Hormone system; In this study volunteers for the annual festival of the Hallockville Museum Farm were instructed to bring their own refillable water bottles, with several, on site, water refill stations provide, all in an effort to “go green” this year, and to keep plastic “out of the oceans.” Also, this past week, San Francisco Airport has banned at their terminals all sales of water bottle in plastic no more sales there of 10,000 water bottles per day.
So let’s take a look at endocrine disrupters, and what they do. In a nutshell; they are chemicals that leach from various plastics into what we consume, interfering with appetite, for example, causing the body easily to gain weight. To appreciate this emerging science about endocrine disrupters, we have to take a step back and refresh our understanding about hormones in the body.
The good hormone signals
Hormones flow mostly from our different glands. Hormones are like chemical signals; also they control just about every process that happens inside us. They regulate energy levels, sleep cycles, mood, appetite, metabolism and more. All of these different hormones are beautifully, naturally managed in the body by something in the nature of a hormone computer, called our endocrine system.
The evil of endocrine disrupters is how they literally hack into the endocrine system. Endocrine disrupters actually disguise themselves as hormones. And once they hack in, these hormone imposters send out bad signals. At that point, endocrine disrupters block the good hormone signals so that the body stops receiving them. Endocrine disrupters, with their chemical disguise, get fast to work, as all hackers do, hitting us with clouded thinking, feeling hungrier; so pounding our energy levels, slowing metabolism and even attacking joints.
From sources such as the coalition, and the National Resources Defense Council website; also the Tellmewhyfacts website, we learn that endocrine disrupters, in their role as toxic hormone imposters, can be find in countless household and agricultural items: many foods, carpets, furniture, cosmetics, clothes, pesticides even store receipts. For purposes of this column, let’s consider the plastics in our lives, and particularly water bottles.
Effects of estrogen
These endocrine disrupters had the effects of estrogen and other hormone imposters. While that involved mineral water; research has stopped altogether on the endocrine disrupter content in regular water bottle in plastic. And the U.S. EPA continues a resounding silence even when pressed to require something as simple as a warning label.
Let’s not overlook some compelling questions about long-accepted risks with this plastic bottle craze in our culture. If it is known that bottled water, subjected to high temperatures, renders the water unfit to drink; what hot temperatures envelope bottled water during shipment? How long do cartons of bottled water sit in parked delivery trucks or on sun drenched, off-loading platforms, waiting to be wheeled into stores?
Maybe the time is now to boycott not only water, but also any other beverage that sits in plastic bottles for unknown lengths of time and extremes of conditions before we open each one to drink. Recall the evil of the on-going scourge of opioids; so profitable for big pharma, at the peril of millions; while the Food and Drug Administration, by design or by neglect, failed us. Common sense points to the plastics and chemical industry cabal that profits from their widely used products with harmful substances that leach into so much of what we oblivious, trusting consumers drink every day.