Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'd like to show you a picture of my daughter.
She's three years old.
She is three years old, and we will have a picture of her coming.
Here she is.
There she is.
She's three years old,
and she often thinks she's a triceratops.
And I've been planning any future pregnancies that she might have
years from now, decades from now,
from the time before she was born.
Now this idea, this new idea,
that we should be planning our toddlers' babies while they're still babies,
or better yet, while you're still pregnant with these babies,
might be unsettling and disturbing to you.
But it turns out that this might be one of the most profound ways
that we can protect our children's future fertility and their future health.
And not just their health but their children's health.
Now I'll explain this in a bit, but I want you to first imagine a newborn baby.
What do you think of? What do you see?
Innocence?
The future?
Some of you might be thinking poopy, smelly diapers.
I guarantee you what you're not thinking of is toxic waste dump.
But you need to start thinking about those words in association with newborn babies
because human newborns are one of the most polluted species on the planet.
That's one of the most profoundly depressing things that I found out
when I was researching my film and app, "Toxic Baby";
the idea that our babies are depositories
for hundreds, if not thousands, of chemicals.
Let me show you some figures:
In the United States,
a study was done which found 287 chemicals present in umbilical cord blood samples.
180 of those are known to cause cancer in humans and animals.
So for those of you who don't know,
umbilical cord blood is the blood that is transferred from the mother to the baby
in the womb while she's pregnant.
So these babies are being born with 180 known carcinogens in their blood.
The Netherlands did a similar study, and they found a very similar effect.
Chemicals associated with disturbing and serious adult diseases and conditions
are already present in birth in these children.
The tragedy in all of this: not one single sample turned up clean.
There has never been an umbilical cord blood study done
that has shown no toxic chemicals present.
Imagine that: not one single study.
And the people who manufacture these chemicals,
the people who use these chemicals in their products will tell us
that this isn't a big deal
because chemicals occur in such low doses, it doesn't actually matter.
It's based on a doctrine that is: the dose makes the poison.
In my opinion, possibly responsible for one of the greatest miscarriages
in modern day science and biology,
"the dose makes the poison" was partly responsible
for unleashing thousands of chemicals into our environments,
into our bodies, our soils, our water, our air.
It was the map that was used to navigate a better living through chemistry,
this modern-day, plastic, pesticide-full lifestyle that we live.
The problem with that map is that it's incorrect and outdated.
Now it's as outdated as the map that Christopher Columbus rejected
when he set sail for the Americas.
Which is ironic, because the gentleman who came up with this idea,
"the dose makes the poison," was born the year after
Columbus first set foot on America's soil.
Now, the idea that a 500-year-old doctrine
should be responsible for helping to determine how much toxicity
our children are exposed to feels kind of weird.
I want to show you the guy.
Here's an image of who I call the grumpy dude,
who is known to science as Paracelsus, came up with this idea.
He was a great thinker of his time.
And the idea that the dose makes the poison probably makes sense
to a lot of people.
Let me explain a little bit more about that.
It's the idea that big doses have big effects;
small doses have low to no effects.
So it's the idea that perhaps if you have a thumb full of brandy
you might feel warm and fuzzy.
You drink the whole bottle, you'll probably fall over.
The problem is, is that toxic chemicals don't seem to behave in that kind of way.
Low amounts, low doses of toxic chemicals
have the ability to interfere with the human body,
have the ability to interfere with the way that hormones in the body are regulated,
the way that hormones express themselves.
I want to show you a clip from one of the most pioneering researchers,
a gentleman called Dr. Pete Meyers,
co-author of a book called "Our Stolen Future,"
who's been across this very new science for decades now.
Here he describes how important hormones are
to the expression of genes in a baby.
(Video) Pete Meyers: The reason why this is important
is because hormones are responsible for controlling
the way the genes are being turned on and off,
particularly during development,
during the time that the fetus is growing from that tiny embryo,
to birth and beyond into childhood.
Hormones are the control system
for making sure genes are being turned on and off
at the right time in development.
When it happens at the wrong time, then you set the fetus off
on a course of development that could cause problems.
If the genes to make sure the hand has five fingers
aren't acting in the right way, at the right time,
it may have three, it might have none.
This issue of genes being turned on and off at the right time in development
is the most central challenge to ensuring that your baby is healthy.
Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: So chemicals that have the ability
to disrupt the way that hormones function are called endocrine disruptors.
And when you interfere with a hormone like testosterone,
the effects can be very blatant and pretty profound.
If you expose a mother rat to a chemical like phthalates, for example,
her pups will be born with penises like this.
And for those of you who don't spend much time looking at rat's penises,
these are not normal penises.
They're deformed.
Now these phthalates, these plasticizers in vinyl and PVC
are amongst several chemicals known to disrupt the testosterone function.
Interesting thing is, this condition, hypospadius,
is also widely seen in newborn boys
along with a condition called cryptorchidism,
where the testicles have not descended into the scrotum at birth.
I want to show you what that looks like.
You will see that the urethra, through which a male would urinate,
in these cases, one is not at the tip, on the shaft,
the other one seems to be part of the testicles.
That is not normal.
I think we can all agree that that's not normal.
And I'm going to show you some images. They are extraordinarily graphic.
If you are of a delicate constitution, you might want to look away.
You've been warned.
The treatment for this is incredibly invasive
and painful surgery.
These are newborn baby boys' penises.
Gentlemen of the audience, the penis is in peril.
And not just the penis, balls, sperm,
all the other aspects of the male reproductive tract is in danger here.
Now before you all rise up en masse, rush out the door,
down to the European Union down the road, and claim, "Why is this happening?" -
and we'll get to the European Union in a second -
you need to know that there are other aspects,
not quite so threatening to your manhood but equally profound
in the effects on a young child.
The pioneering researcher, Bruce Lanphear and his team,
just released a video that looked at how very low levels of chemicals
have the ability to affect the human brain in children.
Low, low amounts of chemicals.
Now if you get a chance to watch this video, you should check it out.
You can get it online.
But I'm going to show you a small clip of it,
and it's called, "Little Things Matter."
What Bruce and his team have done is they've used marbles
as an analogy for one part per billion,
which is an infinitesimally small amount.
That's like taking two tablespoons of sugar
and dropping them into an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Those are the minute amounts
that are shown to have profound effects on the brain.
The interesting thing is the people who make these things know that,
because pharmaceutical chemicals, pharmaceutical drugs,
have the same ability to act at such low concentrations.
Bruce and his team find the same effect with...
they talk about how Ritalin, the drug used for ADHD and hyperactivity in children,
has the same effect in those low-dose concentrations
as the amounts that are found for a chemical like lead, for example.
Tiny doses do make a difference.
Now, when you see that chemicals can behave like drugs,
they act like drugs,
and they're effective in the same amount, same concentrations as drugs,
it makes you ask this question, it made me ask this question, which is:
if chemicals behave like drugs, why aren't they regulated like drugs?
Which leads me back to the European Union.
Now the European Union did an incredible, amazing thing
when they brought in the REACH legislation not so long ago,
starting to look at regulating toxic chemicals;
much further ahead than what the Americans are doing, or trying to do.
But the European Union has become a little bit stuck
when it comes to endocrine disruptors.
The committee that's in charge of dealing with endocrine disruptors,
regulating them, defining what they are,
should have at least been on the way to this process a year ago.
They should have had at least a definition.
A year later, we're still waiting.
The science for this is very clear.
Very clear.
There are thousands of studies that have shown these effects.
The politics of this, however, are very hazy.
You could imagine, there's a lot of money at stake.
So while the European Union ums and ahs
and tries to work out what they can do, and what they should do,
and what's the right thing to do,
parents like myself are left trying to be chemists,
biologists, geneticists, doctors,
trying to regulate our children's own toxicity.
And that's incredibly unfair.
I shouldn't have to be thinking about my future great grandchildren
while I'm pregnant with my child.
That's an incredibly unfair position to put anyone in;
the knowledge that I'm responsible for my children's toxic chemical exposure.
So I ask you today to think about this question.
I ask the European Union and its committees
that look at regulating these chemicals to ask this one question, which is this.
This is the idea
[There is so much debate about the fetus' right to life...]
about fetuses and chemicals.
[What about: the morality of millions of polluted fetuses?]
Child's voice: Are we raising
the most polluted generation
in the history of the planet?
PJS: Is it OK to have polluted babies
knowing what the consequences
for those pollution levels are?
Thank you.
(Applause)