"How the Leaded Gas Industry Got Away With It"
As the whistle-blowing pediatrician who helped expose
the Flint drinking water crisis put it, "The people in Flint have a 20-year
lower life expectancy than people in a neighboring suburb.
We were already struggling with every barrier to our children's success.
Then we gave them lead."
Her research showed that the switch in water supplies from the Great Lakes
to the polluted Flint River "created a perfect storm" for lead contamination,
doubling the percentage of kids with elevated lead levels in their blood.
Whereas out in the suburbs, where they kept the same water supply,
children's lead levels stayed about the same.
That's how we knew it was the switch in water supplies.
That's what broke the story of the Flint crisis, a doubling of elevated lead levels.
But wait a second: even before the switch, when everyone was getting the same water,
lead levels in children in Flint were twice that of the suburbs.
There was already a doubling in elevated lead levels in Flint
and other poor communities around the country,
yet, where have all the crisis headlines been?
So even with all the bottled water in the world,
the children in Flint will continue to live in a lead polluted environment.
Many have pointed out the irony that the new water from the Flint River
was so corrosive that the General Motors plant switched back
to a clean water source when they started noticing rust spots on their new parts.
All the while water quality complaints from Flint residents were being ignored,
but there is an additional irony.
General Motors is a major reason why the world is so contaminated with lead
in the first place, as GM invented leaded gasoline.
Shortly after manufacture began,
workers...began to become floridly psychotic and die."
In the wake of blaring headlines about the lead-poisoned workers,
public health leaders "warned of the potential for damage to broad swaths
of the population" posed by putting a well-established toxin into gasoline.
"Yet despite these warnings, millions upon millions...were harmed...
and this entirely preventable poisoning still occurs today."
Virtually all the lead in the environment today is because we put it there.
It used to be locked away deep underground or under the ocean,
but that was before we drove it around the Earth.
By the 1970s, "200,000 tons of lead was emitted from cars and trucks
in the United States each year, mostly in urban areas."
Otherwise, the industry would have to use a higher octane gas,
which is less profitable.
So "the oil and lead industries... successfully thwarted government efforts
to limit lead in gasoline for 50 years."
But how were they able to do that?
"Because the industry assured the scientific community and the public
that there was no danger."
OK, I could see how a gullible public could be swayed by slick PR,
but how do you manipulate the scientific community?
By manipulating the science.
"The lead industry was able to achieve its influence in large part
by being the primary supporter of research on the health effects of lead,"
and they got the best science money could buy.
"Long before Big Tobacco, the lead industry understood
the inestimable value of purchasing 'good science.'"
Consequently, the vast majority of relevant studies published for decades
were favorable to the lead industry.
They even sent a delegation to try to convince the EPA
that lead regulation wasn't necessary because, they claimed,
"lead was an essential nutrient required for optimum growth and development."
Of course, the exact opposite is true, toxic to development,
but there are nutritional interventions that can help alleviate lead toxicity,
for example, food components that can help decrease the absorption of lead
and help flush it out of your body.
I've got a series of three videos coming up on specific dietary interventions,
particular foods to eat, but — spoiler alert —
in general, "food patterns that reduce susceptibility to lead toxicity
[tend to be] consistent with [just] recommendations for a healthy diet."