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Too Toxic to Conceive
Is Your Lifestyle to Blame? By Teri Brown
Studies are showing that the toxins we don't even think about can be just as dangerous as the more obvious ones. One study reported in Epidemiology, the official journal of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, shows a strong connection between the use of herbicides and fungicides and infertility. The study indicates that infertile women were almost 27 times more likely to have mixed or applied herbicides than fertile women and 3.3 times more likely to have used fungicides.
Lindsey Berkson, consulting scholar for the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities and the author of the book, Hormone Deception: How Everyday Foods and Products Are Disrupting Your Hormones and How to Protect Yourself and Your Family (McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books, 2001), believes that substances in the environment called hormone disruptors are gaining entrance into our bodies through the food we eat, the water we drink and even the air we breathe.
"My book is about pollutants the thousands of them that have been introduced into the environment since the Second World War and look molecularly similar enough to our own hormones that they can deceive the proteins that read the messages from these hormones," says Berkson. "Many pollutants can cross talk with these receptors and affect the way cellular and genetic communication occurs within our bodies. This does not adversely affect everyone, but just who, how and what is happening is the area of active research and, of course, debate."
Though these endocrine disrupters cause hormonal havoc in animals, making it difficult to impossible for the animals to reproduce, their effect on humans has been more difficult to pinpoint. Many scientists believe that the weight of evidence is showing a similar effect in humans.
