemicals it includes, this article should help by providing the information you need. If you are familiar with endocrine-disrupting chemicals, this article may provide you with more current information. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals like bisphenols (BPA & BPS) found in plastics & thermal receipt paper, nonstick chemicals found in your pots and pans, pesticides, water repellent chemicals found in your furniture and food packaging, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) found in processed foods, artificial dyes and preservatives, phthalates found in “fragrance” in your personal care products, etc., can literally wreak havoc on your hormones. And endocrine-disrupting chemicals are linked to many health concerns such as depression, anxiety, infertility, weight gain, heart defects, early puberty, diabetes, complications during IVF treatments, breast and prostate cancers, to name a few. Let’s have a heart-to-heart about how you can protect yourself and your family from the health issues related to endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
What are Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals?
By definition, endocrine-disrupting chemicals can interfere with the body’s endocrine system (the system that keeps our bodies in balance, maintains homeostasis, and guides proper growth and development) and cause adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects in both humans and wildlife. According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a wide range of substances, both natural and man-made, are thought to cause endocrine disruption, including pharmaceuticals, dioxin, and dioxin-like compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT and other pesticides, and plasticizers such as bisphenol A. Endocrine disruptors may be found in many everyday products– including plastic bottles, metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, food, toys, cosmetics, and pesticides. Research shows that endocrine disruptors may pose the greatest risk during prenatal and early postnatal development when organ and neural systems form. Interestingly, even ten years ago, there was no body of evidence like we have today on the body’s endocrine actions and the disease consequences of endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals can:
- Mimic or partially mimic naturally occurring hormones in the body, such as estrogens (the female sex hormone), androgens (the male sex hormone), and thyroid hormones, potentially causing overstimulation.
-
Pose the greatest risk during prenatal and early postnatal development when organ and neural systems are developing. In animals, adverse consequences, such as subfertility, premature reproductive senescence, and cancer are linked to early exposure, but they may not be apparent until much later in life.
- Bind to a receptor within a cell and block the endogenous hormone from binding. The normal signal fails to occur, and the body responds improperly. Examples of chemicals that block or antagonize hormones are anti-estrogens and anti-androgens.
- They interfere with or block how natural hormones or their receptors are made or controlled, for example, by altering their metabolism in the liver.
- Cause obesity. Hormone (endocrine) disrupting chemicals called obesogens can literally slow or inhibit thermogenesis (burning fat to produce heat). They encourage the body to store fat and reprogram stem cells to become fat cells; they prompt the liver to become insulin resistant, which makes the pancreas pump out more insulin to control blood sugar, leading to increased fat storage all over the body; they prevent leptin, which is the satiety hormone, from working properly in the body. The most important sources of obesogen exposure that lead to weight gain are diet, household dust, cleaning chemicals, kitchenware, and cosmetics.
“Adults ingest about 50mg of dust every day, and children twice as much, so keeping the house clean is a very effective measure. And use a humid cloth to dust your furniture, rather than a cleaning product that may contain more of these chemicals.”
Dr. Ana Catarina Sousa, Universities of Aveiro and Beira Interior, Portugal
According to the NIEHS, endocrine-disrupting chemicals may cause:
- Reduced male fertility and a decline in the number of males born.
- Abnormalities in male reproductive organs.
- Female reproductive health issues, problems, early puberty (precocious puberty), and early reproductive senescence.
- Increases in mammary, ovarian, and prostate cancers.
- Increases in immune and autoimmune diseases and some neurodegenerative diseases
What are Xenoestrogens?
Xeno means foreign; therefore, xenoestrogens are literally foreign estrogens. Xenoestrogens are considered a type of xenohormone that imitates estrogen. They can be either synthetic or natural chemical compounds. Synthetic xenoestrogens are widely used industrial compounds, such as PCBs, BPA, and phthalates, that have estrogenic effects on the body even though they differ chemically from the natural estrogenic substances produced internally by the body’s endocrine system. Xenoestrogens are also called “environmental hormones” or “EDC” (Endocrine Disrupting Compounds). Most scientists who study xenoestrogens, including The Endocrine Society, regard them as serious environmental hazards that have hormone-disrupting effects on wildlife and humans. Industrial, agricultural, and chemical companies, as well as consumers, have introduced xenoestrogens into the environment only in the last 70 years.
Some of the 70,000 registered chemicals for use in the United States have hormonal effects in addition to toxic effects. These substances can increase the body’s estrogen load over time and are difficult for the liver (the body’s main filter) to detoxify. Scientists have also noticed changes in the age of onset of puberty and have decided that it is a sign of the toxic chemical and hormonal onslaught that has become a part of our modern life.
There are two big — and by big I mean monumental — problems with the argument and the perspective taken by federal regulatory agencies and by the manufacturers of foods and medicines. The argument is that trace levels of these chemicals do no harm to human health. What that argument ignores is the cumulative effect of hundreds, if not thousands, of these chemicals entering and then mixing within the human body. This is known as the “body burden. ” We each carry a “body burden” of these synthetic chemicals. That is the problem of synergies; the synergistic reactions of two or more chemicals in the body. When they interact, it is much more powerful than any one individual chemical can do on its own.
~Randall Fitzgerald, author of The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine are Destroying Your Health
Relationship Between Breast Cancer Risk, Estrogen, and Environmental Chemicals
Since many breast cancer cases have known risk factors they cannot explain, some researchers suspect that environmental chemicals may play a role in breast cancer risk. Though there are many unanswered questions about whether environmental factors affect breast cancer risk, researchers have developed hypotheses about how environmental chemicals may affect breast cancer risk. These include chemicals that either mimic estrogen or indirectly affect estrogen levels by disrupting how the body produces or uses estrogen. Many different chemicals have been identified as being weak environmental estrogens. These include several pesticides (including some forms of DDT), the food preservatives BHT and BHA, the industrial detergent by-products nonyl- and octaphenol, compounds used in plastics including bisphenol A and some phthalates, the food dye Red #3, and the solvent formaldehyde, which was used in carpet manufacturing and is still used in making plywood.
Common Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals
Endocrine disruptors may be found in many everyday products– including plastic bottles, metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, food, toys, cosmetics, and pesticides.
- BPA
- Dioxin
- Atrazine
- Phthalates
- Perchlorate
- Fire retardants
- Lead
- Mercury
- Arsenic
- PFCs
- Organophosphate pesticides & glycol ethers – Because this is very important, let’s pause here to explain. According to the Environmental Working Group, ” Neurotoxic organophosphate compounds that the Nazis produced in huge quantities for chemical warfare during World War II were luckily never used. After the war ended, American scientists used the same chemistry to develop a long line of pesticides that target insects’ nervous systems. Despite many studies linking organophosphate exposure to effects on brain development, behavior, and fertility, they remain among the most commonly used pesticides today. A few ways organophosphates can affect the human body include interfering with how testosterone communicates with cells, lowering testosterone, and altering thyroid hormone levels. Glyphosate (RoundUp) is an Organophosphate and known Endocrine Disruptor.
- PCBs
- Xenoestrogens
- Mold
- Radon
Can Xenoestrogens Act Synergistically?
In my opinion, this is a critical question. Study after study has revealed links between xenoestrogens and such health concerns as decreased sperm viability, ovarian dysfunction, neurodevelopmental deficits, precocious puberty, and obesity. But experimental limitations have prevented researchers from exploring one of the most serious questions posed by exposure to xenoestrogens: what happens in the real world when an individual is exposed to multiple estrogen-mimicking chemicals simultaneously? After all, humans and wildlife rarely experience xenoestrogens as single compounds; in fact, they are most likely to be exposed to dozens of them simultaneously each day.
University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston) researchers are now using new techniques to study the synergistic effects on the body when it is exposed to low doses of multiple xenoestrogens. Even at low doses, the conclusions are quite concerning.
Using cell cultures to test mixtures of three compounds known to affect estrogen signaling — bisphenol A (found in plastic bottles and the linings), bisphenol S (a supposedly safer replacement for bisphenol and recently found to have similar effects), and nonylphenol (a common component of industrial detergents and surfactants) – scientists have determined that combinations of endocrine disruptors can have a much greater effect than any one of them acting alone.
“We wanted to see how these persistent, ubiquitous contaminants affect estrogenic signaling when they’re mixed together as they are in nature, so we set up a cell-culture system that allowed us to test their influence on signaling by estradiol, the estrogen found in adult, cycling women,” said UTMB professor Cheryl Watson, senior author of a paper on the study now online in the journal Environmental Health. “What we found is that these things gang up on estradiol and thwart its response, which is not a good thing.”
Watson and her colleagues tested different mixtures of estrogen-disrupting compounds using rat pituitary cells, which are master regulators of the animals’ endocrine systems. Their experiments measured responses in key signaling pathways that lead to cell proliferation, the secretion of the pituitary hormone prolactin, and the activation of proteins involved in apoptosis (programmed cell death), comparing the effects of estradiol alone with those of estradiol and mixtures of bisphenol A, bisphenol S, and nonylphenol.
“These compounds work at very low concentrations — at the parts per trillion or parts per quadrillion level –, and when you mix them, they affect estrogenic signaling differently and more dramatically than they do individually,” Watson said. “We need to pay attention to this because estrogens influence so many things in both males and females — reproduction, the immune system, metabolism, bone growth, all sorts of important biological functions.”
Studies have detected measurable levels of bisphenol A and bisphenol S in the urine of more than 90 percent of Americans. Watson says modern humans are exposed to dozens of xenoestrogens almost constantly.
One critical concern and obstacle to
identifying EDC (endocrine-disrupting
chemical) exposure and harm in humans
is that there can be a significant
lag time, possibly decades, between
exposure and the manifestation
of a clinical disorder.
“These things are all over the environment, and we need to know what they do so we can start figuring out what we need to change,” Watson said. “They’re probably disrupting and confusing hormones in people, and it’s important to find a way to prevent that as soon as we can. We need to test these compounds for their hormone-disrupting activities before they are put into products, so we can redesign for safety very early in the process.”
“To successfully study the impact of these chemical exposures, we must shift the burden of proof from the individual health care provider and the consumer to the manufacturers before any chemicals are even released into the environment,” Dr. Jeanne Conry, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.
Lifestyle Factors to Limit Your Exposure to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals
Below are some suggestions to employ that can help protect you and your family from endocrine-disrupting chemicals that act as xenoestrogens:
- Use only natural cleaning products in your home. Most health food stores carry these, or you can search online or even make them yourself.
- Avoid processed foods whenever possible. Cook at home and buy from local farmers’ market vendors who are using organic methods.
- Avoid all kinds of artificial food additives, including artificial sweeteners and MSG.
- Avoid all varieties of unfermented soy. In fact, it’s probably best to avoid all soy.
- Switch to natural brands of personal care products such as shampoo, toothpaste, hair products, soaps, antiperspirants, and cosmetics. Avoid fluoride.
- Choose an electronic receipt instead of a thermal paper receipt that contains bisphenol.
- Avoid all synthetic and horse hormones (oral contraceptives and conventional/synthetic HRT).
- Read Our Stolen Future, probably one of the best resources on this topic
- Avoid all pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Wash your food well to remove the pesticides. Bathe washed produce in a produce wash (check the ingredient list).
- Purchase effective water filters for your home, shower and kitchen faucet, and ice maker.
- Use only organic or locally sourced whole foods when you can. Purchase free-range meats and dairy products. Ask whether they were fattened up with grains before slaughter.
- Avoid all GMO foods and products.
- Avoid plastic goods as much as possible and never heat in them or place hot foods in plastic containers.
- Use tampons and sanitary napkins made of organic cotton without chlorine. (The FDA detected dioxins and dozens of other substances in conventional tampons. Look for ones that contain no chlorine, fragrance, wax, surfactants, rayon, etc.)
- If you use a microwave, don’t microwave food in plastic containers; especially avoid using plastic wrap to cover food for microwaving. The best thing is to throw away your microwave.
- Do not wash plastic containers in the dishwasher (even on the top rack).
- Use glass or ceramics to store food.
- Don’t drink water that is stored in any plastic container.
- Plastic containers. Check the recycling number on the bottom of plastic bottles. Avoid the numbers 3, 6, and 7.
- Don’t use fabric softeners, as they put petrochemicals right on your skin. Vinegar is a great fabric softener!
- Use a “green” laundry and dish detergent with fewer chemicals.
- Use an ionic air purifier in your home (especially bedroom), office, school, etc.
- Computer monitors can emit a high level of electromagnetic frequencies (EMF). Use an EMF protection device.
- Keep your liver clean and supported. Perform a monthly liver cleanse.
- Be aware that BPA-Free may not mean free of xenoestrogens. Plastics labeled BPA-free may not be Estrogen Activity-Free (Yang et al. 2011).
- Remove shoes when entering the house to avoid bringing contaminants in on the soles.
- Vacuum often, using high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, and dust your house frequently using a damp cloth.
Why Isn’t This Reported By the Mainstream Media?
Good question. A 2018 report in the Journal of Public Health Policy provided an eye-opening account of why the mainstream media doesn’t report on the chemical industry. Court-released discovery documents released from the Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIA) between Monsanto, who produced the most popular herbicide in the world called Roundup, and regulatory agencies and public universities found evidence that is important for the public knowledge. These emails matter to the public because they show who journalists quote and rely on for background on scientific issues surrounding chemicals. The study found clear evidence of corporate malfeasance & undisclosed conflicts of interest related to scientific integrity. They found evidence of Monsanto ghostwriting papers and statements submitted to the media, interfering with journal publications, and unduly influencing federal regulatory agencies. It turns out these “independent” sources aren’t as independent as they would like the public to believe. They have a vested interest in reporting positively on chemical companies. Of course, this doesn’t give much faith in the mainstream media’s coverage concerning synthetic chemicals like glyphosate and other hormone-disrupting chemicals. It’s also reasonable to assume this is happening in other industries as well.
References & Research
René Viñas, Cheryl S. Watson. Mixtures of xenoestrogens disrupt estradiol-induced non-genomic signaling and downstream functions in pituitary cells. Environmental Health, 2013; 12 (1): 26 DOI: 10.1186/1476-069X-12-26
Estrogen and Breast Cancer Risk: What Factors Might Affect a Woman’s Exposure to Estrogen? Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors. Fact Sheet #10. Cornell University Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors in New York State (BCERF). Rachel Ann Clark, M.S. Science Writer, BCERF; Suzanne Snedeker, Ph.D. Research Project Leader, BCERF and Carol Devine, Ph.D., R.D. Division of Nutritional Sciences and Education Project Leader, BCERF.
International Journal of Andrology, Apr 2010, 33(2):346-359, “Hypothesis: exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals may interfere with timing of puberty.”
Yang CZ, Yaniger SI, Jordan VC, Klein DJ, & Bittner GD (2011). Most plastic products release estrogenic chemicals: a potential health problem that can be solved. Environmental health perspectives, 119 (7), 989-96 PMID: 21367689
TEDX List of Potential Endocrine Disruptors – Every chemical on the TEDX List has one or more verified citations to published, accessible, primary scientific research demonstrating effects on the endocrine system.
Scientific Statement on EDCs published by The Endocrine Society.
Our Stolen Future – The book Our Stolen Future, by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers, brought worldwide attention to scientific discoveries about endocrine disruption. This website tracks the most recent developments, including the cutting edge of endocrine disruption science, ongoing policy debates, and suggestions for consumers.
Environmental Health News – Environmental Health News provides access to hundreds of articles on environmental health topics published daily in the world press. Sign up for ‘Above the Fold’ to get daily news emailed right to your computer.
Environmental Working Group – Environmental Working Group specializes in providing useful resources for consumers to protect them from health problems attributed to a wide array of toxic contaminants.
Environmental Health Perspectives. 1995. 103:83-87.
Trasande MD, MMP, Leonardo. Sicker, Fatter, Poorer: The Urgent Threat of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals to Our Health and Future . . . and What We Can Do About It. January 2019.
Krimsky, S. & Gillam, C. J. Public Health Pol (2018) 39: 318. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41271-018-0134-z.
†Results may vary. Information and statements made are for educational purposes and are not intended to replace your doctor’s advice. Oasis Advanced Wellness does not dispense medical advice, prescribe, or diagnose illness. The views and nutritional advice expressed by Oasis Advanced Wellness are not intended to be a substitute for conventional medical service. If you have a severe medical condition or health concern, see your physician of choice.
