Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) and Flame Retardants
From The Toxic Sandbox (2007) by Libby McDonald; pages 103 – 104:
David Carpenter is the director of the Institute for Health and the Environment. He explains that like lead and mercury, PCBs are particularly toxic to the fetal brain, affecting both short-term memory and a child’s ability to concentrate for long periods of time. Scientists like Dr. Carpenter have figured out that PCBs harm the fetal brain by affecting a mother’s thyroid function, and they suspect that PBDEs may do the same.
Located in the throat, a mother’s thyroid gland secretes thyroxine (T4), a hormone that is crucial to fetal brain development. Until babies in the womb develop their own glad, at about midgestation, they rely on their mother’s thyroid hormones, which, attached to carrier proteins, are delivered to the fetus. Scientists believe this powerful ability to interfere with thyroid function at a crucial time of brain development is the means by which prenatal PCB exposure smothers human intelligence, dousing a child’s ability to effectively learn and pay attention.
Additionally, the majority of the scientific studies report that exposure to PCBs cause cancer. The World Health Organization, the National Cancer Institute, and the Environmental Protection Agency have all categorized PCBs as a probably carcinogen.
From The Toxic Sandbox (2007) by Libby McDonald; pages 105; by Dr. David Carpenter:
If you wait until you are pregnant to alter your diet it is too late. The half-life of methyl mercury in the body is about seventy days. This means that if you want to get pregnant and to avoid the possibility that the methyl mercury will harm the intellectual development of your child, you should stop eating fish with high mercury concentration at least one year before getting pregnant. For POPs [persistent organic pollutants -- shorthand for PCBs and PBDEs] the situation is even worse. The half-life of most POPs is on the order of ten years. Therefore even little girls who eat POP-contaminated fish will still have much of it in their bodies when they get to be of reproductive age. My advice: if you are female, avoid POP-contaminated fish from birth to menopause.
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