Chemicals: Tiny Mysteries in Our Food and Environment

by Carol Simontacchi

But These Chemicals Are So Tiny!

When we broach the subject of chemical toxicity and the influence of chemicals on weight and health, people’s eyes glaze over. If you thought the discussion on the endocrine system is complicated, it is simple compared to the subject of chemicals. While you have just a few endocrine organs, there are literally tens of thousands of chemicals being released into the soil and atmosphere.

When Rachel Carson wrote her earth-shattering book “Silent Spring,” in the 70s, we were appalled. She was simultaneously ridiculed and lauded. Since then, other authors have expounded more fully on the subject, as more and more research proved Carson’s point. Our world is dangerously polluted, and becoming more so.

The topic is becoming increasing complex because the chemical influence is growing day by day. We know very little about how these chemicals influence the human body. Scant research is being done to determine if specific chemicals cause cancer but these studies are hopelessly inadequate to deal with the questions related to the health of the neurological system, the endocrine system, or other systems of the body, or the cumulative effects of combined chemical exposure. NO research has been done on the effects of compounded chemical exposure, or exposure to thousands of chemicals at the same time. We simply have no idea what happens when these compounds gather in human tissue. Is there a synergistic effect? Probably. But we have no idea what it is.

According to Worldwatch, between 50,000 and 100,000 synthetic chemicals are in commercial production, and new synthetics are entering commerce at an average rate of three per day. What these chemicals eventually do to the human body we really do not know. How do these chemicals influence weight management? We don’t know that either but we can speculate, based on our understanding of the human body and how these chemicals work in the insect and animal worlds.

Environmental toxins wield a variety of influences on the body, particularly the endocrine, neurological, and detoxification systems. Some chemicals act as enzyme disruptors. Others act as estrogen mimics or estrogen blockers. They are often stored in fat tissue as the liver’s ability to detoxify the body is compromised, possibly due to overload, malnutrition, or sub-functional detoxification pathways.

One of the reasons that mainstream science hasn’t picked up a clear causal relationship between chemical exposure and damage to these delicate systems of the body is that the long-term damage may come as a result of smaller dosages rather than larger dosages. Large doses of chemical agents produce immediate effects that are easily measured in a laboratory or medical setting. Tiny doses (nanogram amounts) of the same chemicals may produce more subtle yet farther-reaching damage, and may be difficult to measure, given our current scientific method.

How much is a nanogram? The average paper clip weighs one gram. Divide the paper clip into one thousand pieces; each piece weighs one milligram. Divide a milligram piece into one thousand pieces; each piece weighs one microgram. Divide the microgram into one thousand pieces; each piece weighs one nanogram. Many chemicals are biologically active in nanogram amounts, although some chemicals are active in even smaller dosages. Put another way, one drop in a vat of liquid as large as a freight train one mile long.

Several years ago, British medical doctor Baille-Hamilton began exploring the question of why people gain weight, even when they follow a strict diet. She believes that chemicals wield several damaging effects on the weight management facilities of the body. In her book, The Detox Diet, she writes, “The most obvious and best-documented way is poisoning, with a relatively large amount of chemicals – inducing almost immediate and often violent symptoms, whereas the second, more subtle way follows long-term exposure to much lower levels of chemicals and usually goes unnoticed by the affected person, so that they do not relate health problems to this toxic build-up.

“Not surprisingly, the quicker and more dramatic poisoning episodes are relatively easy to recognize, both by the person affected and by health professionals…symptoms can range from mild flu-like illnesses to the other extreme, of convulsions, unconsciousness and death. Since these symptoms usually follow quickly after the poisoning incident, they are relatively well documented and on the whole pretty hard to ignore. And on a wider scale, these high-dose poisoning episodes account for a staggering 3 million cases of acute severe pesticide poisonings alone, including 220,000 worldwide fatalities every year.

“However, these figures in all probability vastly underestimate the true damage that chemicals pose to our health. Because as yet, no one has found a way to record the number of people suffering from a whole range of chemical related illnesses triggered by much lower levels of chemical exposure…

“And because of the much longer time factors and the lower levels of chemicals involved, and the simply massive numbers of toxic chemicals all around us, it has become far more difficult to draw a direct link between particular chemicals and particular illnesses. The other complication here is that since we all have different genetic make-ups and live in different environments, we may each react in a slightly different way to a given level of chemical.”

I encourage you to purchase a copy of Baille-Hamilton’s book (available through Amazon.com).

How Do They Work Against Us?

Chemicals wield a number of effects. Remember what enzymes do? Enzymes are the workers of the body; they catalyze the hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions. Nothing takes place in the human body without the catalyzing effects of enzymes. Certain chemicals like organophosphates and carbamates may act as enzyme disruptors or enzyme inhibitors. Organophosphates, for example, disable the brain enzyme cholinesterase, important in cognition and behavior.

Several research studies show that some chemicals appear to damage the appetite ‘switch’, so that more food is eaten than is generally needed. They may reduce the amount of food the body needs by damaging the ability to burn off food, or by preventing the body from using existing fat stores.

Animal growth promoters (from pesticides) are used to fatten animals before butchering. Organophosphates (used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz as nerve gas) are used on crops to kill insects, and are some of the most common pesticides found on soft fruit and vegetables. Organophosphates appear to fatten beef by reducing their ability to use existing fat stores. As their fat-burning abilities slow, they gain weight, and their food requirements drop. The use of organophosphates as growth promoters is now banned but organophosphates are still found as common pesticide in foods, and are routinely used in the manufacture of rubber and plastics, in gasoline as additives, and in lubricating oils.

These products also damage the muscles, causing weakness and atrophy of muscle tissue. According to an article published in Psychopharmacology, “organophosphates…can permanently damage nerves, break down the structure of muscle fibres, reduce the ability to produce energy to power exercise and…reduce the desire to exercise” according to Baille’s work.

Carbamates are some of the most widely used chemicals in agriculture because they are generally thought to be the least toxic of the pesticides. They are used as a fungicide on tobacco, cotton, potatoes, peanuts and citrus fruit, along with other produce, and are added to food after harvesting and storage. They cause weight gain by reducing the overall metabolic rate, and lowering the overall level of physical activity.

Some chemicals are thyroid disruptors. Adequate thyroid studies have not been done but according to a study published in the Archives of Toxicology, a number of synthetic chemicals used on food and the environment damage the thyroid, causing hypothyroidism. Many studies (and clinical work) have estimated that upwards of 35% of the population struggles with some form of clinical or subclinical hypothyroidism. Hypothyroidism not only slows the metabolism but also increases water retention, dysregulates the female and male hormonal system, and slows digestion (causing constipation and other digestive disorders.

It is commonly known that steroids cause rapid weight gain, and have been used for years to fatten cattle. According to a 1976 article in Environmental Quality and Safety, some steroids were so good at increasing levels of body fat that when estrogens were given to broiler chickens, they caused such an increase in body fat that the practice had to be stopped. The levels of fat in the hen’s bodies jeopardized their lives.

We are exposed to huge amounts of xenoestrogens in the environment and foods. The combination of xenoestrogens and steroid in the food supply may induce rapid fat gain in humans. Humans are also exposed to steroids in prescription medications.

Organochlorines make us fat. They are possibly the most fattening of all because not only do they damage our weight control mechanisms but it is relatively difficult for the human body to process and excrete them. Lindane, for example, is used to promote obesity in animals. Lindane is used in flea powders anti-nit shampoos and insecticides, and in landscaping applications. It is also found in animal products and chocolate.

DDT (organochlorine) is still ubiquitous in the environment, although its use has been banned for several decades. It is powerful inducer of weight gain in animals.

Several studies on the fish from the Great Lakes (polluted with organochlorines DDT and PCBs) have shown that people who ate the fish from this region were significantly fatter than people eating the same amount of fish from other parts of the world. One study showed that mothers who had eaten more fish from the Great Lakes were more contaminated with PCBs but gave birth to significantly larger babies, and were themselves significantly heavier than non-fish eating mothers.

POPs or “persistent organic pollutants” disrupt the reproductive capabilities of animals in the parts per trillion range, according to Worldwatch.

I encourage you to read another important, frightening book on the hormonal influence of chemicals, Our Stolen Future. (Purchase from your local bookstore or Amazon.com. Great book!) In it, Colburn writes, “Although the concentration of contaminants such as PCBs are so low in the water in the Great Lakes that they cannot be measured using standard water testing procedures, such persistent chemicals concentrate in the tissue and accumulate exponentially as they move from animal to animal up the food chain. Through this process of magnification, the concentrations of a persistent chemical that resists breakdown and accumulates in body fat can be 25 millions times greater in a top predator such as a herring gull than in the surrounding water. One other startling fact emerged from the spreadsheet. According to the scientific literature, the adult animals appeared to be doing fine. The health problems were found primarily in their offspring.” (Colburn, 26)

While human estrogens operate at parts per trillion, xenoestrogens or other forms of estrogen are present in human blood and body and body fat in concentrations of parts per billion or parts per million – levels sometimes thousands to millions of times greater than natural estrogen levels. This is a very consequential contaminant level.

According to Colburn, “imposter chemicals such as DDT and DES bind with the estrogen receptor and the receptor readily accepts them.” Although DDT is not chemically identical to estrogen, it has estrogenic effects. Colburn writes, “To date, researchers have identified at least fifty-one synthetic chemicals – many of them ubiquitous in the environment – that disrupt the endocrine system in one way or another. Some mimic estrogen like DES, but others interfere with other parts of the system, such as testosterone and thyroid metabolism. This tally of hormone disruptors includes large chemical families such as the 209 compounds classified as PCBs, the 75 dioxins, and the 135 furans, which have a myriad of documented disruptive effects.

“Most discussions of hormone-disrupting chemicals inevitably focus on DDT, the PCBs, and dioxin, but not because they necessarily pose the only or the gravest threat. These get the lion’s share of the attention because they happen to be the only hormone-disrupting chemicals that scientists have studied in any depth…these man-made estrogen mimics differ in fundamental ways from plant estrogens. The body is able to break down and excrete the natural estrogen mimics, while many of the man-made compounds resist normal breakdown and accumulate in the body, exposing humans and animals to low-level but long-term exposure…they can persist in the body for years, while plant estrogens might be eliminated within a day.”

While these estrogen mimics have not been studied for their weight disruptive properties, we know that estrogen dominance leads to all sorts of endocrine mischief, including water retention and fat deposition, primarily in the hips, thighs, and buttocks.

According to Dr. Baille-Hamilton, “Every one of the pesticides found in our foods – in addition to the majority of the other synthetic chemicals – appeared to have a significant effect on at least one of the major weight-controlling hormones. More specifically, the trend was that these chemicals tended to increase the levels of fattening hormones such as insulin and steroids, while reducing the levels of slimming hormones such as thyroid hormone, sex hormones, growth hormone and catecholamines.”

She describes the adrenal gland as the gland most susceptible to chemical-induced toxicities. The adrenal gland produces catecholamines that help the body burn calories and maintain weight.

Chemicals Are Anti-Thermogenic

Chemical damage appears to make people less able to raise their body temperature, particularly marked when surrounding temperatures fall. This can be seen in people who are severely damaged by chemicals, as they tend to have a lower than average body temperature. They produce less heat, thereby using less energy. The reason for this inability to convert existing fat stores into heat is that the hormones that are essential in mobilizing fats, namely catecholamines, have been severely lowered. Same thing with thyroid hormone. Our fat stores cannot be exploited fully to produce heat energy or indeed energy.

The Tip Of The Iceberg

As we said, this is unfortunately, just a “snapshot” of potential problem of chemicals. We do not know exactly what they do – but we know they do damage our ability to lose weight.

We are not able to clear our environment of these chemicals. They are here to stay. We will pass our toxic legacy on to our children and grandchildren. The chemicals our mothers and fathers dumped into the environment are making us fat. The chemicals we are dumping into the environment and our food supply today will make our kids and grandkids heavy tomorrow. Shame on us!

What Shall We Do About It?

Since the chemicals are here to stay, our personal question is, “What can we do about my weight problem? How can I protect my children and grandchildren? How can we lose weight even while bathing in the chemical soup?”

The first step is to avoid exposure as much as possible. Learn more about your dependence on chemicals and write a plan for gradually reducing your toxic load. Browse through your local health food store for cleaning products that do not harm the environment. Stop using perfumed personal care items. As much as possible, go natural.

The second step is to do a routine body cleansing. You will want to do a two-week body cleansing at least twice per year, and preferably once per quarter. Email me to learn more about how to do this.

If chemicals have disrupted your hormone system, you will not know it. There is no testing that can determine where your hormone imbalance originated. Same thing with your enzymes. There is no way to know if chemicals are disrupting enzyme activity. Assume that they are, and make sure your nutrition is up to the additional challenges that chemicals pose.

Tags: chemicals food