Civilians and US Troops Exposed to Toxic Chemicals in CamelBak's BPA-Free Hydration Packs

It took several years (see here and here), but the consumer demand for plastic containers that do not contain bisphenol-A (BPA) finally has resulted in shelves full of water bottles, food storage containers, and hydration packs (CamelBak being the industry leader) that do not contain this known carcinogen, endocrine disruptor, and neurotoxic susbstance.

Wonderful, right? Yeah, not so much.

An article being shared around Facebook identifies serious health issues with new BPA-free plastics, perhaps worse than those with BPA. Susanne Posel, Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | The US Independent ran a story about the use of Camelbak's by the military and the exposure of U.S. troops to a substance in the BPA-free plastic liners of the water packs, something called Tritan.

The US Armed Forces have contracted CamelBak to provide their soldiers with technology to carry “3 liter hydration systems” like the CamelBak CBR X which is used in combat situations because of the reservoir tip that allows the solider to drink clean water – even while wearing a gas mask during a chemical agent attack.

Tritan, the chemical substitute for BPA used in BPA-free products such as those sold by CamelBak, are assumed safe; however Tritan has a wide range of adverse effects such as:

• Severe dizziness
• Drowsiness
• Excitability
• Headaches
• Anxiety
• Vomiting
• Nervousness
• Sleep disorders
• Urinary dysfunction
• Heart palpitations
• Hallucinations
• Seizures
• Tremors
• Macular disorders

In a peer reviewed study from 2013, Tritan was shown to contain chemical compositions of BPA and was proven to migrate from the plastic to the liquid contained in bottles tested.

The authors of the study maintain that Tritan functions as an endocrine disruptor because of the presence of BBP and BPA.

It's unfortunate that Posel tried to make the jump that the symptoms associated with exposure to Tritan and similar chemicals (listed above) could somehow be related to Gulf War Syndrome and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Known adverse effects of Tritan have striking similarities to clinical definitions of Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At this time, further research is needed to confirm a direct link between Tritan and PTSD or GWS.

These are two obviously separate issues. But her need to make a more sensational statement detracted from her message - several people discounted the article because of that simple act of sensationalism.

Gulf War Syndrome (1991 Gulf War Veterans suffer with this debilitating disease, which is more likely associated with exposure to organophosphate pesticides used to reduce pest-born illnesses) predates military use of Camelbaks (not founded until 1989 and not widely used until 2000), and PTSD predates plastics and even guns. People have been developing PTSD as long as there has been violence and accidents (always).

The information and evidence is damning enough without making illogical and unfounded claims. Her own data refute her attempt to link these chemicals to GWS (nine years ago was 2005, not 1991):

Nine years ago, CamelBak was awarded an $11.2 million contract for the DoD through the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) for hydration systems made with Tritan.

In 2009, CamelBak received a $5.9 million contract with the US Marine Corp.

Two years ago, CamelBak reported sales of $121.1 million; which was $6.4 million more over 2011.

Clearly, the people who own Camelbak and who developed these chemicals at Eastman Kodak have more concern for profits than they do for our military and our children.

Mother Jones has led the coverage of this issue in the lefty press, as demonstrated in this article from the March/April 2014 issue (the following quotes are from that article). A neurobiologist from the University of Texas-Austin, named George Bittner has led the research into these alternatives to BPA.

CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that "almost all" commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren't exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun's ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner's research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.

Clearly, he has struck a nerve.

The American Chemistry Council, which lobbies for plastics makers and has sought to refute the science linking BPA to health problems, has teamed up with Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical—the maker of Tritan, a widely used plastic marketed as being free of estrogenic activity—in a campaign to discredit Bittner and his research. The company has gone so far as to tell corporate customers that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected Bittner's testing methods. (It hasn't.) Eastman also sued CertiChem and its sister company, PlastiPure, to prevent them from publicizing their findings that Tritan is estrogenic, convincing a jury that its product displayed no estrogenic activity. And it launched a PR blitz touting Tritan's safety, targeting the group most vulnerable to synthetic estrogens: families with young children.

The plastics industry is worth $375-billion-a-year so it's no wonder they are doing and will do everything they can to silence Bittner - but his is not the only research implicating them in suppressing the health risks of these chemicals.  

Another BPA substitute, bisphenol-S (BPS), turns out to be just as toxic to the development of the fetal endocrine system as BPA (June 23, 2014 press release), and more than likely would have similar endocrine-disruptive effects in adults, as well.

A chemical found in many "BPA free" consumer products, known as bisphenol S (BPS), is just as potent as bisphenol A (BPA) in altering brain development and causing hyperactive behavior, an animal study finds. The results will be presented Sunday at the joint meeting of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society: ICE/ENDO 2014 in Chicago.

BPA has been linked to a wide range of hormone disorders, such as obesity, reproductive cancers and, recently, hyperactivity in children born to women exposed to high levels of this substance during the second trimester of pregnancy. Now, this research in fish found that exposure to BPS, a bisphenol compound, led to hyperactive offspring, just as BPA did.

"BPS, termed the safe alternative to BPA, may be equally as harmful to developing brains," said the study's senior investigator, Deborah Kurrasch, PhD, from Canada's University of Calgary. "Society must place increased pressure on decision makers to remove all bisphenol compounds from manufacturing processes."

A 2011 paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives (a publication of the National Institutes of Health [NIH]) showed that nearly ALL of the plastic tested leached estrogenic chemicals (xenoestrogens, the class of chemicals to which belongs BPA, BPS, Tritan and other similar substances).

The article is freely available online - here is the abstract and publication data.

Most Plastic Products Release Estrogenic Chemicals: A Potential Health Problem That Can Be Solved

Chun Z. Yang [1], Stuart I. Yaniger [2], V. Craig Jordan [3], Daniel J. Klein [2], George D. Bittner [1,2,4]

1. CertiChem Inc., Austin, Texas, USA
2. PlastiPure Inc., Austin, Texas, USA
3. Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA
4. Neurobiology Section, School of Biology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA

Environmental Health Perspectives; 119:989-996 (2011). doi: 10.1289/ehp.1003220 [online 02 March 2011]

Abstract

Background: Chemicals having estrogenic activity (EA) reportedly cause many adverse health effects, especially at low (picomolar to nanomolar) doses in fetal and juvenile mammals.

Objectives: We sought to determine whether commercially available plastic resins and products, including baby bottles and other products advertised as bisphenol A (BPA) free, release chemicals having EA.

Methods: We used a roboticized MCF-7 cell proliferation assay, which is very sensitive, accurate, and repeatable, to quantify the EA of chemicals leached into saline or ethanol extracts of many types of commercially available plastic materials, some exposed to common-use stresses (microwaving, ultraviolet radiation, and/or autoclaving).

Results: Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals having reliably detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than did BPA-containing products.

Conclusions: Many plastic products are mischaracterized as being EA free if extracted with only one solvent and not exposed to common-use stresses. However, we can identify existing compounds, or have developed, monomers, additives, or processing agents that have no detectable EA and have similar costs. Hence, our data suggest that EA-free plastic products exposed to common-use stresses and extracted by saline and ethanol solvents could be cost-effectively made on a commercial scale and thereby eliminate a potential health risk posed by most currently available plastic products that leach chemicals having EA into food products.

Another paper (Guart et al, 2013) in Food Chemistry, also found that Titan contains BPA-like substances and other xenoestrogens, and this one was conducted by researchers not associated with George Bittner.

So why is this being posted on The Masculine Heart?

Xenoestrogens are a men's issue - our bodies are more impacted by these toxic plastics than are women's, partly because we are more sensitive to estrogens of any kind. They lead to cancer (prostate cancer has been linked to xenoestrogen exposure) and they are making us sterile and less virile in general.

Male fetuses exposed to these chemicals in the womb are especially at risk, with resulting endocrine system damage, and neurotoxic effects (likely including ADHD, and I would think autism might also turn out to be linked to these chemicals at some point, not vaccines).

And this is an issue for the men who go to battle to serve their country. We do not send women into combat zones, so only our male soldiers are using these Camelbaks daily (likely several times a day) and being so frequently exposed to these chemicals.

When the results of Bittner's research are confirmed by other independent labs, Camelbak and Eastman Kodak should be held liable for all the healthcare costs, and possibly charged with treason.

Worth looking at:

• How Industry and the Feds Suppressed Evidence That Plastics Wreak Havoc on Our Hormones
• The Frog of War: One Biologist's Crusade Against Atrazine
• Waiter, There's BPA in My Soup
• Which 9 Household Items Will Make Your Hormones Go Haywire?
• Buying Local and Organic? You're Still Eating Plastic Chemicals

Plastics Are Unsafe in Any Form for Foods

We have known for a long time that bisphenol A (BPA) is a dangerous endocrine disruptor, but now we also know it is associated with prostate cancer.  Here is the introduction to the press release of the new study published in PLoS ONE, which is open access.

BPA linked to prostate cancer, study shows

March 4, 2014CINCINNATI—Findings by Cincinnati Cancer Center researchers show that levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in men's urine could be a marker of prostate cancer and that low levels of BPA exposure can cause cellular changes in both non-malignant and malignant prostate cells. 

This research, published in the March 3 edition of PLOS ONE, provides the first evidence that urinary BPA levels may help predict prostate cancer and that disruption of a cell duplication cycle through exposure to low-dose BPA may cause cancer development in the prostate.

BPA, an environmental pollutant with estrogen activity, is used to make hard, clear plastic and is common in many food product containers. It has been linked to neurological defects, diabetes and a number of cancers, including breast and prostate.

Many of us who care about our health have tried to eliminate BPA from our lives and hoped that would be good enough to protect us somewhat. Not so much.

In a new article from Mother Jones, it seems all of those BPA-free plastics have a lot of different, and sometimes even more toxic, endocrine disrupting chemicals. Oh joy!

The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics

And the Big Tobacco-style campaign to bury it.

—Mariah Blake | March/April 2014 Issue


Photographs by Evan Kafka

Update (3/3/14): After this story went to press, the US Food and Drug Administration published a paper finding that BPA was safe in low doses. However, the underlying testing was done on a strain of lab rat known as the Charles River Sprague Dawley, which doesn't readily respond to synthetic estrogens, such as BPA. And, due to laboratory contamination, all of the animals—including the control group—were exposed to this chemical. Academic scientists say this raises serious questions about the study's credibility. Stay tuned for more in-depth reporting on the shortcomings of the FDA's most recent study.

EACH NIGHT AT DINNERTIME, a familiar ritual played out in Michael Green's home: He'd slide a stainless steel sippy cup across the table to his two-year-old daughter, Juliette, and she'd howl for the pink plastic one. Often, Green gave in. But he had a nagging feeling. As an environmental-health advocate, he had fought to rid sippy cups and baby bottles of the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), which mimics the hormone estrogen and has been linked to a long list of serious health problems. Juliette's sippy cup was made from a new generation of BPA-free plastics, but Green, who runs the Oakland, California-based Center for Environmental Health, had come across research suggesting some of these contained synthetic estrogens, too.

He pondered these findings as the center prepared for its anniversary celebration in October 2011. That evening, Green, a slight man with scruffy blond hair and pale-blue eyes, took the stage and set Juliette's sippy cups on the podium. He recounted their nightly standoffs. "When she wins…every time I worry about what are the health impacts of the chemicals leaching out of that sippy cup," he said, before listing some of the problems linked to those chemicals—cancer, diabetes, obesity. To help solve the riddle, he said, his organization planned to test BPA-free sippy cups for estrogenlike chemicals.

The center shipped Juliette's plastic cup, along with 17 others purchased from Target, Walmart, and Babies R Us, to CertiChem, a lab in Austin, Texas. More than a quarter—including Juliette's—came back positive for estrogenic activity. These results mirrored the lab's findings in its broader National Institutes of Health-funded research on BPA-free plastics. CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that "almost all" commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren't exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun's ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner's research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.

Estrogen plays a key role in everything from bone growth to ovulation to heart function. Too much or too little, particularly in utero or during early childhood, can alter brain and organ development, leading to disease later in life. Elevated estrogen levels generally increase a woman's risk of breast cancer.

Estrogenic chemicals found in many common products have been linked to a litany of problems in humans and animals. According to one study, the pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs female. DES, which was once prescribed to prevent miscarriages, caused obesity, rare vaginal tumors, infertility, and testicular growths among those exposed in utero. Scientists have tied BPA to ailments including asthma, cancer, infertility, low sperm count, genital deformity, heart disease, liver problems, and ADHD. "Pick a disease, literally pick a disease," says Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia who studies BPA.



BPA exploded into the headlines in 2008, when stories about "toxic baby bottles" and "poison" packaging became ubiquitous. Good Morning America issued a "consumer alert." The New York Times urged Congress to ban BPA in baby products. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) warned in the Huffington Post that "millions of infants are exposed to dangerous chemicals hiding in plain view." Concerned parents purged their pantries of plastic containers, and retailers such as Walmart and Babies R Us started pulling bottles and sippy cups from shelves. Bills banning BPA in infant care items began to crop up in states around the country.

Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But Bittner's findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.

Those startling results set off a bitter fight with the $375-billion-a-year plastics industry. The American Chemistry Council, which lobbies for plastics makers and has sought to refute the science linking BPA to health problems, has teamed up with Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical—the maker of Tritan, a widely used plastic marketed as being free of estrogenic activity—in a campaign to discredit Bittner and his research. The company has gone so far as to tell corporate customers that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected Bittner's testing methods. (It hasn't.) Eastman also sued CertiChem and its sister company, PlastiPure, to prevent them from publicizing their findings that Tritan is estrogenic, convincing a jury that its product displayed no estrogenic activity. And it launched a PR blitz touting Tritan's safety, targeting the group most vulnerable to synthetic estrogens: families with young children. "It can be difficult for consumers to tell what is really safe," the vice president of Eastman's specialty plastics division, Lucian Boldea, said in one web video, before an image of a pregnant woman flickered across the screen. With Tritan, he added, "consumers can feel confident that the material used in their products is free of estrogenic activity."

Eastman's offensive is just the latest in a wide-ranging industry campaign to cast doubt on the potential dangers of plastics in food containers, packaging, and toys—a campaign that closely resembles the methods Big Tobacco used to stifle scientific evidence about the dangers of smoking. Indeed, in many cases, the plastics and chemical industries have relied on the same scientists and consultants who defended Big Tobacco. These efforts, detailed in internal industry documents revealed during Bittner's legal battle with Eastman, have sown public confusion and stymied US regulation, even as BPA bans have sprung up elsewhere in the world. They have also squelched debate about the safety of plastics more generally. All the while, evidence is mounting that the products so prevalent in our daily lives may be leaching toxic chemicals into our bodies, with consequences affecting not just us, but many generations to come.

THE FIGHT OVER THE SAFETY of plastics traces back to 1987, when Theo Colborn, a 60-year-old grandmother with a recent Ph.D. in zoology, was hired to investigate mysterious health problems in wildlife around the Great Lakes. Working for the Washington, DC-based Conservation Foundation (now part of the World Wildlife Fund), she began collecting research papers. Before long, her tiny office was stacked floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes of studies detailing a bewildering array of maladies—cancer, shrunken sexual organs, plummeting fertility, immune suppression, birds born with crossed beaks and missing eyes. Some species also suffered from a bizarre syndrome that caused seemingly healthy chicks to waste away and die.

While the afflictions and species varied widely, Colborn eventually realized they had two factors in common: The young were hardest hit, and, in one way or another, all of the animals' symptoms were linked to the endocrine system, the network of glands that controls growth, metabolism, and brain function, with hormones as its chemical messengers. The system also plays a key role in fetal development. Colborn suspected that synthetic hormones in pesticides, plastics, and other products acted as "hand-me-down poisons," with parents' exposure causing affliction in their offspring. Initially, her colleagues were skeptical. But Colborn collected data and tissue samples from far-flung wildlife populations and unearthed previously overlooked studies that supported her theory. By 1996, when Colborn copublished her landmark book Our Stolen Future, she had won over many skeptics. Based partly on her research, Congress passed a law that year requiring the EPA to screen some 80,000 chemicals—most of which had never undergone any type of safety testing—for endocrine-disrupting effects and report back by 2000.

Around this time, the University of Missouri's vom Saal, a garrulous biologist who previously worked as a bush pilot in Kenya, began studying the effects of synthetic estrogens on fetal mouse development. The first substance he tested was BPA, a chemical used in clear, hard plastics, particularly the variety known as polycarbonate, to make them more flexible and durable. (It's also found in everyday items, from dental sealants and hospital blood bags to cash register receipts and the lining of tin cans.) Naturally occurring estrogens bind with proteins in the blood, limiting the amount that reaches estrogen receptors. But vom Saal found this wasn't true of BPA, which bypassed the body's natural barrier system and burrowed deep into the cells of laboratory mice.

Vom Saal suspected this would make BPA "a hell of a lot more potent" in small doses. Working with colleagues Susan Nagel and Wade Welshons, a professor of veterinary biology, he began testing the effects of BPA at amounts 25 times lower than the EPA's safety threshold. In the late 1990s, they published two studies finding that male mice whose mothers were exposed to these low doses during pregnancy had enlarged prostates and low sperm counts. Even in microscopic quantities, it seemed, BPA could cause the kinds of dire health problems Colborn had found in wildlife. Before long, other scientists began turning up ailments among animals exposed to minute doses of BPA.

These findings posed a direct threat to plastics and chemical makers, which fought back using tactics the tobacco makers had refined to an art form. By the late 1990s, when tobacco companies agreed to drop deceptive marketing practices under a settlement agreement with 46 states, many of the scientists and consultants on the industry's payroll transitioned seamlessly into defending BPA.

Plastics and chemical interests worked closely with the Weinberg Group, which had run Big Tobacco's White Coat Project—an effort to recruit scientists to create doubt about the health effects of secondhand smoke. Soon Weinberg, which bills itself as a "product defense" firm, was churning out white papers and lobbying regulators. It also underwrote a trade group with its own scientific journal, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, which published studies finding BPA was safe.

The industry also worked hand in glove with the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, a think tank affiliated with the university's school of public health that has a history of accepting donations from corporations and then publishing research favorable to their products. In the early 1990s, its founder, John D. Graham—who was later tapped as George W. Bush's regulatory czar—lobbied to quash an EPA finding that secondhand smoke caused lung cancer, while soliciting large contributions from Philip Morris.



In 2001, as studies on BPA stacked up, the American Chemistry Council enlisted the center to convene a panel of scientists to investigate low-dose BPA. The center paid panelists $12,000 to attend three meetings, according to Fast Company. Their final report, released in 2004, drew on just a few industry-favored studies and concluded that the evidence that low-dose BPA exposure harmed human health was "very weak." By this point, roughly 100 studies on low-dose BPA were in circulation. Not a single industry-funded study found it harmful, but 90 percent of those by government-funded scientists discovered dramatic effects, ranging from an increased breast cancer risk to hyperactivity. Four of the 12 panelists later insisted the center scrub their names from the report because of questions about its accuracy.

Chemical interests, meanwhile, forged deep inroads with the Bush administration, allowing them to covertly steer the regulatory process. For decades, the Food and Drug Administration has assured lawmakers and the public that BPA is safe in low doses. But a 2008 investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that the agency had relied on industry lobbyists to track and evaluate BPA research, and had based its safety assessment largely on two industry-funded studies—one of which had never been published or peer reviewed.

The panel the EPA appointed to develop guidelines for its congressionally mandated endocrine disruptor screening was also stocked with industry-backed scientists. It included Chris Borgert, a toxicology consultant who had worked closely with Philip Morris to discredit EPA research on secondhand smoke. He later served as the president of the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, the Weinberg Group-sponsored outfit, which met in the offices of a plastics lobbyist.

Members of the EPA panel say Borgert seemed determined to sandbag the process. "He was always delaying, always trying to confuse the issue," recalls one participant. And the screening approach the EPA settled on came straight from the industry's playbook. Among other things, the chemicals would be tested on a type of rat known as the Charles River Sprague Dawley—which, oddly, doesn't respond to synthetic hormones like BPA.

How best to test for estrogenic activity would become a key front in the fight over plastic safety. The American Chemistry Council joined forces with an unlikely ally, PETA, to fight large-scale chemical-safety testing on animals. At the same time, Borgert and other industry-funded scientists made the case that the other common method for testing—using cells that respond in the presence of estrogen—did not necessarily tell us how a substance would affect animals or humans. In fact, a massive, ongoing NIH-run study has found that cell-based tests track closely with animal studies, which have accurately predicted the effects of synthetic estrogens, particularly DES and BPA, on humans.

Stanton Glantz, who directs the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California-San Francisco, argues the chemical industry's real aim in challenging specific testing methods is to undermine safety testing altogether. "Like the tobacco companies, they want to set up a standard of proof that is unreachable," he says. "If they set the standard of proof, they've won the fight."

DURING THE HEIGHT of the battle over BPA, vom Saal periodically traveled to Texas and huddled around the dining table with his old friend George Bittner, whose home overlooks a walnut grove on the outskirts of Austin. Bittner, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford, is quirky and irascible. But he has a brilliant mind for science and an interest in applying it to real-world problems—in his lab at UT-Austin, he had developed a nerve-regeneration technique that had helped crippled rats walk within days. And he had taken a keen interest in vom Saal's research on endocrine disruption. "It struck me as the most important public health issue of our time," Bittner told me when we met at his lab. "These chemicals have been correlated with so many adverse effects in animal studies, and they're so pervasive. The potential implications for human health boggle the mind."

In the late 1990s, Bittner—a squat, ruddy man with thinning red hair and Napoleon Dynamite glasses who had made a tidy sum investing in real estate and commodities—began mulling the idea of launching a private company that worked with manufacturers and public health organizations to test products for endocrine disruptors. He believed this approach could help raise awareness and break the regulatory logjam—while also reaping a profit.

In 2002, armed with a $91,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, Bittner launched a pair of companies: CertiChem, to test plastics and other products for synthetic estrogens, and PlastiPure, to find or develop nonestrogenic alternatives. Bittner then enlisted Welshons to design a special test using a line of breast cancer cells, which multiply rapidly in the presence of estrogen. It features a robotic arm, which is far more precise than a human hand in handling microscopic material.



But before long Bittner began butting heads with Welshons and vom Saal. Bittner wanted the researchers to sign over the rights to the test Welshons had developed, while they insisted it belonged to the University of Missouri. Eventually, they had a bitter falling out. Welshons and vom Saal filed a complaint with the NIH, alleging that Bittner had misrepresented data from Welshons' lab in a brochure. (Bittner maintains that he merely excluded data from contaminated samples; the institute found no evidence of wrongdoing.) Bittner, meanwhile, enlisted V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacology professor at Georgetown University with an expertise in hormones—he discovered a now-common hormone therapy that blocks the spread of breast cancer—to refine the testing protocol. By 2005, Bittner had opened a commercial lab in a leafy office park in Austin. He managed to attract some big-name clients, including Whole Foods, which hired CertiChem to advise it on endocrine-disrupting chemicals and test some of its products.

At this point, BPA was among the most studied chemicals on the planet. In November 2006, vom Saal and a top official at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences convened a group of 38 leading researchers from various disciplines to evaluate the 700-plus existing studies on the subject. The group later issued a "consensus statement" that laid out some chilling conclusions: More than 95 percent of people in developed countries were exposed to levels of BPA that are "within the range" associated with health problems in animals, from cancer and insulin-resistant diabetes to early puberty. The scientists also found that there was "great cause for concern with regard to the potential for similar adverse effects in humans," especially given the steep uptick in these same disorders.

At the same time, a new body of research was finding that BPA altered animals' genes in ways that caused disease. For instance, it could switch off a gene that suppresses tumor growth, allowing cancer to spread. These genetic changes were passed down across generations. "A poison kills you," vom Saal explains. "A chemical like BPA reprograms your cells and ends up causing a disease in your grandchild that kills him."

Scientists were also uncovering links between endocrine-disrupting chemicals known as phthalates and health problems, including genital abnormalities and infertility in humans. These chemical additives were commonly found in soft, pliable plastics, such as those used in pacifiers and baby bottle nipples. In 2008, Congress passed a law banning six types of phthalates in children's products. As concerns about BPA hit the mainstream, Congress also launched an investigation into the industry's efforts to manipulate science and regulation, and a number of states proposed BPA bans.

In 2009, the BPA Joint Trade Association—which included the American Chemistry Council, Coca-Cola, and Del Monte, among others—gathered at the Cosmos Club, a members-only retreat in Washington, DC's Dupont Circle. According to meeting minutes leaked to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the group explored messaging strategies, "including using fear tactics (e.g., 'Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?')." The "'holy grail' spokesperson," attendees agreed, was a "pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA."

Even as the industry crafted defensive talking points, some companies began offering BPA-free alternatives. But they often didn't bother testing them for other potentially toxic compounds or synthetic hormones. Nor did they have to: Under US law, chemicals are presumed safe until proven otherwise, and companies are rarely required to collect or disclose chemical-safety data. Michael Green, the Center for Environmental Health director who worried about his daughter's sippy cup, says this results in a "toxic shell game": Corporations that come under pressure to root out toxins often replace them with untested chemicals, which sometimes turn out to be just as hazardous. "It's an unplanned science experiment we're doing on our families," Green told me when I visited him at his Bay Area home, where Juliette, now 5, was padding around in a pink princess costume.

One of the most popular BPA-free options, especially among companies catering to families and health-conscious consumers, was Tritan, a clear, sturdy, heat-resistant plastic that Eastman rolled out in 2007. (Eastman also produces the chemical that sullied the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginians in January.) A company founded by alternative medicine guru Dr. Andrew Weil launched a line of Weil Baby bottles made from Tritan, which it touted as "revolutionary" and "ultra-safe" material. Thermos began churning out Tritan sippy cups, decorated with Barbie and Batman. With more and more consumers demanding BPA-free products, Nalgene, CamelBack, Evenflo, Cuisinart, Tupperware, Rubbermaid, and many other companies also worked Tritan into their production lines.



Eastman, a $7 billion company that was spun off from Eastman Kodak in the 1990s, assured its corporate customers that it had done extensive safety testing on Tritan. But its methods were questionable. According to internal Eastman documents, in 2008 Eastman signed a two-year contract with Sciences International, another product defense firm that had played a key role in the tobacco industry's scientific misinformation campaign. On Sciences' advice, Eastman then commissioned a study that used computer modeling to predict whether a substance contains synthetic estrogens, based on its chemical structure. The model suggested that one of Tritan's ingredients—triphenyl phosphate, or TPP—was more estrogenic than BPA.

Eastman, which never disclosed these findings to its customers, later commissioned another study, this one involving breast cancer cells. Again, the initial results appeared positive for estrogenic activity. In an email to colleagues, Eastman's senior toxicologist, James Deyo, called this an "oh shit moment."

Read the whole article.

UTNE Reader - Masculinity Crisis: The [Biological] End of Male

Rather than the drivel passing for cultural commentary that often proclaims the end of men, or the crisis in masculinity, or whatever may be the phrase of the day, this article looks at the real crisis for men - xenoestrogens (endocrine disruptors) and their impact of men and male sexuality.

Since the 1990s endocrinologists have issued warnings on the future of male reproductive health—“penis and semen,” in Moore’s words. In 1992, Danish scientists published a meta-analysis of 61 studies on semen quality from around the world, concluding that the average sperm concentration had declined by nearly 50 percent over a 50-year period, from 113 million to 66 million sperm per milliliter. “Every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was,” reproductive biologist Lou Guillette told Congress in 1993. “Are our children going to be half the men we are?” 

An increasingly solid—but by no means conclusive—body of evidence links low sperm density and other problems in male reproductive health with a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, which are present in everything from pesticides to plastics to beauty products. First identified in the 1990s, endocrine disruptors are named for the way they mimic hormones and tinker with the signals sent between cells. These include news-making plastic components like bisphenol-A and phthalates, recently banned from use in baby bottles and children’s toys, respectively, but still present at low levels in the blood and urine samples of more than 90 percent of the U.S. population.

I've been speaking to this issue on this blog for years. A quick search under labels for "xenoestrogens" or "endocrine disruptors" should bring up several articles from the last few years.

The article below doesn't offer solutions, but this article from Cy Wilson at T-Nation offers a few suggestions that are useful:

Here are some tips on how to avoid exposure to the compounds mentioned earlier:

• Use water-based paints to avoid alkylphenolics
• Make sure that the teething toys you have are PVC-free. Otherwise, they could contain phthalates.
• If you’re really concerned with certain fruits or vegetables being contaminated with pesticides, opt for organic food instead. Other than that, washing the fruit or vegetable thoroughly can help too. Still it doesn’t guarantee complete elimination.
• Plastic utensils, baby bottles and even things like beakers that are scratched can leak chemicals like Bisphenol A. Replace those that are damaged with new products.
• Perfumes and air fresheners, along with other scented products may contain parabens. Luckily, perfumes should list their ingredients, so you can check for parabens and choose a product that doesn’t contain them. Other than that, try cutting down on air freshener usage.
• One last thing that may work would be to use some type of anti-estrogenic compound like clomiphene or tamoxifen. Isoflavonoids have been shown to block environmental estrogens from inducing any growth in humans breast cancer cells.(56) Since these weaker compounds can provide some protection, it stands to reason that clomiphene or tamoxifen should do the same.

I’d actually rather see these two latter compounds used instead, as there are some studies suggesting that many isoflavonoids (NOTE: DIM [3,3′-Diindolylmethane] is one) can induce protein transcription after binding to alpha receptors.

Something along the lines of 25 mg of clomiphene every day to every other day might well do the job. In other words, it wouldn’t require a very large dose. Besides, clomiphene would help to combat not only the risk of breast tissue growth and cancer, but it can help prevent the xenoestrogen-caused reduction in Testosterone.

Getting a doctor to provide you with clomid (clomiphene) or tamoxifen is not likely, unless s/he is VERY progressive. However, the use of DIM and resveratrol will help limit the build-up and toxicity of these environmental endocrine disruptors.

Masculinity Crisis: The End of Male

May/June 2013
By Zak Stone, from Tomorrow Magazine

As a gay man, I welcome the growing irrelevance of old-school masculinity. But a creeping masculinity crisis, one that’s biological, affects me just as much as any frat boy or military officer.

On a Thursday in August, I walk into a budget health clinic in downtown Los Angeles. At the end of a maze of pistachio-colored hallways, I find a room marked LabCorp—it’s essentially a storage closet full of folded cardboard boxes, a jumble of plastic tubs, a bin marked “Dry Ice,” and a few desks and chairs. It’s reminiscent of where the janitors at elementary school would hang out, only with microscopes. I’ve paid $129 to have a test done: “Semen Analysis, Basic.”

There is no waiting room. I stand in the doorway until Maria—a lab-tech with a sweet-looking face, long black hair, and a pink shirt sprinkled with fine black polka dots under a white coat—acknowledges me. She hands over some forms and a plastic cup.

“You have to ejaculate everything inside, and when you’re finished put it in here,” Maria says, pointing at a box next to me crowded with plastic cups in baggies. “The bathroom’s out the door, a quick left.”

I enter the handicap-accessible bathroom. The walls are a chalky shade of blue. A knot of toilet paper drifts around the toilet bowl. An overworked plunger sits in the corner. I can hear someone unfurling a roll of duct tape beyond the door. There is no porn. There is no chair. I do my thing. I return to the office and put the cup into the box. I avoid Maria.

In my rush to leave, I forget to hand in my paperwork. When I revisit Maria, she tells me they’ll measure volume and concentration here on the spot. Then the sperm will travel south, to another lab in San Diego, where a technician will analyze their shape and size, and how well they swim. I’ll get the results—a password-protected PDF—a few days later.

I signed up for a fertility test not because I’m trying to have a kid (please) but as a barometer of my maleness, in its most medieval, distilled sense. Admittedly, it was a ridiculous thing to do. But I was curious. As you may have heard, male anxiety is on the rise in 21st-century America. Employers no longer value our strength to lift or make things (we sent those jobs overseas). Society is sick of our risk-taking bravado (that’s what crashed the economy). Women don’t need our financial support (matriarchy is the new patriarchy). Every week there’s a new think piece or cover story ripping holes in the trappings of traditional manhood.

As a gay man, I welcome the growing irrelevance of old-school masculinity. I’m less likely now than at any point in history to be impeded by my failure to conform to traditional notions of manhood. I can be the CEO of Apple. I can be a drag queen. Whatever I choose, I’m still a man.

But a creeping masculinity crisis, one that’s biological, affects me just as much as any frat boy or military officer. Around the world, male fertility is sharply declining. Birth defects afflicting the penis and testicles are on the rise. So is testicular cancer. Scientists expect that these problems will plague future generations even more than ours.

Whether you’re RuPaul or Paul Ryan, functional genitals matter—and contribute to an understanding of your maleness. “When you boil it down to it, the essence of masculinity might be a hard penis and semen,” says Lisa Jean Moore, professor of gender studies at Purchase College-SUNY. Specifically, semen dense with healthy, tail-wagging sperm.

It’s a reductive idea, but maybe that’s why it’s valuable. Cultural understandings of masculinity are always shifting, after all. They’re temporary. Cock and balls are forever. Or at least they’re supposed to be.

Since the 1990s endocrinologists have issued warnings on the future of male reproductive health—“penis and semen,” in Moore’s words. In 1992, Danish scientists published a meta-analysis of 61 studies on semen quality from around the world, concluding that the average sperm concentration had declined by nearly 50 percent over a 50-year period, from 113 million to 66 million sperm per milliliter. “Every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was,” reproductive biologist Lou Guillette told Congress in 1993. “Are our children going to be half the men we are?”

An increasingly solid—but by no means conclusive—body of evidence links low sperm density and other problems in male reproductive health with a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, which are present in everything from pesticides to plastics to beauty products. First identified in the 1990s, endocrine disruptors are named for the way they mimic hormones and tinker with the signals sent between cells. These include news-making plastic components like bisphenol-A and phthalates, recently banned from use in baby bottles and children’s toys, respectively, but still present at low levels in the blood and urine samples of more than 90 percent of the U.S. population.

“They’re not all identical and they have different actions. Some interfere with estrogen; some with androgen, the male hormone,” explains Philip Landrigan, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “It’s a mixed lot, and very complex.” Wildlife biologists first identified them in connection with birth defects and decreasing populations of birds and fish. “For the first few years, the concept of endocrine disruption was treated with a lot of skepticism outside of environmental circles. But in the last four or five years it’s moved very much into mainstream medicine,” says Landrigan, particularly as study after study suggests connections to the contemporary decline in male reproductive health.

In 2000, American researchers not only confirmed results from the original Danish semen quality study, they found sperm density in the United States and Europe to be falling at an even faster clip: by 1.5 to 3 percent per year. And last summer, an Israeli study noted a steady decline in semen quality at one local bank over the past 15 years. A full 38 percent of all sperm-donation applicants are now rejected, up from one-third prior to 2004. That year, the bank lowered its minimum sperm count for acceptance to widen its net for donors. Under those more stringent standards, 88 percent of contemporary samples would have been rejected.

Sperm-bank rejects aren’t necessarily infertile. But if the downward trend continues, by 2030 the researchers predict that even above-average men will reach “subfertility” levels. Globally, an average of 15 percent of men are considered infertile, up from 10 percent 20 years ago.

Psychologists have shown that men who get an infertility diagnosis “feel isolated, they feel lost,” says William Petok, a psychologist who specializes in treating infertility. “One of the things we often see is a feeling that in some ways they are a failure sexually, because there’s a conflation between being fertile and being potent.” Indeed, two-thirds of infertile men say they worry about their “physical potency.” This conflation is especially visible in non-Western cultures, or ones where structural economic disadvantages mean men are unable to fill traditional roles like provider or protector—which is where Hanna Rosin, in her book The End of Men, says we’re headed. “I think a man considers his sperm far more an annunciation of his identity than a woman considers her egg,” Petok says. “It’s visible. Every time a guy has an ejaculation it’s evidence of his capacity to produce a child.”

The masculinity-fertility relationship is reified in the sperm bank industry. When I called up the Cryobank in Los Angeles, California’s largest sperm bank, director of client experience Scott Brown told me what an accepted donor looks like. He’s a “college graduate or student. Average age is probably 22 to 25. Altruistic in nature, successful in life. Healthy. Tall.” A real catch, but only for the ladies: he can’t have had sex with another man in the past five years. Like the FDA prohibition on blood from gay donors, it’s “a leftover prejudice from the days of HIV and not understanding how it’s transmitted,” conjectures Brown, even though all sperm is tested for disease.

How does one man end up making more, better sperm than another? Endocrinologists believe a man’s capacity for sperm production is capped by the time he leaves the womb—so, maybe he’s born with it? But with an increasing body of evidence implicating chemicals found in everything from carpeting to cosmetics, the more crucial question becomes: Maybe it’s Maybelline?


It’s a relief when I get my lab results back the next week: I’m fertile. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’m 25; I don’t regularly take drugs, linger in the sauna, ride a bike, or huff gasoline fumes. But my sperm count shows up on the low side of normal: with just 33 million sperm per milliliter, it’s right above the lab’s cutoff of 20 million per milliliter.

I am guilty of lifestyle choices that could lower my count: I spend my days at a desk; I’m prone to stress; I’ve recently experimented with tighter underwear styles. But it’s possible the explanation goes back much further, to the chemicals that infiltrated my mother’s womb.

It was the ’80s. My mom applied hairspray liberally. She didn’t seek out pesticide-free food or use glass instead of plastic. Yet there’s no way to prove that endocrine disruptors affected my or anyone else’s development, according to Niels Skakkebaek, a pediatric endocrinologist in Copenhagen. “You can’t do experimentation in humans.”

You can document the patterns, though. Skakkebaek was one of the first researchers to highlight the connection between endocrine disruptors and a variety of problems in male reproductive health, starting with testicular cancer. The disease became commonplace in the 20th century—1 in 100 Danish men were getting it—and as a young doctor in the 1970s, Skakkebaek set out to determine why. “You can’t see such an increase in one or two generations just due to genetic factors alone,” Skakkebaek says. “It had to be an environmental problem.”

Skakkebaek’s research showed that the signs of testicular cancer—which strikes after puberty—are present in the womb. In the testes of miscarried fetuses, he found cells similar to precursor testicular cancer cells. In his clinical practice, he observed a spate of birth defects like undescended testes. Meanwhile, semen-quality studies in the 1980s revealed surprisingly low sperm counts among working-class Danes.

Skakkebaek started to connect the dots. “I noticed that infertile men—they more often had undescended testes and other childhood abnormalities,” and were at a greater risk for testicular cancer, he says. Another observation: The precursor cancer cells were more often found in men with birth defects. He started reviewing semen-quality studies, which led to his landmark meta-analysis in 1992 that found sperm density was half as high as it was 50 years ago.

His work coincided with environmentalists’ growing concerns about endocrine disruptors. In 1991, World Wildlife Federation zoologist Theo Colborn held the first major symposium about the possible effects of environmental toxins on animals’ sexual organs and behavior. Researchers presented data showing how pesticides in Florida swamps appeared to raise the levels of estrogen in male alligators to unusually high levels, shrinking their penises to three-quarters the usual size. Lesbian seagulls had been outed in Southern California. Later, fish turned intersex in the Potomac.

The evidence was starting to pile up that “we all might be—without knowing it, unintentionally—exposed to chemicals that had hormonal effects,” Skakkebaek says, “which at that time was completely new for me.” And it posed a possible explanation for the problems he was finding among men.

Researchers began replicating these environmental conditions in the lab, exposing rodents to a variety of endocrine disruptors, including phthalates. Male rodents exhibited malformed prostates, undescended testes, and other problems. In 2010, male frogs introduced to the herbicide atrazine started producing eggs, copulating with other male frogs, and giving birth to healthy young. They were seven times as likely as the unexposed frogs to display homo-sexual behavior.

Why would all of these problems affect males more than females? The answer is sexual differentiation: Before hormones kick in, male and female fetuses are mostly indistinguishable. If left alone, gonads become ovaries—it takes androgens to command them to morph into testes. During gestation, “the reproductive organs and other organs are undergoing rapid development,” says Landrigan. “The price of that rapid development is extreme vulnerability.” In lab animals, the tiniest difference in hormones or hormone-mimicking chemicals—a teaspoon-sized drop in an Olympic-sized pool—can permanently undervirilize the male reproductive system and brain. The testes may not fully descend. The urethra might not reach the tip of the penis. The sperm count could be permanently lowered.

In 1993, Skakkebaek co-authored a paper advancing an environmental theory for the decline in semen quality he discovered the previous year. And over the course of the next decade, he built an argument about the relationships between testicular cancer, birth defects, and infertility.

Recent research has shown a strong association between these conditions in men and one type of endocrine disruptor in particular: phthalates, the anti-androgen chemical used to soften plastics and found in the food we eat, water we drink, and dust we inhale. Male rats whose pregnant mothers were fed a diet of phthalates were shown to be at risk for reproductive problems, “undescended testes and so on,” explains Shanna Swan, a biostatistician at the University of Rochester. Moreover, the distance between the anus and the genitals—normally twice as long in male as in female rats, and longer in human males as well—was shorter in the exposed rats, a sign of prenatal feminization.

“This measure of ano-genital distance”—AGD, as it’s called—“has been used in animal studies for a long time, but almost never in human studies,” Swan says. She decided to measure it in children, and in a groundbreaking paper in 2005, she made a significant reveal: Boys whose mothers had higher levels of phthalates had shorter AGDs than normal, not to mention impaired testicular descent. The paper is perhaps the strongest evidence we have that “phthalates may undervirilize humans as well as rodents.”

A shortened AGD has been linked with the birth defect hypospadias, when the urethra opens on the penis’s underside. Data cited by the Centers for Disease Control showed hypospadias doubled in frequency between the 1970s and the 1990s. Affecting about one out of every 100 men, it’s among the most common abnormalities males are born with. But unlike autism or cleft palates, it’s rarely discussed.


In the decades since Skakkebaek started asking questions about declining fertility in Denmark, research has coalesced around the association between fetal exposure to endocrine disruptors and feminized male genitals. Now a few researchers are starting to ask: Do these toxins also affect men’s brains?

In 2009, Swan studied 145 preschoolers whose mothers had relatively high levels of phthalates in their urine. Parents were asked to fill out surveys about how their children played. Did the boys gravitate toward gender-typical toys like trucks and guns? Were they “rough and tumble”?

“Now, I have to stress that these studies are small. They were the first studies,” Swan says. “And you know we can’t obviously randomize people to be exposed to phthalates or not, so we have a lot of limitations.” But initial results showed that boys exposed to higher levels of phthalates were more likely to exhibit feminized behavior—a correlation, not conclusively a cause.

Still, I can’t help but ask if the study implies something bigger. “I actually don’t know the answer to that question,” Swan responds. “Behind your question is the question I get a lot: ‘What does it have to do with gender identity?’ ”

It’s probably unanswerable. And it feels offensively reductive—a vestige of the tired nature-versus-nurture debate that seeks to find a cause for complicated differences in gender and sexuality. Scientists take seriously the hypothesis that endocrine disruption affects behavior, but when I asked them about gender, one by one the experts steered the conversation toward other studies linking the toxins with ADHD or autism—behaviors that are more diagnosable and less controversial.

If endocrine disruptors are indeed feminizing males, it’s a health problem in humans only insofar as it affects fertility and the functioning of sex organs. Feminine and gay men obviously still reproduce. Will the feminized boys in Swan’s study end up infertile? Will they end up with testicular cancer? Or will they just end up gay? It’s certainly possible that this type of research will pathologize male differences, lumping in gender variation with real health concerns. But it could also push the question of gender identity to the foreground, forcing a broader dialogue about the need for more accommodating notions of maleness (at a time when male reproductive organs seem to be changing, nonetheless).

Swan is gearing up for another study with a bigger sample size of about 800 children. “If we see this again in the second study, then I think it will be really convincing,” she says. “I think the fact that we took animal data, we formed a hypothesis, went to test it in a human population, and found what we had predicted also strengthens our original findings. But it’s not conclusive.” And perhaps that’s a good thing. Plenty of experts, whether they’re scientists or psychologists or queer theorists, deny linkages between sex, gender, and the role of hormones. Gender isn’t something someone has; it’s something someone does. There are all sorts of people—those who are transgender, say, or intersex—who don’t map onto one set of norms.

How—and why—we “do maleness” is incredibly complicated, and seems to be getting more so. Phthalates are among the most common chemicals on earth; billions of tons continue to be produced annually. What does manhood look like in a future where men are less likely to be able to reproduce naturally and far more likely to be born with imperfect sex organs? The questions will linger in our minds, just as long as the chemicals permeate our bodies.

Zak Stone is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor, a staff writer for Fast Company’s Co. Exist website, and co-founder of Tomorrow Magazine, a crowdfunded publication about politics, culture, and lifestyle, from which this article was reprinted.

Is Monsanto's RoundUp Destroying Male Testosterone?

Here is another story about the way toxic chemicals are destroying male sex hormone levels and reproductivity. Even very minute levels have serious negative effects on male hormones.

This was reprinted from the Sovereign Independent.

Is Biotech Terrorist Monsanto’s RoundUp Destroying Male Testosterone?

Kevin Hayden – TruthisTreason

Here’s the key phrase:
What is more disturbing is that even at a lower, presumably “non toxic” concentration of 1 ppm of Roundup, testosterone concentrations were observed to decrease by 35%.

In a disturbing study published last month (Dec. 2011) in the Journal of Toxicology in Vitro, researchers found that Monsanto’s popular “weed killer” known as Roundup, which has already been linked to over 25 adverse health effects, is also capable of interfering with and/or harming the male reproductive system.

Researchers tested Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide, on mature rat testicular cells at a concentration range between 1 and 10,000 ppm, which they described as “the range in some human urine and in environment to agricultural levels.” They found that within 1 to 48 hours of Roundup exposure testicular (Leydig) cells were damaged or killed.

 

What is more disturbing is that even at a lower, presumably “non toxic” concentration of 1 ppm of Roundup, or glyphosate by itself, testosterone concentrations were observed to decrease by 35%.

Keep in mind that 1 ppm of Roundup is an infinitesimal concentration. Distilled water, as a reference point, contains between 5-10 ppm of dissolved solids. How can such a small concentration of Roundup/glyphosate cause such a profound disruption of biological activity in testicular cells? The phenomenon is known as endocrine disruption.

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with the “synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, or elimination of natural hormones in the body that are responsible for development, behavior, fertility, and maintenance of homeostasis (normal cell metabolism),” and are capable of interfering with hormonal health even in minute concentrations. Whereas a higher concentration of Roundup might result in immediate cell death, a much lower one can alter the hormonal and genetic expression of that cell, perhaps taking it down the path towards pathological dysfunction, or even cancer.

truthistreason.net

Cryptorchidism (undescended testicles) Is One of the Most Common Birth Defects in the U.S.

Phthalates are a class of chemicals in plastic - they have been associated with various endocrine disorders in mammals, including cryptorchidism (undescended testicles) in males. We are creating a generation of biologically emasculated boys and men - but these chemicals could easily be banned.

PVC plastics (like materials used in milk processing) are primary sources of these chemicals, as are perfumes, pesticides, flooring, mini-blinds, shower curtains, and other products made of vinyl. Eating organic and using organic personal care products, as well as using natural products in our homes is a good place to start in avoiding these chemicals. 

Baby, You Gotta Have Balls

By Laura Wright Treadway
September 6, 2011


Let’s talk about boys and their balls. The kind that dangle between legs and not, ideally, the kind you hit with a baseball bat.


I found myself thinking about the cultural and biological importance of baby balls -- and masculinity, really -- one morning not long ago as I lay in bed, scrolling through my e-mail on my smartphone. I’m about seven months pregnant, and like most moms-to-be that I know, I signed up to receive weekly e-mail updates about fetal growth and development.


On this particular day, I skimmed along until I read a passage that went something like this: "Congratulations! If you are having a boy, his testicles are beginning to descend." A baby’s testicles, the e-mail told me, develop inside his abdomen until the last trimester of pregnancy, at which point they begin to move to their rightful place, hanging between his little legs.


Or maybe not, I thought.


Cryptorchidism, the medical term for undescended testicles, is among the most common birth defects in the United States. It affects about 1 in 30 boys, and although it can be corrected surgically, the condition has been linked with fertility troubles later in life. The problems that lead to undescended testicles begin very early on, scientists believe -- possibly during mom’s first trimester, or maybe even earlier, before dad’s little swimmers have even met up with mom’s egg.


Over the past decade, scientists have built an increasingly strong case indicating that some chemicals interfere with male sex hormones in the womb. Cryptorchidism is just one facet of what has become known as "phthalate syndrome," named for a class of industrial chemicals called phthalates, which are used to make such things as the plastic PVC (polyvinyl chloride), as well as many personal care products. Phthalate syndrome has been well documented in rodents, and there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that humans are suffering, too.

Read the whole article.

BPA-Exposed Male Deer Mice Are Demasculinized and Undesirable to Females

While the FDA notes "some concern" with the controversial chemical BPA, and many other countries, such as Japan and Canada, have considered BPA product bans. The latest research shows that BPA causes male deer mice to become demasculinized and behave more like females in their spatial navigational abilities, leading scientists to conclude that exposure to BPA during human development could be damaging to behavioral and cognitive traits that are unique to each sex and important in reproduction.

BPA is bisphenol-A, the xenoestrogen in plastics that has been linked to endocrine disruption in nearly every species that has been studied. AND, human males are no exception, especially infants and pre-adolescent boys (who are most vulnerable to estrogenic compounds). This stuff not only causes cancer, but it can cause gynecomastia (better known as "bitch tits" among steroid users), sterility, and other forms of feminization. The problem is that this stuff is everywhere, including our food containers and our water supply.

In this study with mice, males exposed to BPA are not only unattractive to females, but they act like females and suffer from feminization.

BPA-Exposed Male Deer Mice Are Demasculinized and Undesirable to Females, New Study Finds

ScienceDaily (June 29, 2011) — While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration notes "some concern" with the controversial chemical BPA, and many other countries, such as Japan and Canada, have considered BPA product bans, disagreement exists amongst scientists in this field on the effects of BPA in animals and humans. The latest research from the University of Missouri shows that BPA causes male deer mice to become demasculinized and behave more like females in their spatial navigational abilities, leading scientists to conclude that exposure to BPA during human development could be damaging to behavioral and cognitive traits that are unique to each sex and important in reproduction.

"The BPA-exposed deer mice in our study look normal; there is nothing obviously wrong with them. Yet, they are clearly different," said Cheryl Rosenfeld, associate professor in biomedical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine and investigator in the Bond Life Sciences Center. "Females do not want to mate with BPA-exposed male deer mice, and BPA-exposed males perform worse on spatial navigation tasks that assess their ability to find female partners in the wild. This study sets the stage for BPA researchers to examine how BPA might differentially impact the behavioral and cognitive patterns of boys versus girls. Investigators looking for obvious BPA-induced differences, such as chromosome deletions or DNA mutations, could be missing subtle behavioral differences that eventually lead to long-term adverse outcomes, including demasculinization of male behaviors with ensuing decreased reproductive fitness."

In the study, female deer mice were fed BPA-supplemented diets two weeks prior to breeding and throughout lactation. The mothers were given a dosage equivalent to what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers a non-toxic dose and safe for mothers to ingest. At weaning (25 days of age), the deer mice offspring were placed on a non-supplemented BPA diet and their behavior tested when they matured into adults.

When sexually mature, researchers tested each mouse's ability to navigate a maze to safety. This enhanced spatial navigational ability of male deer mice is important because it allows them to find mates that are dispersed throughout the environment. Females do not have to search to find mates and thus their navigational abilities have not been enhanced by evolution. It was these navigational skills, among others, that were tested in the laboratory setting. Each animal had two five-minute opportunities per day, for seven days, to try to find its way into a home cage through one of several holes placed around the edge of an open maze which was marked with a set of visible navigational cues. Many male mice that had been exposed to BPA early in their development never found the correct exit. By comparison, male mice that had not been exposed to BPA consistently found the hole leading to their home cage within the time limit, some on the first day. In addition, the untreated mice quickly learned the most direct approach to finding the correct hole, while the exposed males appeared to employ a random, inefficient trial and error strategy, Rosenfeld said.

In addition, male deer mice exposed to BPA were less desirable to female deer mice. Females primed to breed were tested in a so-called mate choice experiment. The females' level of interest in a stranger male was measured by observing specific preferential behaviors, such as nose-to-nose sniffing and the amount of time the female spent evaluating her potential partner. These behaviors assess a potential mate's genetic fitness. Rosenfeld said that both non-exposed and BPA-exposed females favored control males over BPA-exposed males on a two-to-one basis.

"These findings presumably have broad implications to other species, including humans, where there are also innate differences between males and females in cognitive and behavioral patterns," Rosenfeld said. "In the wide scheme of things, these behavioral deficits could, in the long term, undermine the ability of a species such as the deer mouse to reproduce in the wild. Whether there are comparable health threats to humans remains unclear, but there clearly must be a concern."

"We can use this evolutionary approach to the study of BPA to determine to best way to assess differences in the risks to boys and girls to early exposure to this chemical," said David Geary MU Curators' Professor of Psychological Sciences.

This research will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rosenfeld collaborated with Geary and Todd Schachtman, Professor from the Department of Psychological Sciences. The primary author was a graduate student in the MU Interdiscplinary Neurosciences Program, Eldin Jašarević, who conducted most of the experiments.

---

Journal Reference:

E. Jasarevic, P. T. Sieli, E. E. Twellman, T. H. Welsh, T. R. Schachtman, R. M. Roberts, D. C. Geary, C. S. Rosenfeld. (2011). Disruption of adult expression of sexually selected traits by developmental exposure to bisphenol A. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1107958108

Tags: men, males, xenoestrogens, bisphenol-A, feminized, BPA, deer mice, Science Daily, research, plastics, endocrine disruptor, estrogenic, demasculinized, FDA, sex hormones, reproduction, sterility, cancer

Documentary - An Emasculating Truth

This is important.

An Emasculating Truth

According to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, testosterone is declining in American men at the alarming rate of one percent a year. But why? That’s what Casey Neistat and Oscar Boyson sought to uncover in their film An Emasculating Truth.

Ultimately, the short film goes beyond this question to further the current dialogue about today’s definition of masculinity in light of changing gender roles. Boyson, the film’s producer and on camera emcee, came to some very personal conclusions about what it means to be a man today, turning the camera on himself and asking the question ‘what does it mean to be a man?’

“Masculinity isn’t something people think about often,” said Boyson. “Our goal was to find a cross-section of people and ask them, what does being a man mean to you? This is an issue where there isn’t much middle ground and we wanted to find out why.”

The facts speak for themselves. Men suffered more than their fair share of lay-offs in the past year (80 percent to be exact), so much so that women now outnumber men in the work force for the first time in history. Women also outnumber men in higher education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, with nearly 60 percent of grad school enrollees being women.

Boys – our future men – are failing out of high school at alarming rates, 4.9 percent versus 3.8 percent of girls, and are being diagnosed with ADHD at rates three times higher than that of their female counterparts. In short, manhood is in peril … or at least going through a pretty significant transformation on its way to the new future state.

An Emasculating Truth from Emasculating Truth on Vimeo.

Tags: men, health, culture, testosterone, xenoestrogens, Documentary, An Emasculating Truth, film, Casey Neistat, Oscar Boyson, masculinity, boys, ADHD, employment

Prostate Cancer Starts with the Plastic Baby Bottle

Bisphenol A has been shown over and over again to be an endocrine disruptor, a chemical that messes with our gender hormones and leads to a variety of cancers. Yet most governments have refused to force manufacturers to remove the chemical from their products.

It has become a socio-economic issue because many companies are voluntarily creating products without biphenol A, but they tend to cost more, so those with limited income or little awareness of this issue are still using products with these toxic and deadly chemicals.

The newest study shows that male babies who drink from bottles containing this chemical are at higher risk of prostate cancer later in life. Certainly, this is just a correlation - there is no way to prove cause and effect over that span of time. But it adds to the already enormous body of evidence that this chemical is deadly.

My other posts on this topic can be found with the xenoestrogens label.

Here is a bit of the article from The Daily Mail Online (follow the link to read the whole article):

A gender-bending chemical found in babies' bottles may raise their odds of prostate cancer in later life, scientists have warned.

In experiments, newborn rats fed bisphenol A, a building-block of many commonly-used plastics, were more likely to develop pre-cancerous cells as they aged.

With chemical levels similar to those commonly found in the human body, the researchers said their findings are directly relevant to babies' health.

Their warning comes just a week after the European food watchdog said that the amounts of the chemical we are exposed to in day-to-day life are too low to do any harm.

The Food Standards Agency also said that bisphenol A does not carry a risk but the latest study raises fresh concerns about the compound which is also found in CD cases, tin can linings, sunglasses, plastic knives and forks, mobile phones and dental sealants.

The American researchers showed that giving newborn rats the chemical raised their odds of developing cellular damage that can lead to prostate cancer in later life. Both mouth drops and injections were equally damaging.

University of Illinois researcher Gail Prins said: 'There was no difference in the number of lesions, whether the bisphenol A was given by injection or orally, the prostate pathology was the same.

'It mattered nothing which way it was given.'

This is important, because it many previous studies which have focused on jabs have been criticised for not being true to life and their results downplayed.

The latest research suggests that the damage seen in such experiments also occurs when we access it through food and drink.

Bisphenol A has previously been linked to fertility problems, breast cancer, prostate cancer and heart attacks.

Tags: xenoestrogens, prostate cancer, men, infants, Bisphenol A, Gail Prins, Daily Mail, pre-cancerous cells