Transcript
Speaker: I'll now move on to man -made chemicals and additives. I'll start off with this quote from a study. The two main impediments to prevention of neurodevelopmental deficits of chemical origin are the great gaps in testing chemicals for developmental neurotoxicity and the high level of proof required for regulation. New precautionary approaches that recognize the unique vulnerability of the developing brain are needed for testing and control of chemicals.
Speaker: So what the authors of this paper are saying is that we are not testing most of these chemicals, whether they're toxic to humans, to developing fetuses, to babies. We're not testing nearly enough how toxic they are or aren't.
Speaker: And even when we do find some proof that something is toxic, there's a lot of extra research and hoops that people need to jump through in order for regulators to actually ban these substances. So it's unfortunately, it's kind of backward. Instead of manufacturers having to go jump through hoops to get something approved,
Speaker: they just go and get it out on the market get it out into the environment and unfortunately terrible things need to happen a lot of people need to get hurt before these regulators actually get off their butts and do something about banning toxic substances so it's it's a little bit shocking
Speaker: It's a little bit kind of scary, which is why we need to arm ourselves with knowledge. We need to educate ourselves and we need to learn how to steer clear of these potentially very toxic chemicals that are polluting our environments, our diets, and so on.
Speaker: Some of the most common exposures that we have are to herbicides and pesticides, plastics and plasticizers, food additives, so artificial colors, flavors, emulsifiers, preservatives, fluoride and chlorine additives in water, fire retardant chemicals, there's tons of chemicals in household cleaning products, there's chemicals in sunscreen,
Speaker: and of course air pollution is a major source of toxic exposure now we can't do much about air pollution in many cases but these other things on this list there's a lot we can do so what i'll do in the rest of the module is i'll look at a few of these
Speaker: which are generally the most common and large sources of exposure. And in the coming modules, then we will look at how to reduce our exposure to these. So you learn which products to steer clear of and what substitutions for certain ones you can make in order to minimize your child's exposure to these toxic chemicals.
