Tier 1 Health & Wellness (00:00)
I woke up feeling like it was Christmas morning. I could hardly sleep last night because I was so excited to meet today’s guest. So let’s just get right to it and I’ll introduce her to you. It is my extreme honor and pleasure to welcome Dr. Linda Birnbaum to the Tier 1 Health and Wellness podcast. I first encountered her influential work during a deep dive into research on endocrine disrupting chemicals in 2010.
when I came across the congressional hearing aimed at raising awareness among lawmakers about the effects of these chemicals on our environment. Dr. Birnbaum is a pioneering toxicologist whose extensive research has critically shaped our understanding of environmental health risk. She has a notable tenure as the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. Following her impact for work at the NTP,
Dr. Birnbaum began significant stint at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she directed the agency’s largest research group focused on environmental health for 19 years. Her leadership and scholarly contributions have been instrumental in advancing the field of toxicology, particularly in the study of pharmacokinetic behavior of environmental chemicals, their health effects, and notably endocrine disruptors.
Dr. Birnbaum’s academic contributions include authoring over 1,000 peer-reviewed publications. She has also served as the past president of the Society of Toxicology and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010. Dr. Birnbaum’s dedication was recognized in 2024 when she was awarded the prestigious Adam Yarmolinsky Medal of National Academy of Medicine.
acknowledging her outstanding service and leadership in environmental and health sciences. Dr. Birnbaum continues to enrich the academic and scientific community as an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and as a scholar in residence at Duke University. Her relentless pursuit of knowledge and the commitment to public health continue to inspire and drive crucial advancements in the field. And it is my pleasure to speak with you today.
So thank you so much and thank you for agreeing to talk with us. Thank you very much. So pleased to have you here.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (02:21)
I’m happy to be here and thank you for that amazing introduction also.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (02:26)
It is true. I have been following your work since 2010 and have been amazed at your remarkable career. So we want to give everyone the opportunity to learn as much as they can today from your experience. So if it’s okay with you, we’ll just get right to some questions that we have.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (02:44)
Sounds good to me.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (02:47)
would you please explain to our viewers what are endocrine disrupting chemicals?
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (02:53)
Well, I think it’s important to understand first what our endocrine system does. Our endocrine system are all of our hormone systems, and there are many of them. Most people are familiar with our sex hormones, our estrogens, or our testosterone, but there are many other endocrine systems like our thyroid system or our insulin, for example, in diabetes. There are many types. And the important thing about endocrine disrupting chemicals
goes back to what the endocrine system does for our body. And what the endocrine system does is maintain our general homeostasis. They’re who we are and how we function. Now I should say that’s true when we’re adults, but during development and in childhood and during developmental periods or during pregnancy, our hormone systems are absolutely key to our development. So while the impact of hormones
in adults is reversible. During development, whatever the hormones do is the one way street.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (03:59)
good. Well, it’s good to hear you say that they’re reversible because after that 2010 hearing and all the information I read, I talked to Keith and I was like, we are just doomed. This is going nowhere. Good. There’s no hope for the future, but now we’re starting to learn that there actually is some improvement in some of these areas.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (04:19)
Well, think about, for example, birth control pills for women. You know, when you take the pills, you can’t get pregnant. When you stop taking them, your hormone system resumes its normal patterns and you can. So I think that’s just an example. But during development, for example, if you think about something like vitamin A, which is really a hormone, and during development, if it’s not there at the right amount at the right time,
you can actually get birth defects.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (04:49)
So what are some common sources of endocrine disrupting chemicals?
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (04:53)
Well, first of all, realized there were hundreds and hundreds of endocrine disrupting chemicals, and there are many more that we just haven’t learned about yet. But many endocrine disrupting chemicals, first of all, I should state that there are lots of drugs, our endocrine disrupting chemicals, but they’re disrupting our hormones, as I mentioned, birth control pills for a purpose. So that’s good because then they can be reversed.
A lot of common sources of endocrine disrupting chemicals are plastics. Many endocrine disrupting chemicals which have been added to the plastic, sometimes for flexibility, sometimes for strength, but they can come out and impact us. For example, certain times our water may have endocrine disrupting chemicals in it. I think one of the biggest sources are food. People forget that food is made up of hundreds and hundreds of different chemicals.
But sometimes there are chemicals that we don’t want, which can be present. So we’ve known for probably hundreds of years that you didn’t let sheep in the clover because there were chemicals in the clover that could cause the sheep to abort the fetuses that they were carrying. That’s an example of some endocrine disrupting chemicals. you know, endocrine disrupting chemicals are not necessarily ones that were chemically synthesized.
they could be perfectly natural as well.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (06:23)
Well, I’m glad that you brought up plastics because I recently heard you say on a YouTube podcast that you were on that we should really consider the life cycle of plastics. And I had never really thought about that. But the more I thought about it, I that’s really important for people to understand. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (06:45)
So plastics are basically polymers, which means you have a small chemical and then you hook lots of the examples of that chemical up together to make your plastic. And different kinds of small molecules can be involved. But in addition, as I just mentioned before, there can be other chemicals that are added to make this polymer more flexible or stronger. And that’s where you have the issue, frankly, with the
endocrine disruptors. with any kind of
chemical, has to be or product, it has to be made, it has to be used. And then eventually, you get rid of it. And that’s what we call the life cycle, kind of from, you know, birth to death of a product.
You can have the chemicals that are used to make that product can reach out into the environment when you’re making the product.
Sometimes they can leach out during the use of the product. And certainly at the end of the product’s usefulness, the product either intentionally or unintentionally can break down and release the chemicals and possibly their chemicals of concern.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (08:01)
people, mainly think of the EDCs, you we always are trained and we all think that the dose is the poison, right? And with these endocrine chemicals, could you maybe comment and explain to our listeners about the low dose responses and the non-monotonic dose effects and as well as how they work, maybe individually is gonna be a lot different than maybe how they work in concert.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (08:25)
Well, Keith, you’ve just asked me a host of questions and I’ll try to take them one at a time, but you may have to come back and re-ask them. So toxicology in general, going back 500 years to Paracelsus talks about the dose makes the poison. And that’s basically says that anything, you have enough of it can cause adverse effects, but it’s much more than the dose that makes the poison. It’s also the timing. Was it a single?
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (08:32)
I’m
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (08:54)
say high dose effect, or was it something where you get exposed repeatedly to very low doses over a long period of time? And you can see very different things occur if you have, what we would call an acute or a chronic kind of effect. Timing is also timing of your life, life stage. So what happens during development? And by development, I might mean in utero, so what’s happening to the embryo or the fetus?
as opposed to there’s also development occurring in the child. We know that teenagers are not stable. There’s development in an adolescent that goes on. There’s development in the woman when she’s pregnant, her body is changing. Those are all critical times as well. And what a chemical does during those developmental periods may be very different than what happens during a stable period of life. So you have timing, which is actually like,
you know, minutes, days or years versus timing, kind of timing of life. Then there’s also the inherent susceptibility. People are not all the same. We all know that. We accept that people are different. But the point is their differences come not only from their genes, which is obviously, but from the past experiences that they’ve had, from their social conditions.
under which they live, what else are they doing, what’s their nutrition, can all impact how you respond. Now, I made the comment that you can get very different effects if you have, say, acute versus chronic exposure or exposure during a developmental stage versus stable stage. What happens at low doses? People used to think, okay, if it’s a high dose, I can extrapolate back to a low dose and, you know, I’ll get to the point that
nothing else happens. Well, now we’re on just different things happen at different doses. So for example, especially in the endocrine field where endocrine, our normal hormones or endocrine disrupting chemicals often interfere with a very specific receptor. And if you think about a receptor as the lock and the hormone is the key that opens that lock,
What can happen is at different doses, you can have different locks and keys causing different responses to occur. So it’s not that, it’s not that people are wrong extrapolating back from a high dose to a low dose. It’s that different things might actually happen at very low doses. Then in other words, the chemical can cause a different response at a low dose than it can at a high dose.
I don’t know if I got all the questions you asked.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (11:47)
Yes, yes, yes.
I don’t think yes, a nonmonotonic dose response. can have negative negative effects at a low dose and not really affect you too much in a higher dose and that’s hard to understand for that for the average.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (12:00)
Well,
well, I think sometimes it’s not that they don’t affect you at a higher dose. It’s that you may not be looking in the right place for what it does. I mean, I think that’s the point. You have to look more broadly. You know, I can think of chemicals that I’ve studied in my career, which cause, for example, apparent obesity or overweight, and they can do it by totally different mechanisms.
at low dose and at high dose. It doesn’t mean that the chemical, you know, isn’t doing, it’s how you look that can tell you whether you find what you’re looking at.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (12:38)
think what’s most concerning to me and maybe others is the way we study chemicals is one at a time. And they’re going to act differently in concert. So it’s almost, I’m going to use the word impossible to test the combinations of how these are going to act in the human body. That’s why I think that we’re just swimming upstream when it comes to battling the EDCs in our environment that.
There’s no way, you know, it wouldn’t be in our lifetime. It’s certainly not gonna be in our lifetime that they’re able to test them all and certainly maybe test them in concert with each other. I don’t know if it’ll be in anyone’s lifetime, but certainly that’s almost an impossible task, I would think.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (13:13)
Well, Keith, what you’ve done is really point out the problem that we live in a soup, a soup of chemicals. And at least historically, in general, we’ve been looking one at a time, which not only doesn’t reflect reality, but doesn’t tell us what we need to know. There have been attempts to, for example, look at the totality of what’s in our drinking water and see, can we see an effect?
Those are very difficult studies to do, but there are approaches that are being used more and more today, which I think are helpful. First of all, we can begin to approach chemicals as groups of chemicals or classes of chemicals. So I have to say, I think we’ve been very…
Oh, I’ll call it, not very bright. When, you know, for example, we’ll find chemical A causes adverse effects. And so then we switched to chemical B because
can still make whatever we want to make and it’ll do whatever we want to do, but we don’t know anything about it. So we think, well, it’s not chemical A, we’re better off with chemical B. And then what happens when we start studying chemical B? Well, it just does what chemical A did.
or very, very similar. then we go to chemical C and that does the same kind of thing. So we have this kind of, what we call politely unfortunate substitution. Sometimes we call it whack-a-mole where we just switch from one chemical that we are no is a problem to something that we don’t know anything So a better approach, which people are beginning to hopefully start to take, many of us are pushing for it is to look at chemicals as a class, you know,
You know, if it smells like a rose, Romeo, 500 years ago, said it, you know, it smell as sweet. And I think we need to think about that if things are are similar, chemically similar, they’re going to do the same thing. That’s one approach that’s being used. The other approach, which started just really began about 20 years ago, was to look at something called the exposome, which was initially defined as the totality of exposure.
kind of both in time and space. So what are you being exposed to today, but also what were you exposed to in the past? Because your past exposure informs how you’re going to react in the future. People are beginning to try to actually study that. So you can look, for example, about what’s in our bodies today. You could take a blood sample and you can measure thousands of different chemicals.
and they can be grouped into different kinds of classes. And then you can, for example, compare what happens in this situation. Let’s just say when you’re in soup one versus when you’re in soup two and identify what may be the responses because it’s not only the chemicals, it’s how do you respond to them. So the exposome can look at things like what’s in our environment, trying to get a measure of the totality there.
It can look at what’s in our bodies. And I mentioned blood, but there are other bodily fluids that we also look at to try to understand what’s present. And then we can look at how is our body responding. And so we can look at all the metabolites that are present in our body, things like, you know, what’s happening to our levels of glucose, what’s happening to our levels of proteins, what’s happening to our levels of
lipids and those things can be looked at and then and I have to say this is where the computational power that didn’t exist 20, 30, 40 years ago can become so powerful because we can begin to compare these different conditions and say okay this is the soup, here’s the response. So people are beginning to try to approach this. For years we would just take okay I know I have to
look at mixtures. I have to look at more than one chemical at a time. So what did you do? You looked at two chemicals. Well, maybe better than one, but it’s not the whole story.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (17:30)
The other thing I see with research, problem is we can’t do randomized controlled trials on humans with chemicals. So it makes it much more difficult, I think, to see the impact that a chemical has because we don’t have the control group to compare to. How do you guys get around? I mean, how do you?
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (17:52)
Well, there are kind of two issues here. The issue of when is it legitimate and ethical to expose people to something. And I can tell you that for many years, we did studies like with air pollution, where you would actually put people in a chamber and pipe in outside air. Okay. Now you wouldn’t go higher than the outside air people could get.
But you know, if you’re standing on a busy street corner, say in a big city, your air pollution is different than if you are out in the country somewhere. So you could do those kinds of comparisons. They were very, very informative. But that’s very rare, right? We’re never going to take something that we are concerned is an endocrine disrupting chemical and intentionally expose people. But we do have a gradient of exposure.
naturally occurring in the population. So you can take people from a population and look at the various amounts of exposure they have. That’s one way. mean, people have heard epidemiology really means the study of humans and the observational epidemiology studies are what we do when we’re looking at environment. And there are a number of things that give us confidence.
that what we see when we’re observing what’s happening in a population actually is real. And some of that is you don’t have the data from just one population. In other words, you have studies that are multiple studies done by different investigators in different populations, and you start seeing usually the same kind of response. We also gain confidence in that
when you might do your measurements of what’s in the population before you’re looking for an effect. So, you know, sometimes you’ll have what we call cross-sectional studies, which is where, for example, Keith, we take you and let’s say…
Let’s say, well, I don’t want to give you a disease. anyway, you know, well, let’s just say somebody is obese. And you say, you measure the levels of a chemical and then you say, this chemical is in this obese person. So that’s what caused their obesity. Well, obesity didn’t happen overnight. And so it’s the powerful studies are not only longitudinal where you follow the health, but where you, what we call the prospective studies.
where you actually measure things in people and then follow their health. So you know what they were exposed a year ago, two years ago, 10 years ago, and then you look at the impacts. That’s one thing. So there’s kind of the issue of temporality. Then there are other things. For example, I’ve already talked about the fact that you see similar effects in multiple populations done in multiple ways. Another thing is if you have animal data. Now the animal data,
could be in laboratory animals and a wide variety. I’m not just talking rats and mice. Sometimes I might be talking birds and fish. I might even be talking about worms or something like that. That can be very informative because nature is inherently conservative. And if you see similar effects, certainly in some animals species to what we see in our epidemiology studies, that gives us confidence that it’s real.
And then a third approach is what we call mechanistic studies, where we might actually try to understand, we might do this first in our animals, we might, you know, what is causing, using obesity as an example, how does this exposure associate with cause obesity? And there we can clearly have a cause and effect. And then we can say, do we see the same thing happening molecularly or biochemically in our human population?
And sometimes we can do that by just taking a blood sample and saying, do we see this change? Sometimes we can do it by taking cells for our animals or cells, for example, from humans and showing that the same processes occur. Sometimes we do it today computationally where we can actually model and see the effects. So there are a number of
approaches that
kind of come together to increase our confidence that what we are seeing is a real effect from a certain exposure.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (22:33)
are the health, the known health implications of endocrine disruptors on the human endocrine system as well as the environment, the things that we know?
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (22:43)
Okay. So let’s, let’s say the things that I think are most obvious are impacts on reproduction because we know that our hormone systems are key there. We see that in wildlife. So for example, um, in the 1960s and seventies, there were no trout being, um, being born in say Lake Erie. And that turned out to be due to the heavy contamination by PCBs and dioxins in the lakes.
We know that in other populations, see it’s easy to look at a large population, for example, of fish or birds. We saw that impacts that they were the associations with lack of reproduction or problems with, with the health of wildlife. And as I kind of said a minute ago, you know, nature’s conservative. And I think when we ignore what we see happening in wildlife or domestic animals,
we do it at our own risk because in general they will see the same kinds of effects as we do. think I’ve wandered off a little bit your question Angie. You’re saying other kinds of effects. So it’s not only say fertility and reproduction, it’s impacts on development that can occur. We also see, for example, I think those are some of the most obvious, but I think many of you may be familiar with more and more people
are having thyroid problems. And of course our thyroid system is one of our endocrine systems. I’ve mentioned obesity and obesity is really an endocrine issue. You you need insulin in order to metabolize glucose and there’s both type one and type two diabetes, which are associated with obesity, but you can have either one without obesity. They are often associated.
but there’s a tremendous increase in type one diabetes, which is an autoimmune condition, and there are other autoimmune conditions as well. And then you also have type two diabetes again, which in many ways and obesity, both of those things are associated with some endocrine disruption as well. So you can pick pretty much any system. Hormones play a key role in that system.
I mentioned autoimmunity and I think many people are aware of the fact that autoimmune diseases are more common in women than men and there’s clearly an endocrine role, for example, in those conditions as well.
I would say that our health is extremely dependent on our endocrine system and as you perturb it, you’re likely to have health impacts.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (25:33)
Let’s talk about speaking, let’s talk about testosterone for one minute. know that men’s testosterone levels have been declining significantly for the last several decades and they kind of coincide with the increased in industrial chemicals that are being produced, as do all the endocrine disorders that we’re seeing. They run parallel. But with testosterone, as you mentioned, the fetal development, during fetal development, that’s a one-way street, right? It’s not reversible.
And so anything that can affect testosterone levels during fetal development, or maybe even during the neonatal period, hasn’t it been shown to lead to disturbed testicular development and result in reproductive organ abnormalities such as hypospadias and cryptorchitism and reduced anal genital distance, which you’ve mentioned before. And also some of the data out there, the research, and this might hit a nerve for some, but it can also lead to gender identification issues as well as negatively affect neurobehavioral development and…
and really increase the risk of hormone disorders later in life.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (26:36)
I think you’re spot on with much of
were referring to the increase in cryptorchidism and hypospadias and testicular cancer, for example, this is part of something called the testicular dysgenesis syndrome, which is related to endocrine disruption during development. We know that there are many chemicals which are associated, not all of them with all parts of that syndrome, but some of them parts.
My colleague Shana Swan has published a book about a year or two ago called Countdown in which she predicts that most men will be infertile by about 2050. And that’s associated with a decrease in sperm count, which is being seen certainly in all the developed world. The data, it’s not that it’s not being seen in the less developed world, it’s just we don’t have the data to confidently say that we’re seeing it there as well.
So I think that there are a lot of concerns. think people don’t understand that the way that you get estrogen is it basically comes from testosterone. And so during development, the brain, the female brain, the levels of testosterone get converted to estrogen specific regions of the female brain. And that is absolutely essential. So if you don’t have enough testosterone, you’re not going to have enough estrogen in the brain when you need it.
So those are examples of how everything is kind of connected and very, very, very important. You know, there is data that says, we do know that the female brain and the male brain have some differences, actual structural differences. And a lot of that again has to do with the hormonal impact that occurs during development. And so there’s a range. you know, so I don’t want to say ultra.
ultra female to possibly having more and more male content, for example, in the brain. And that’s just the reality. It’s not a clear, you know, it’s not like a switch that says this is one and this is the others. There’s actually a gradient, but there certainly are concerns if we alter that developmental milieu that we are going to alter what happens down the road.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (28:58)
right.
Well I don’t think that a lot of listeners understand that the testosterone and the sperm go together. They are have an intimate relationship. You have to have high intratesticular testosterone levels in order to produce sperm and when one lowers it’s going to lower the other. So they really go hand-in-hand when you said everything was connected that that is absolutely true.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (29:19)
Yes,
I agree.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (29:21)
can these chemicals have effects, transgenerational effects?
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (29:27)
The answer is yes, and that’s very concerning. In other words, what grandma or grandpa ate or did, we may see in the grandchildren, and we’re beginning to wonder whether we can see it beyond that. And we’re not talking about changes to your primary DNA structure. In other words, we’re not, many people may know that the DNA is passed down and you have the four bases and they have a specific sequence and
those are your genes. We’re not talking about genetic mutation. We’re talking about how genes are expressed, how they’re turned on. And this whole field, would say, it actually got started almost 100 years ago, but it was discounted until maybe 20 years ago. And it’s now more and more effort in the field of epigenetics. And what epigenetics is, is really which genes are turned on.
and which genes are turned off. You know, I can tell you in 2003 when the human genome was first decoded and there were only 20,000 genes. And we all said, wait a minute, how could there be only 20,000 genes? It doesn’t make sense, you know, that there are essentially same number of genes in a chimpanzee or maybe in a dog or maybe in a mouse, very similar. What makes all the difference is how the genes are turned on.
and off. And what we are finding is sometimes genes can be turned on kind of permanently or turned off kind of permanently. And those are kinds of things that can be passed from parent to child or grandparent to parent to child. And we have that data first appeared, I want to say about 30 or 40 years ago.
We first saw it from studies of populations, one in the UK and one in the Netherlands. And they were looking at grandparents and grandchildren where the grandparents had suffered during World War II. And they were looking at, it wasn’t an actual, it was called the…
the hunger famine, but it wasn’t really famine like we’ve seen horrible pictures from Ethiopia or Somalia or something in the past 30 or 40 years. But there wasn’t adequate nutrition. And what they found is that the grandchildren were at increased risk of a number of chronic non-communicable diseases, things like obesity and diabetes, heart disease and cancer. And that was associated with what the grandparents had undergone.
We now have data on specific kinds of chemical exposures.
harder to see in people, although because we don’t have many population studies where somebody measured chemicals in your grandparents and now they’re looking 40, 50, 60 years later at what we’re seeing in the children. We are getting some of that data. There’s a population called the California Development and Health Study, or the Child’s
health and development study from California that was started in the late in 1959 where they recruited 20,000 pregnant women and they took blood and urine specimens from those women and have continued to follow them and their children and now their grandchildren and can actually see effects in the grandchildren that are associated with the grandmother’s exposure.
There’s data coming out of something called the Framingham study, which was a recruitment of about eight or 9,000 men, all from Framingham, Massachusetts. And that was initially focused on heart disease. Now it’s looked at many other things, but they had lots of biospecimens. So they can go now and they’re looking at the children and the grandchildren. And there are a couple of other populations where that kind of information, where we have some data that we can ask those questions.
But your question about
transgenerational effects is, I would say, extremely important and of a great deal of concern to think that what happened to your grandparents has an impact on you physiologically.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (33:56)
There are so many questions that we could ask. I was compiling these questions and I have pages and pages of things, but we want to respect your time. So I would like to jump to one thing that I think is important and that is, are there things that we can do to try to minimize our exposure or perhaps reverse some damage caused by exposure?
to these chemicals.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (34:25)
I’m going to take the reverse and then I’ll go back to the avoidance. So as I said before, what happens during development is usually not reversible. What happens as an adult, you may be able to reverse. And you know, if you know what’s causing the problem, you may be able to reverse it. So that’s the good news for how you can avoid exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (34:27)
Okay.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (34:51)
It’s very difficult.
It involves changes in individual behavior, which in some ways it’s much harder to do than policy changes. Well, maybe harder to get the policies to change, but if you change the policy, you’ll impact many other people. But there are things you can do, things you can intentionally avoid. So I don’t, I’m a pragmatist. I do things that make sense to me.
and that I can easily do. So I stopped microwaving in plastic 30 years ago. Why? Because anytime you heat something, chemicals move more rapidly. You know, it’s dependent upon the warmer it is, chemicals will move more quickly. So I don’t necessarily, if I buy something in the store and it’s in plastic, I don’t necessarily get home and immediately put it into a glass or a paper container. I mean, there are people who do that. I kind of don’t have the time for that.
But I never would heat or warm something in plastic. If something is hot, I don’t put it in a plastic container. I wait till it cools. I mean, those are kind of simple things that I do. If I know, for example, that there’s often a problem knowing what’s in things. So a major source of endocrine active chemicals is often cosmetics or personal care products.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s in them and what’s a problem. There are certain websites you can go to to get information so that you buy sunscreen that has less endocrine active chemicals or certain kinds of makeup, for example, that has less endocrine active chemicals. And I would go to those websites. there’s something like the Environmental Working Group has excellent websites, the Green Science Policy Institute.
You know, I happen to eat a lot of fish, but there are certain foods that have fish advisories on them. I would say that what we get from FDA or EPA is often not as up to date as I’d like to know. So then I do go to say the environmental working groups website and get the information. mean, years ago, I learned that, for example, things like the dioxins and PCBs, which are
stopped being intentionally made 50 years ago, and yet they’re in all of us today. And I know where they go, say in the fish or in the animals. So, you know, I happen to love salmon, but, you know, I try to avoid the fatty parts of salmon. So I don’t eat the skin because that’s where a lot of the contaminants might be for other kinds of fish. It might be somewhere else. So I, you know, I, I do what I can that makes sense to me.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (37:43)
Yeah, the more you dig into it, I didn’t know the paper cups that you get the to go coffee in. The inside is lined with like a coating. And when you, when you start reading about it, you know, okay, the poor hot coffee in there and that plastic type coating, like over time, the longer the coffee’s in there, there’s the potential for it to leach out into the coffee that you’re drinking through a plastic lid.
And it’s like, then you, when you start, the more you read, it like makes you afraid almost to do anything. And then Keith and I have talked about for our stage in life. I mean, is it just too late for us? Should we not even worry about it? I mean, if we had young, young people in the house, it might be a little bit different, but.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (38:28)
Well,
let’s just say there are things that I do that I will not let my grandchildren do. Because the issue, I I guess in some ways we all say, well, so it’s too late. On the other hand, we don’t know how some of these types of chemicals may impact aging. And we all want to live as healthy as we can, as long as we can without
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (38:36)
Okay.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (38:58)
dementia and that kind of thing. So, but I totally agree. mean, I would never let my girls growing up forget, like say swordfish for them because of the mercury. Well, there are other sources of mercury and the levels of compound and swordfish, but you know, there were certain things that I was very strict about with the kids and I, or with pregnant women or young men, because sometimes we forget that dads matter and there are impacts on sperm.
that can occur preconceptionally and we want to avoid that kind of thing.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (39:31)
Speaking of websites, before I let you go, Angie pulled up a website I found very interesting that gives you your local groundwater contamination. There’s a website you can pull up that will tell you all about that and that was fascinating in that it was everywhere. There was nowhere in our area that appeared to be. Yes.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (39:48)
you talking about PFAS?
PFAS are everywhere. I often say everywhere and everything and in all of us, which is true. We all have this stuff and there are 15,000 or more of them. Not all were intentionally synthesized. Some of them are breakdown products from longer, bigger PFAS, for example, that are made. And essentially it’s not only in our groundwater, it’s in our, almost all of us have some in our drinking water.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (40:18)
Thank you.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (40:20)
And, but for most of us, unless your water is very heavily contaminated, food will be your major exposure source.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (40:29)
That was one big question I had was about the water because when I did pull up on the environmental working group, our zip code, and it tells us all the contaminants. And you know, some things were, you know, 400 plus times the limit that’s recommended. And it says it’s a cancer causing chemical. And I mean, there’s all these things and I was shocked. And in the past, when we’ve lived other places, we’ve bought like whole house water filters and different things like that, reverse osmosis.
Do you recommend water filtration systems and if so what type?
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (41:04)
I think you need to know, have a better handle of what’s in your water. And then you have to know different filtration systems will remove different things from your water. So the granular activated charcoal will remove many organic contaminants. It will remove some of the most common PFAS, but it doesn’t do a good job with some of the new alternatives.
which may turn out to be just as bad. So I think you have to know what’s in your water to pick what’s the best filtration system. The EPA does have websites that will provide information on what are the good filters to use in your area. know, overall our water is still municipal water systems in general are still better than say non-treated water often.
But you have to know what’s in your system to know what to do with it. mean, what we used to, or many people walk around buying plastic water and plastic bottles and you get a huge dose of microplastics every time from those bottles. So that’s probably not the best
solution.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (42:21)
Well, we would love to have you back if you are open to it to talk more about some of these things, particularly PFAS. And I was really interested in your information about fluoride. And I’d love to have you come back if you’re open to that. But we’ve enjoyed having you today so much.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (42:43)
I’d be happy to do that and happy. Those are some of my favorite and I say that in quotes, topics of the moment.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (42:50)
Yeah.
Well, I think it’s important for people to know because the average person really, I think, doesn’t know what’s going on. They really just don’t know the dangers that are around them. So anytime we can raise awareness and bring attention to it, we definitely want to do that.
Dr. Linda Birnbaum (43:07)
Well, I appreciate the efforts that you make and I look forward to speaking in the future. Okay. You too. Bye bye now.
Tier 1 Health & Wellness (43:11)
Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Thank you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.
