The chemical industry is a very big industry. It’s about 7% of the world’s gross national product. And it employs about ten million people. And 30% of the chemicals that are made on the planet are produced in Europe. And we make between 40-60,000 chemicals commercially, and in general there’s about a thousand new ones added each year. The main thing in place that protects us a rather old form of toxicology which tends to look at adult toxicology, tends to look at high dose toxicity. What we’re finding, those of use who work in developmental toxicology, is that actually it wasn’t just a few bad actors amongst the chemicals which we should worry about, but it’s many chemicals by chance able to interfere with cell signaling systems. And they don’t work by having an acute high toxicity effect, they work by hijacking development… if you look upon it that way then we have created for ourselves quite a nasty problem. Which for some chemicals would go away quite quickly if we’d just stop making them. For others, it’s going to last for hundreds of years. So the PCBs, for example – Polychlorinated biphenyl – they will be around for hundreds of years because they’re so persistent. That’s a very long term problem. For others such as bisphenols, we metabolize them quite quickly, so if we stop making them that problem would go away. So we have various options.

They’re ubiquitous we’ve all got them in ourselves in some level or other. So there’s no escape. Everyone’s exposed. And you know for some of them it depends to some extent on what you eat. So for things like dioxins and PCBs, the higher up food chain you eat, the higher the fat content of your diet the more you’ll get.

These studies further show that these chemicals come from common consumer products, household products, everyday plastic materials in our homes. They are a major source of chemical exposure. From reusable water bottles that leach Bisphenol A into the water that we drink to nil polish that exposes women to phthalate compounds that cause reproductive harm in baby boys…

In many cases there’s a double standard where products containing dangerous chemicals are banned in Europe and those same chemicals are allowed to be marketed in the United States. A perfect example is phthalates in children’s toys. Phthalates were some of the compound that were measured in all of our participants bodies.