Endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure in US: disease burden and cost analysis

Apparently not, less so than using vinegar which is what I have been using. That being said, I'll let you know once I've eaten my lunch...

Nope! Couldn't tell at all.

So just take the farmers' word for it? How do you know the farmer is actually selling produce with pesticides as organic since they are more profitable?

Farmer's markets aren't cheaper in sf. The quality is definitely better than whole foods - but some of the other retailers have great produce and lower costs than the farmers markets. I am not trying detract from farmer's markets as they are an important part of the ecosystem - but they are pretty bougie in town.

> It mystifies me that they aren't more commonly used and have a reputation as being for rich hipsters

Are there many farmers markets open for the second shift worker getting off at, say, 10pm?

Never been to a cheaper farmer’s market in my life. I’ve lived in New York, Chicago and Baltimore. Intrigued by this concept. Can’t imagine it actually exists anywhere.

Depending on where you are, the goods at a Farmer's Market might not really be any better: http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fable/far...

They’re for rich hipsters because they’re very expensive, rarely open, and very small. In SF, vegetables at farmers markets and Whole Foods are 2-5x the cost compared to any Chinese grocery like New Mei Wah

I once bought Chilean grapes at a local "farmers" market. Since then I don't go to farmer's markets.

People sell stuff at farmer's markets that they don't actually grow themselves. There's very little oversight.

And even if they do sell their own produce, who knows where they're growing it, or if they've had the soil tested for contaminants, or if they're being honest about pesticides and fertilizers.

This was true when I lived in Georgia, but in San Francisco the farmer's markets are easily double the price of grocery stores like Safeway and Costco.

I feel like this isn't well-enough understood in my circles. Many people I know and talk to about it seem to think that organic means no pesticides, which is indeed far from true.

Interestingly enough, something similar came up when we were looking for car seats for the first time, years ago. We were trying to limit flame retardants, which was(is still?) almost impossible. The best we could do was contact manufacturers and ask them what they used and how the fabric is made and flame retardant applied. At the time there was one pretty new, really expensive car seat company that basically implied that their car seats had no flame retardant at all, which wasn't true because otherwise they would not meet standards, and a bunch of popular bloggers and (at least minor) celebrities were promoting it as chemical-free, when it really, really wasn't.

In the end we found one brand that was OEKO-TEX certified and actually told us what they used and how they used it, which was about the best we could hope to get.

How many people know what pesticides their organic foods/producers use? I hardly know, and I care about this stuff more than just about anyone I know.

> Best thing you can do is buy certified organic, which would preclude a lot of nasty agricultural practices.

Instead they use higher quantities of different nasty, outdated chemicals that were grandfathered. Repeated studies show that eating organic does not change the amount of pesticides found in consumers' blood. Organic food is not healthier.

Careful, though - if you live in an area that's been populated for a long time, that may increase your exposure to lead. Maybe get the soil tested first.

What's shocking is that buying from a farm is _more_ expensive than Whole Foods for you (or for anybody else for that matter). The price they charge wholesalers can be easily 1/10th of what you pay at a grocery store for a lot of common items, probably not beef, but vegetables for sure. To even consider the inconvenience of shopping at a farm, I'd have to see some serious cost advantages, of which there aren't any as far as I can tell.

doubt it, considering how broad the term "pesticides" is.

That's incredibly expensive

Thanks! In case anyone is curious, I found the excerpt that had what I was looking for (the list of specific endocrine disrupting compounds). From page 2:

"The probabilities had been based on assessment of the toxicological and epidemiological evidence for 15 exposure–response relations between EDCs (PBDEs, organophosphate pesticides, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, di-2-ethylhexylphthalate, bisphenol A, benzylphthalates and butylphthalates, and exposures to combinations of these substances; appendix) and disorders (loss of intelligence quotient [IQ] points and consequent intellectual disability, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, adult and childhood obesity, adult diabetes, crypt-orchidism, testicular cancer, male factor infertility, early cardiovascular mortality due to reduced testosterone, leiomyomas, and endometriosis) with use of a modified Delphi approach to achieve consensus."

https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(16)302... works

Regardless of whether glyphosate (the "active ingredient" so they say) is an endocrine disrupter, which is controversial, there is no question that Roundup - the pesticide formula containing glyphosate in certain proportion with a host of other ingredients, the formula which is secret, contains other ingredients with known toxic profiles.

Glyphosate gets most of the (cooked up) research to the detriment of the people being exposed to many other mostly ignored co-formulants. Here is a study that says as much: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4808927/

>It was demonstrated for the first time that endocrine disruption by GBH could not only be due to the declared active ingredient but also to co-formulants. These results...challenge the relevance of the acceptable daily intake (ADI) value for GBHs exposures, currently calculated from toxicity tests of the declared active ingredient alone.

Monsanto teamed up with Bayer to gain influence within the EU. Monsanto was having trouble bribing EU officials. Bayer already have them in their pockets. Might not be good for PR, but Monsanto was terrified because the EU almost banned Glyphosate last year. Bayer itself does not have a good PR image either.

They're going to make a killing by bundling products to farmers, or they'll do what DuPont did and spin out part of Monsanto into a standalone company designed to burden that spinoff with as much debt and liability as possible.

See Chemours

roundup is likely more harmful then glyphosate alone, which has been itself confirmed as harmful in a handful of investigations:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300483X0...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257596/ "Surprisingly, Roundup is always more toxic than its active ingredient... We conclude that endocrine and toxic effects of Roundup, not just glyphosate, can be observed in mammals."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00244-006-0154-8

"The cytotoxic, and potentially endocrine-disrupting effects of Roundup are thus amplified with time. Taken together, these data suggest that Roundup exposure may affect human reproduction and fetal development in case of contamination. Chemical mixtures in formulations appear to be underestimated regarding their toxic or hormonal impact."

This may be the current assessment for mammals, but there is insufficient evidence about the endocrine effects on non-mammals. I know the original link and discussion is in relation to humans, but it's worth noting.

All animals with a nervous system have hormone-secreting structures, analogous to the endocrine system of mammals. Several studies have highlighted serious sub-lethal neurological impacts of glyphosate (not as a formulation) on agriculturally-important arthropods. I'm not aware of any conclusive research, but it seems reasonable to anticipate some of these effects may be related to endocrine signaling. Either way, the toxicity is clearly more severe for non-mammals, and their disease burden has direct and indirect costs to us.

You might love reading Brave New World (if you are not purposely paraphrasing it here), kinda blew my mind in high school so not sure what effect it would have on adults now.

The benefits of nicotine on focus, concentration and mental ability are reasonably well established. It is unfortunate that it comes packaged with so many nasties in cigarette smoke. Of course you can get nicotine inhalers that avoid this problem. To avoid too much of a blast/crash, you can spray it onto the skin.

I think if nicotine were discovered for the first time today it would be considered a wonder drug.

The positive correlation between testosterone and violence is not a myth in animals.

It has also been observed in humans, though the correlation is weak[1].

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135917890...

You posted pseudoscience of your own to counter pseudoscience.

Where is the evidence that lack of "post cycle therapy," which isn't accepted science in itself, and estrogen causes violence?

I don't see any evidence of what you suggest on Cochrane Collab.

https://us.cochrane.org/

I just wanted to say (and the edit window is gone), although I disagree with you, I want to encourage discussion, even of controversial ideas (I know, I have plenty!). It's a shame you're downvoted.

Another major difference between the pseudoestrogen problem and proper hormone replacement: consent.

The general public has not consented to poorly-understood, poorly-controlled hormone therapy.

Most of us are already nonviolent, so the proposed decrease in violence isn't even possible for us. The only net effect, therefore, is likely negative.

It's kind of like saying that a minority of men have a testosterone deficiency, so let's put it in the water supply. Doesn't it sound more insane when formulated that way?

The entire society is, in fact, experiencing it today, with 1000s of chemicals, as the Lancet article describes. Most are harmful. But if there are some beneficial ones in there, the medical literature doesn't seem to have a way to account for them.

Somewhat playing devil's advocate (I don't particularly buy the specific pseudoestrogen example here), there's a real reporting bias in these random environmental studies. Assume that the environment is always changing, and that some of these changes will be good, some of them will be bad, and most of them will be neutral. If a change is bad, then eventually some study will discover it, there will be a widespread press cycle, and outrage will eventually attempt to revert it. If a change is good, however, it will probably never get published, and if it does it will likely not generate much notice.

This is as much a statement about psychology than about biology, and what the definitions of "good" and "bad" are. Us paying more attention to potential negative consequences than positive ones is an example of loss aversion, and the resulting pressure to repress change (because negative changes get more airtime than positive one) is an example of status quo bias. They're often rational from the POV of an individual - you exist by virtue of being well-adapted to the present environment, and so any change in the environment is more likely to harm your own fitness function than individuals who do not yet exist - yet they're irrational from the POV of the system, where you would expect good and bad changes to occur in equal numbers and individuals who are no longer suited to the current environment to be replaced by ones who are.

Come to think of it, this may be behind the observed effect where any radical technical innovation or societal change that happens in your teens and twenties is an awesome opportunity to be capitalized on, while any such change that happens in your thirties or later is a threat to the natural order of things. In your late 20s and early 30s you typically make (nearly) irrevocable commitments in life that are the best adaptations you have to the world as it exists then; any change that happens afterwards will relatively benefit younger people who have not made such commitments more than it will benefit you. For biological changes the benefits are shifted even earlier: any change in the environment that affects relative survival rates will benefit people yet to be born more than people already born, because the latter have already won the evolutionary lottery while the future winners among the former still face selection pressure.

To be cynical regarding that link, there are 2 separate facts presented but not a good explanation of why the two are related.

1) A chinese electricity company began collecting wireless sensor data in 2014

2) In April 2018 their profits were up $315M

Did they begin doing more business? Did their competition remain the same? Are they subsidized by the government somehow?

So many reasons why a utility company could be more profitable, they should explain the connection between the monitoring and profitability, otherwise someone can probably show you evidence that switching brands of office coffee increase profitability 200%.

Testosterone levels halved over the last 20 years? You need to back that up with some evidence please.