WHAT
Hello everybody! I have lots of different products for you today: cosmetics, paint, cans, furniture, plastic toys… And what’s the similarity between all these objects? That they contain endocrine disruptors1.
WHY
The endocrine disruptors that fulfil your everyday life environment not only have an effect on your physical health, but also on your mental health. And on the society.
We all have already heard about endocrine disruptors, we all know that these products are harmful for human beings, that men synthesizes them in large quantities and that they are largely spread in our environment. But we less often hear about the disastrous sanitary consequences – at a society scale – caused by this established fact. Although you don’t need to be brilliant to understand that high concentration of toxic products in the environment means global health issues for the population, the idea that the disease is not a particular case, on the individual scale, that it is not an accident, is hard to conceive. And that’s for sure because this almost never happened during the human kind’s history! Nevertheless, how couldn’t it be in the present context?
I recently read an article2 the concept of which interested me: because it handled the global, societal consequences of the endocrine disruptors issues, more than their effects on the individual human body, and also because it estimated the financial (!) cost of this issue for the society. So, the circle is completed: this article touches the junction between the environmental discourse and the financial one. An industrial solution destroying men (and nature) necessarily fights against its own topic (the search fot financial profit). What is the kind of a solution which result is counterproductive even towards the only objective it is supposed to achieve – to the detriment of all the other components of the problem – if not a bad one?
HOW
Let’s go for the heart of the subject: in March, 2015, a research team led by Leonardo Trasande from New York University School of Medicine showed that the annual cost of the consequences of the endocrine disruptors issues amounts to 157 billion euros a year (that is 1,28 % of the GDP) on the European Union extent. Their results are published on the website of the “Newspaper of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism”. These costs are imputed to the means devoted to take care of the population affected by these products, the consequences
of which are, in bulk: cases of infantile backwardness, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for the intellectual consequences, diabetes, obesity and … assisted reproductive technologies (certain endocrine disruptors have reprotoxic effects) for the physical ones3.
WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH IT
In the end, we only can recommend to you to pay attention on what you buy, from the products of which you spread your body (shower gels, cosmetics) up to your food and their packaging. Thus, read the compositions of the products you buy and use, for the sake of your body, your mind and the society!
Look further / Useful link(s)
♦ Book « Endocrine Disruptors, Brain, and Behavior » (Oxford Series in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology) Hardcover – 1 Jun 2017
by Heather B. Patisaul (Author), Scott M. Belcher (Author)
Notes
1■ Website cancer-environnement.fr
2■ Le journal de l’environnement
3■ Le journal de l’environnement