Book review: The Body Toxic

Posted on Sep 11, 2008 by Susie Collins in Blog, Media/Videos, Research, Susie Collins

Lisa at the Environmental Working Group’s Enviroblog posted a book review today of interest to us with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. What caught my attention is that the list of products the book’s author focuses on– those that contain endocrine disruptors– are some of the products that trigger adverse reactions in people with MCS. What a coincidence, huh?

Like many parents of young children, I don’t read books cover-to-cover much anymore. So it was with great pleasure that I read even the appendices in Nena Baker’s new book, The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our health’s and Well-being.

Baker spent four years researching this book and you can tell. It’s chock full of chemical history and the politics that surround it, including tidbits like Teflon’s beginnings as a coating for the valves and gaskets in the atom bomb. Her emphasis is endocrine disruptors and she digs deep into five problem areas: the common pesticide atrazine, cosmetics, flame retardants, plastics and perfluorinated chemicals. In each case she not only confronts the major issues head-on, she tells a readable story and even throws in some manageable chemistry. No easy task.

She also wraps her arms around the reason we are all afraid to buy most anything:

The vast majority of [the 10,000 widely used chemicals] have not been tested for potential toxic effects because the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976 does not require it. And the news gets shockingly worse: the EPA cannot take any regulatory action regarding a suspected harmful substance until it has evidence that it poses an “unreasonable” risk of injury to human health or the environment.

The barriers to action are so high that, according to a 2005 report by the Government Accounting Office, the EPA has given up trying to regulate chemicals and instead relies on the chemical industry to act voluntarily when concerns arise.