By Dr. Mercola

Unless you live in some remote wilderness, you’re likely being exposed to a wide variety of chemicals on a daily basis that can compromise your health. One class of chemicals that have become ubiquitous in the US is flame retardants.

In the 1970s, the US implemented fire safety standards that led to more and more products adopting the use of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) to meet the stringent regulations.

PBDEs have a molecular structure similar to that of banned PCBs, the latter of which have been linked to cancer, reproductive problems, and impaired fetal brain development.

And, even though certain PBDEs have since been banned in some US states, they still persist in the environment and accumulate in your body. Tests have revealed that as many as 97 percent of all Americans have significant levels of PBDEs in their blood.

Many harmful chemicals also lurk in personal care products that you apply to your body on a daily basis.

A recent article in Environmental Health Perspectives¹ discusses the impact of newer flame retardants and the routes by which people are exposed to these hazardous chemicals—which, surprisingly, may include personal care products.

Hand-to-Mouth Exposures in Adults

In 2005, PBDEs used in foam furniture were voluntarily withdrawn from the US market.² But were they replaced with harmless chemicals? Hardly.

Many PBDEs were replaced by organophosphate flame retardants such as tris phosphate (TDCIPP), and triphenyl phosphate (TPHP), both of which are now used in a wide variety of consumer goods, including furniture, cars seats, carpet padding, and baby products, just to name a few.

According to the featured article:³

“TDCIPP is listed as a human carcinogen under California’s Proposition 65, and a small human study found evidence that exposure to both TDCIPP and TPHP was associated with altered levels of some hormones and lower sperm concentration.

In vitro and animal data have linked TDCIPP to neurotoxicity and both TDCIPP and TPHP to endocrine disruption.”

A recent study⁴ looked at how, and to what degree, people were exposed to these chemicals in their homes. A total of 53 men and women participated in the study, and more than 90 percent of them provided dust samples from their home.

Not only did every single dust sample contain both TDCIPPs and TPHPs, metabolites of TPHP and TDCIPP were also found in 91 percent and 83 percent of the urine samples respectively.

Flame Retardants May Hide in Women’s Products

Interestingly, women had nearly twice the urinary levels TPHP metabolites than men, suggesting there must be a hidden route of exposure that women come into contact with more regularly than men... According to study author Heather Stapleton:

“This is a very unusual finding. We haven’t seen that before [for flame retardants], which suggests to us that there is likely exposure through a personal care product.”

Nail polish is currently being investigated as a possible source of the exposure to the flame retardant TPHP.

The study also found that those who had higher levels of organophosphate chemical traces on their hands had higher levels in their urine, suggesting that “hand-to-mouth contact or dermal absorption may be important pathways of exposure to these compounds.”

According to the researchers, frequent hand washing may help reduce some of the exposure, but clearly, your best bet would be to try to determine the sources and eliminate as many of them as possible—especially if you have young children.

Ideally, we all need to start paying attention to the presence of these chemicals, because not only are they bad when ingested or absorbed, they’re also bad for the environment when flushed down the drain...

Chemical Research Ruled by Politics, Not Science

A recent article by The Center for Public Integrity⁵ (CPI) reveals just how little is being done by the US government to protect you from these chemical hazards, thereby necessitating taking more personal responsibility.

It appears assessments of toxic chemicals by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have come to a standstill, courtesy of political wrangling.

One of the EPA’s responsibilities is to determine which chemicals pose a hazard to human health, and then decide how to protect the public from those chemicals. They may decide to ban the chemical in question, or create more stringent regulations, for example.

However, any such measure will result in a loss of profits for the chemical industry, which is working hard to keep their products on the market—and they have a very powerful political lobby to ensure business keeps going as usual.

One of the tactics the chemical industry uses is simply to seed doubt when questions about potential hazards arise.

It’s quite difficult to tease out exactly how much of a toxic chemical one must be exposed to before succumbing to cancer or some other malady, and the chemical industry uses that fact to argue for the chemical’s safety.

This is a strategy that was originally used with great success by the tobacco industry. Another political ploy being used today is o delay scientific findings. According to CPI reporter David Heath:

“Congressional investigators found that the Bush White House put many of the EPA scientific findings on hold. In fact investigators said the delays were so endless that the scientific research being done at the EPA was virtually obsolete.

Things would go over to the Bush administration and they'd ask a bunch of questions and they'd have to go back and start all over again...

[T]he Obama administration came in with a plan to fix it. And that called basically for doing many more chemicals assessments and to do them a lot faster. But that plan has actually failed. In the last three years the EPA has actually done fewer chemical assessments than ever before.”

Damning Assessment of Arsenic Halted and ‘Buried’

The EPA started working on a toxicology assessment of formaldehyde in 1998, and it’s still not published. Why? According to Heath, Louisiana senator David Vitter managed to postpone the assessment by threatening to block a key EPA appointment. Ditto for the EPA’s assessment of arsenic.

The agency began assessing arsenic around 2003. Then, in 2011, Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson inserted language into a committee report attached to a spending bill that delayed the release of that assessment. And even though the language is not legally binding, the EPA is strongly advised to follow it, and it does.

Shockingly, Heath reports that the EPA had determined arsenic is 17 times more potent a carcinogen than previously thought, yet these findings never made it to publication.  

“What that meant was that even people drinking the legal limit of arsenic⁶ in drinking water were likely to get cancer from it. In fact they came up with a calculation that was 730 out of 100,000 people would get cancer from it,” Heath says.

“[A]ll chemical assessments right now have been delayed. Congressman Simpson acted on behalf of two pesticide companies who make a weed killer containing arsenic.

Those companies hired a lobbyist named Charlie Grizzle, who had been a former EPA official and knew the ropes. At the same time he was also working as a lobbyist for the formaldehyde industry. And at the same time he was lobbying against the arsenic assessment, he was lobbying to delay all chemical assessments, about 50 in all.”

Chemicals Abound in Personal Care Products

Chemicals like formaldehyde and arsenic can be found in many products—some of which you may be ingesting or applying to your body on a regular basis. Nail polish, for example—which is now under investigation to determine the presence of flame retardants—typically contain formaldehyde along with toxic dibutyl phthalate (DBP), and toluene. Even Johnsons & Johnsons Baby Shampoo—a classic bathroom staple for most families with small children—contained formaldehyde when sold in the US (but not the version sold in other countries).

Last year, after years of applied pressure from public health groups, including a boycott, the company announced its famous baby shampoo had been reformulated and would no longer contain formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane⁷ (yet another chemical known for its toxic effects). Cosmetics are a major source of potentially toxic exposure for women.⁸

Tests suggest you can absorb five pounds of chemicals each year from your daily makeup routine alone. Many of these chemicals have been directly linked to cancer or are known to cause damage to your brain, reproductive system, and other organs. On average, women apply 126 different ingredients to their skin daily and 90 percent of them have never been evaluated for safety. A handful of the most hazardous ones include:

• Paraben, a chemical found in deodorants and other cosmetics that has been shown to mimic the action of the female hormone estrogen, which can drive the growth of human breast tumors.
• Sodium lauryl sulfate, a surfactant, detergent and emulsifier used in thousands of cosmetic products, as well as in industrial cleaners. It’s present in nearly all shampoos, scalp treatments, hair color and bleaching agents, toothpastes, body washes and cleansers, make-up foundations, liquid hand soaps, laundry detergents, and bath oils/bath salts. The real problem with SLES/SLS is that the manufacturing process (ethoxylation) results in SLES/SLS being contaminated with 1,4 dioxane, a carcinogenic by-product.
• Phthalates are plasticizing ingredients that have been linked to birth defects in the reproductive system of boys and lower sperm-motility in adult men, among other problems. Be aware that phthalates are often hidden on shampoo labels under the generic term “fragrance.”
• Methylisothiazolinone (MIT), a chemical used in shampoo to prevent bacteria from developing, which may have detrimental effects on your nervous system.
• Toluene, made from petroleum or coal tar, and found in most synthetic fragrances. Chronic exposure linked to anemia, lowered blood cell count, liver or kidney damage, and may affect a developing fetus.