What Are Endocrine Disrupters? -- Video brief with explanation

A disturbing and informative video teaches about the rise of these everyday chemicals that influence the neural and phenotypal plasticity of your child during development.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB-qA9KMsTE

The following is selected from "Healing Ecology, Child Development and Empathy" a conversation between myself and an herbalist/naturalist.

Aaron – I also believe that a major cause [of developmental complications, adhd and autism] is the proliferation of endocrine disrupter chemicals throughout our daily lives… I suggest that in the decades nineteen fifty and ninetine ninety there was a shortage of empathic behavior, a scarcity of thinking about it.

Laura – The nineties more than the eighties?

Aaron – The nineties more than the fifties… The nineties was a horror story that we cannot imagine. Because we changed the food supply that sustains our lives. Nothing like that was even heard of in the fifties. They were making science fiction flicks about that. It was the fulfillment of the dream of the fifties.

Laura – Uh-huh. Oh Yeah.

Aaron – In this inversion of empathy of the nineties… that was sort of this anaesthetic bubble of the nineties, right under people’s noses… out of the blue, within our lifetimes, the food system changed forever, the proliferation of endocrine disrupters to the point of criminal negligence […]

Laura – What are endocrine disrupters?

Aaron – Endocrine disrupter chemicals are found in a lot of stuff. They are found in daily products: in women’s cosmetics for the large part, they’re found in almost all plastics. They’re found in most cans of food, in the lining. They are subtle bioaccumulative agents (it’s hard or impossible for most people to get rid of them) [...] especially with the Standard American Diet, they don’t ever get rid of them, they accumulate them.

Laura – Can things like seaweed get rid of them?

Aaron – There are ways, yeah. But I think it takes a long time.

Laura – Is this the same as Persistent Organic Pollutants? Like vinyl is a persistent organic pollutant. I think PCBs, they accumulate in orcas and so on, in salmon I think. Have you heard of these things going into the ocean?

Aaron -- Yeah… That’s not the same classification necessarily. Endocrine Disrupter Chemicals specifically gets its meaning from ‘endocrine’ which means hormone glands… Take this reality check… young girls going into puberty earlier and earlier in each generation, reaching the beginnings of sexual maturity. Endocrine disrupter chemicals are affecting their sexual development. But you can bet it doesn’t stop there. But that’s the big bad thing about it, the symptoms get worse with passing generations, that’s what accumulation of endocrine disrupters like BPA is doing to us.

People didn’t know – in the Levittown culture, that was the beginning of white suburban America. A post-world-war two white community… especially for soldiers returning home, they wanted to start families, and what do you know, the desire for nice neighborhoods being constructed on the fly translated into a growth market. Levittown spread across the country. William Levitt was a business genius, but his communitas reflected the makings of a Disneyland-esque Pleasantville. The nineties inherited this Pleasantville mentality, “the soccer mom” politically represented the white burbs. They were teaching us at the time that there was possibility of limitless growth in the economy. There was no limit to spending.