"Take Control of your health!"

At the beginning of each year, that’s the mantra shared again and again. Visit the gym more often. Wear sunscreen. Avoid sugar. If you can just make smarter choices, you can live a healthier life.

But sometimes choice is an illusion. New research published February 18^th in the American Journal of Public Health highlights one specific part of your health you no longer have control over.

“One word: Plastics.”

In so many ways, plastics have transformed our world. They’ve made our cars more efficient, kept medical equipment sanitary, disrupted demand for ivory, made products cheaper and lighter and more durable. And for that reason, we find ourselves surrounded by them. Throughout our everyday lives: in our drinking water, in our air, and in our environment.

Plastics carry with them a number of chemicals, added during production to give them specific traits. Some of these are likely harmless. Others, most certainly are not. One type of chemical, known as phthalates, is added to plastics to make them more flexible and durable.

With such desirable characteristics, phthalates end up in everything from raincoats and nail polish to IV bags and mattress covers. Annie’s organic macaroni and cheese even contains phthalates, with efforts to mitigate it announced just this week, nearly four years after USA Today covered their presence in the product.

The recent work of Dr. Stephanie Engle and a team of experts raises the alarm on the dangers of this particular family of chemicals. A long list of studies on animals and humans exposed to phthalates agree on a host of dangerous outcomes.

These chemicals seem to affect brain development in children and babies, even in utero. Some such effects include: “cognitive and psychomotor development, internalizing and externalizing behaviors, attention, gender-related play behaviors, social responsiveness, and visual spatial abilities of children”.

Women can pass along their own exposure to their future children. For example, one examined study found children were more likely to have ADHD if they had a mother with high exposures to phthalates. Another found children who had been exposed to high concentrations in utero to have attention and anxiety effects, even by age 16.

So avoid plastics and live a healthier life?

It’s not so simple. We’re exposed to phthalates all the time. It’s true that heating up your leftovers in a plastic container will transfer chemicals into your food. But so could the carpet dust in your air.

Even those of us really striving to go Zero Waste, perhaps reemploying a milkman to deliver organic milk in glass jars to our door, cannot avoid a chemical as ubiquitous as a phthalate. One study found that even this attempt at local, plastic-free milk contained high levels of phthalates, likely transferred into the warm, fatty milk as it flowed from the cow’s utter in plastic tubing, as even small scale operations use.

Does this make you mad? Or scared? Honestly, me too.

Without policies that require products to disclose whether they contain phthalates, as consumers we are powerless to avoid it. We can take steps—eating fewer animal-based products can help, as can choosing plastic-free alternatives when we can—but completely avoiding phthalates, or “everywhere chemicals” as they are sometimes called, is next to impossible.

If you’re a skeptic, perhaps you can hold out hope a little longer. Some who read these same studies, like the American Chemistry Council, don’t feel that the studies fully and convincingly trace a strong connection from phthalate exposure to the health effects seen. Perhaps something else is causing the observed effects. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, out of caution and concern, the team of academics and physicians behind the Engel et al. paper are advocating for phthalates to be labeled, regulated, and in some cases banned. They’ve outlined research-backed regulations that can be adopted to reduce exposure from our diets, our medications, and our buildings.

What we can do now is share our concerns and these recommendations with our representatives, limit our exposure in the ways we can, and most of all, remind each other that in this fast-moving world of innovation and unknowns, we’re doing the very best that we can for ourselves and our families.

Here’s a link to the paper by Dr. Stephanie Engle and colleagues published in the American Journal of Public Health on February 18, 2021: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306014