Cancer, infertility, obesity, asthma, learning disorders, early puberty, diabetes — what do all of these things have in common? For starters, they are all on the rise in the U.S. Second, they are major health trends that scientists are now linking to exposure to toxic chemicals.
The latest alarming public health trend now linked to chemicals is obesity. Read on to find out about the scariest new term to come out of the lab since ‘spontaneous involution’— obesogens. See Born to be Big, Newsweek magazine’s roundup on the issue, and Can plastics make us fat? from Grist.
Pediatrician Harvey Karp provides a clear overview of the problem in the Huffington Post, focusing on BPA, a hormone-disrupting chemical found in plastic:
“Hundreds of studies on laboratory animals reveal that BPA promotes obesity, diabetes, testicular cancer, breast cancer-like changes (and resistance to life saving chemotherapy) and even reduce sperm counts. This is very worrisome because, over the past 20 years, scientists have noticed rising rates of these problems in people all around the world.”