Posted by Larry Hoover on March 22, 2007, at 11:56:08
In reply to Lar - any opinions on this ? (nm), posted by tealady on March 21, 2007, at 21:44:57
I generally have opinions, and I'm not likely to keep them to myself. ;-)
Back in the day, this was almost precisely my field of study, though I tended to focus on strict feminizers. Phthalates fall into a class of toxicants loosely called "gender benders", due to their ability to agonize/antagonize sex steroid binding sites. Most surprisingly, some bear virtually no chemical structure similarities to the respective hormones. Moreover, some act as agonists at some hormone binding sites, yet act as antagonists at others of the same class, within the same organism. Sometimes, that's useful, e.g. tamoxifen therapy for estrogen-dependent breast cancer, but usually we know little of the cumulative or combinatorial effect of trace exposure to multiple endocrine-binding toxicants.
The more I learned about these substances, I think I actually became jaded. Everywhere you look, you can find exposures. Children's teething rings were only recently found to still contain sometimes massive amounts of phthalates, despite voluntary guidelines designed to exclude them from such applications. The EU is banning them this year, and I look forward to similar bans in North America.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8346specialtychem5.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/19/MNG2LMG0IJ1.DTLSee sidebar to the right on first article, re: recent discoveries in American children's products.
I have no doubt that phthalates are not good for us. The full-text article from which your own reference arises (first link, below) demonstrates that virtually all male US subjects tested were excreting urinary metabolites of phthalates with known anti-androgenic activity. Based on the differance between the mean and median values detected, there were some very high-concentration outliers (positive homoskedacity). Not a good thing.
About the only advice I can give is to avoid microwaving food in plastic containers of any sort. Some plastics are safe, but knowing the difference, or knowing how to know the difference, is very complicated and not foolproof.
Here's your full-text references.....I note that "members" is in the paths, so you might have to register to open them. I don't recall that being a difficult task, but I don't recall one way or the other.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:743049
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20070320/msgs/743178.html