Industrial Food: Hazardous to your Species

It wasn’t a scientific study, just an exercise to test methods for a possible future study, yet its findings were so stunning and conclusive they have become the subject of widespread discussion and a major industrial damage-control effort. The sample, by common research standards, was infinitesimally small: five families, comprising ten adults and ten children. The duration was similarly minute: three days. And the methodology was hardly complex: don’t eat any packaged food. The results were amazing.

First, a little chemistry. The functioning of the living body — any living body — requires a symphony of tiny chemical reactions, thousands per second, whose complexity is far beyond our power to comprehend. How fast we grow, how much we weigh, when we mature, whether we reproduce, how we respond to a threat or an attractive potential mate — and how all these things are affected by a myriad of outside influences — are governed by a network of glands that send a constant stream of orders, in the form of hormones, to the outposts of the body to manage its long battle to survive. This network is called the endocrine system.

Industrial chemistry has unleashed on the world thousands of chemicals whose purpose ostensibly is to improve our lives, by killing bugs and weeds or by providing all manner of plastic gizmos. Many of these chemicals, we now know (now that they are in wide distribution throughout the world) are endocrine disruptors: they mimic, or interfere with, or distort the functioning of the endocrine system. (read more)