|
by D. Lindsey Berkson
Hormone Deception
Editor’s Note: In her cuttingedge work Hormone Deception D.
Lindsey Berkson tells us that
“your body has an internal
Internet system. One cell sends
e-mail to another cell . . . that cell
has mail. This Internet
system delivers the messages that
get things done inside your body.”
And who delivers most of
these e-mails? Hormones.
Hormones deliver messages
of life that keep our bodies
humming. But something new
has happened. Chemicals in our
air, water, homes and foods are
getting into our body’s Internet
systems and acting as hijackers.
Hijacking of our internal
Internet system is laying the
groundwork for a wide variety
of illnesses from breast cancer
to attention disorders in children
and has become a major health
issue for us all.
Hormone Deception was
written to take you by the hand
and walk you easily through this
brand new terrain of hormone
disruption. The book is in fun,
easy-to-understand language.
Best of all, Hormone Deception
gives you answers. The last
third of the book is a
room-by-room tour of your
home to show you how to reduce
exposure to you and your family,
without driving you crazy. It
emphasizes simple answers. It
tells you how to reduce exposure
in your home and supermarket
cart, the two places where your
family gets the highest exposure.
Also included are interviews
with dozens of top scientists
from both sides of the equation:
those who are convinced that
hormone disruptors are a serious
health threat and those who
remain skeptics.
The following is excerpted from Hormone Deception. |
 ormones. We all know what hormones do—they make men masculine and women feminine. They make us fertile, support pregnancy, make us crave chocolate, put pimples on our teenager’s chin and bring about The Change.
How about those first copies of Playboy you find underneath your son’s bed?
What’s at work here? Hormones. Or one
reason it’s harder for women to lose weight
than it is for men? Hormones. Hormones
play our lives like instruments, constantly
influencing and fascinating us. Hormones
tell our bodies when to start developing
breasts or producing sperm. Hormones
direct the cells in the fetus, guiding them
to become cells of the reproductive organs,
cells of the brain or the various glands,
cells of all the particular tissues of our
bodies.
Hormones (which are named from a
Greek word meaning “to urge on”) do
exert a powerful influence over many
facets of our growth and development, our
sexual and reproductive capability, our
behavior and intelligence, our energy and
our memory and aging. Hormones regulate
puberty, fertility, pregnancy and
menopause.
Hormonal imbalance can contribute to
diseases like endometriosis and breast or
prostate cancer. However, it’s not only our
natural hormones that can wreak havoc
with our lives. Sometimes the pharmaceutical
hormones we take for birth control,
fertility and to stop those @#! hot flashes
can also disturb our hormonal balance,
leading to health problems. As if this were
not already confusing enough, now there’s
another aspect to hormones that we must
learn to take into consideration if we’re
going to stay healthy ourselves as well as
raise healthy families.
Certain man-made chemicals, many of
which are found in the household products
we use regularly and in the foods we
consume every day, are under suspicion.
We are exposed to these compounds
through the air we breathe and the food
and water we ingest or absorb through our
skin. Called hormone disruptors, these
particular compounds can mimic our natural
hormones, creating imbalance, or
they can alter the way our natural hormones
are supposed to work in the body.
Hormone disruption can possibly
affect everything from lowered sperm
counts to our ability to fight off disease. It
can alter or determine our, and our children’s,
destiny.
Hormone disruption has become such
an important issue in the United States
and throughout the world that various
groups and agencies have made the study
of endocrine-disrupting chemicals a top
priority. Congress has begun by mandating
the EPA to come up with ways to
identify and test hormone-related toxicants
that are already on the market
and in the environment, for their potential
to disrupt the endocrine system. The EPA
responded by creating EDSTAC (Endocrine
Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory
Committee) in October 1996. An estimated
$5 billion will be needed to
carry out EDSTAC’s recommendations.
Endocrine disruption is one of five priority
research areas of the Committee on
the Environment and Natural Resources
within the Executive Office of the
President. In other words, our government
is taking the threat of hormone disruption
very seriously.
What are hormone disruptors?
Perhaps you think that you already know enough about protecting your health. You eat a moderately good diet and go to the gym a few times a week. You’ve started to cut down on caffeine and alcohol and cigarettes went out the window a long time ago. You probably don’t feed your baby soda pop in her bottle. Read through the following list of questions and see how many pertain to you.
Assessing Your Exposure Risk
- Did your mother take prescription diethylstilbestrol DES, the first synthetic estrogen ever marketed, or another synthetic hormone when she was pregnant with you?
- Do you consume a diet high in animal fats (over 30 percent)?
- Do you dust and vacuum your home less than twice a week?
- Do people walk on your carpets with street shoes?
- Do you shower without turning on the bathroom exhaust fan?
- Do you hang recently dry cleaned clothes in your bedroom closet?
- Do you eat nonorganic, commercially grown food? Canned foods and drinks?
- Do you microwave food in plastic containers or cover foods with plastic cling wrap?
- Do you use pesticides on your lawn and garden or foggers or bombs in your home?
- Do your pets wear flea collars?
- Do you use clothes washing detergent?
- Does your new car have a strong new car smell?
- Do you use commercial air fresheners in your home or car, deodorizers in your bathroom?
- Do you use any solvents or chemicals in your work, home or hobbies or have you been exposed to these in the past?
- Do you park your care in a garage attached to your home?
Chances are you answered yes to at least a few of these questions. Each of these situations can introduce hormone disruptors into your body.
To understand hormone disruption, we first need a basic understanding of hormones and how they work.
Signals of Life
Birds do it. Bees do it. Alligators and petunias, fruit flies and polar bears do it. The baby in the womb does it. A teenager with pink hair, a 100-year-old woman blowing
out her birthday candles and
an Olympian carrying the
torch all do it. So do you and I.
Every living thing that’s bigger
than one cell does it. Every
organism operates through the
same mechanism of signal and
response that has changed very
little over the last 400 to 500
million years or so.
 One cell sends out a signal and another cell receives the message. It’s so simple, yet this is how magic happens throughout biology—how life develops and gets directed.
There are signals that decide which end of the earthworm will become its head and which end will be the tail. There are signals that direct plant roots to communicate with bacteria to take nitrogen out of the soil so the plants can thrive. Cells in the human brain send out signals called neurotransmitters. These messages leap across gaps and are received by other cells. “I got it!” you yell with delight as you suddenly figure out the solution to a problem that’s been bothering you.
The cell-to-cell signaling system was firmly
established long before plants and animals
split off from each other on the evolutionary
path and it has remained basically the same
ever since. This is called evolutionary conservation
—meaning the signaling system has
been basically the same throughout evolution.
All life is based on sending and receiving these
signals. The messages we are concerned with in
this article are the ones in humans and animals
that come from the endocrine system. They
are called hormones.
The signal-response mechanism is used in
many different ways in the body. Our
immune, nervous and endocrine systems all
work through this cell-to-cell process. These
systems control development and aging—the
way we grow from an embryo to a fetus to an
infant to a child to a teenager to an adult, all
the way to old age.
The endocrine system, which is responsible
for sending out hormonal signals, runs a very
efficient messenger service. An endocrine
gland sends out a small amount of a hormone
carrying an important message. The hormone jumps on its trusty bicycle and rides through
the bloodstream until it finds the correct
address—the cells of a specific organ or tissue
(called target tissues) that are meant to receive
the message. The hormone finds a place to
park, called a receptor, located either at the cell
surface or inside the cell, and delivers its message.
The signal has been delivered from one
cell to another.
Now there is a response. Central headquarters
in the cell takes the message and runs with
it. The message is copied and translated into
orders, which are sent to various parts of the
body. For example, the pituitary is an
endocrine gland that sends signals to the ovary,
which then sends e-mail messages to the uterus
and, in response, the uterus sheds its lining.
You suddenly realize why your daughter has
been eating candy bars and slamming doors
for the past few days.
The signal-response mechanism—where
one cell secretes a message and another cell
receives it and produces a response—is a widespread
phenomenon. A few days before a
women ovulates, the hormone estrogen sends
a signal to the endometrial cells inside the
uterus that urges the cells to grow thicker so
the uterus is ready for pregnancy to occur. This
same mechanism of signal and response occurs
in the mating of sea urchins. An urchin
releases molecules called pheromones that
reach another sea urchin and bind to receptors, telling its chosen partner that it’s time to clink their underwater wineglasses and mate.
There are hundreds of hormones (that we
know about so far) acting throughout the
human body. For example, adrenaline is a
well-known hormone, responsible for the
fight-or-flight response. The hormone insulin
helps regulate blood sugar. Thyroid hormones
(thyroxine and triiodothyronine) are needed
for overall metabolism and brain development.
Testosterone is responsible for libido
and certain behaviors (like leaving the toilet
seat up).
If the endocrine system is the body’s
messenger service, the hormone
itself delivers the actual message.
When the endocrine system works
properly, the right message is sent by
the endocrine glands, which secrete
a hormone that travels through the
bloodstream and the message is
received by special proteins called
receptors. A receptor looks a little
like a open pouch or the shape of a
tiny womb. Receptor sites have frequently
been compared to locks, waiting to be opened
by a hormonal key. When a hormone enters
the binding site and snuggles into the pouch,
the hormone is said to be bound to the
receptor.
The receptor is usually located in the cell’s
nucleus, the central command zone. The hormone’s
message gets delivered to the DNA. The
DNA is like an archival library, containing all
the genetic information within a cell. Then the
genes carry out the instructions contained in
the message. Gene function is turned on and
off to produce a variety of rapid responses and
long-term effects in the body.
Hormones integrate all systems in the body
and urge the body to regulate, through the
action of the genes, among other things:
- metabolism (the extraction of energy from nutrients)
- sexual development and reproduction
- mental processes
- growth and maintenance
- many aspects of our development before birth.
It’s a very competent and effective setup.
Messages are sent and received and the body
complies with the orders contained in the messages.
It’s a system that has worked exceedingly
well for a very long time.
Up until recently.
For the last 50 years, man-made chemicals
used in the external world have been entering our bodies, where they are participating in an
age-old signal/response system that has not
had time to adapt to them. Hormonal signals
always used to come from inside our bodies or
from natural substances, such as the estrogens
in plants, that have evolved along with us.
The signal/response system in vertebrates is
hundreds of millions of years old, while
endocrine-disrupting chemicals have only
come into widespread use since the end of
World War II. Our bodies haven’t had enough
time to take into account these alien messengers,
coming from outside our bodies, which
are now pervasive in air, land and water and to
make the necessary evolutionary changes that
would protect us from these substances.
All this points to what can go awry. If
something is wrong with the signal, the body
will respond to the wrong message. In other
words, an unnatural signal may create an inappropriate
response. What science is discovering
is that hormone disruptors can bind with
receptors and send messages the same way our
natural hormones can. But these particular
messages can significantly alter normal cell
function and growth.
In fact, hormone disruption may very well
turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg when
we finally learn how chemicals from the environment
are acting inside the integrated whole
of our bodies. In a machine, if one part is damaged
or altered, the functioning of the entire
engine can be disrupted. If someone threw a
wrench into the engine of your beautiful new
Jaguar, chances are your automobile would
have trouble. Likewise, an incorrect message
sent by a chemical that mimics a hormone can
tell the genes to turn on when they should be
turned off, or vice versa. Creating a disturbance
at any one point can throw things off
balance anywhere else in the body.
Many scientists believe that the weight of
evidence points to endocrine disruption as a
human reality. Until recently there has been
little solid cause-and-effect proof of health
effects in humans except for research on the
synthetic estrogen DES. However, hormone
disruptors have been linked to specific health
conditions in humans. For example, pesticide
exposure to the pregnant mother has been
shown to have a definite effect on children’s
neurological behavior. Other chemical compounds
can even cause lowered intelligence.
Endometriosis (a painful reproductive tract
problem that contributes to female infertility)
has been associated with exposure to dioxins
(airborne hormone disruptors). But scientifically
confirming the link between hormone
disruptors and human health would mean doing experiments that deliberately expose
humans to chemicals, which of course, would
not be ethical or desirable.
This is the way science works, carefully and
cautiously, compiling evidence over an
extended period of time. It took 40 years and
more than 60 studies to get warnings out to the
public that in fact, cigarettes constitute a
health hazard.
What is going on with endocrine disruption
is big—so big that if we are afraid to ask
questions, we very well may miss the answers.
Why wait another 20 to 40 years until the final
word is in before we take preventative action
on hormone disruptors?
We have a right to know what is happening,
in language we can understand. Very
few people can read a scientific study and comprehend
what is being said, let alone what is
being implied. We need to take this growing
body of information out of the hands of professionals
alone and place it in the hands of
everyday folks—the people who buy the groceries
and feed their families, microwave quick
meals, take their kids to dentists, use hormone
replacement therapy—the people who need to
know how to minimize the risks for the breast
cancer, the people who understand the danger
in waiting years and years for more studies to
be funded and carried out in order to prove
conclusively the correlation between hormone
disruptors and damaged health in humans.
That’s you and me.
 D. Lindsey Berkson is presently a consulting scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities and a lifelong women’s health advocate. Berkson has a master’s degree in nutrition and is author of Natural Answers for Women’s Health (Simon & Schuster 2002) and other books like Healthy Digestion the Natural Way (John Wiley, 2000).
For more information, visit the Web site:www.hormonedeception.com
|
