"Oh great, my child's going to be a mutant," says Lou Terrier as the woman explains to him why she wants to look inside his car.
--First line of a "Men's Health" article
The current issue of Men's Health magazine contains an article that, while making every effort to be scary and authoritative, actually contains no good advice about anything relevant to men's -- or anyone's -- health.
The article, "Invisible Hitchhikers May Be Lurking in Your Car," also appeared on the MSNBC website on Jan. 13.
It is replete with misleading assertions, alarmist exaggerations, and fear-mongering and is a disservice to the magazine's readers -- especially to parents, who are especially vulnerable to inflammatory "warnings" about the imminent dangers to their children's health allegedly posed by various chemicals, which, it seems, are lurking everywhere.
The piece actually begins with a line about a "mutant child," since a father is led to believe that the infant car-seat he just bought is going to turn his innocent child into a monster. This opening is certainly eye-catching but baseless as it pertains to reproductive risks from phthalates in the environment, as well as flame-retardants. Bottom line: there is no -- that's zero -- evidence from any scientific study demonstrating health effects on humans of any age (including infants and fetuses) from common exposures to car-seats, dashboards, or upholstery. Every regulatory body that has studied these chemicals agrees with this statement.
Facts notwithstanding, the writer continually refers to "toxic smog" and "rat poison" when discussing phthalates, which have been used safely in many products for a half-century.
These plasticizers revolutionized medical therapy by reducing the need for glass in IV tubing and blood product bags, as well as surgical lines and dialysis catheters. I wonder what the writer imagines would replace it, in the event that enough readers swallow the article's hysterical innuendo? Back to glass, I guess.
Rats Are Not Humans, and "Experts" Are Not Always Experts
The "experts" cited, from the "nonprofit environmental watchdog group" the Ecology Center, are pushing their own anti-chemical agenda with this hype. In fact, the closest they get to the truth is when they refer to "rat poison" -- because the only actual data they have to support their attacks comes from high-dose rat studies, which in and of themselves have almost nothing to do with human health. In fact, as far as phthalates are concerned, it is well known that the mechanism by which rats suffer ill effects, even from the extremely high doses used in testing, is completely foreign to human physiology. We discussed this fact in our pioneering, "Blue-Ribbon Panel" report on phthalates in 1999, A Scientific Evaluation of Health Effects of Two Plasticizers Used in Medical Devices and Toys: A Report from the American Council on Science and Health.
If we had to ban all the chemicals shown to harm rats, we would go back to the stone age -- and have nothing left deemed "safe" to eat, either (see our book America's War on "Carcinogens".
Don't you imagine that we'd have seen some ill effects of these products by now, after all the years we've used them, if they were so toxic?
Detecting Chemicals Does Not Mean Detecting Danger
The writer, Michael Abrams, contorts some facts about known airborne toxins, called "volatile organic compounds" (VOCs), into the phthalate discussion, although no phthalate is a VOC. His only reason for conflating these chemicals is to make a vain attempt to support his point about "toxic smog" in car interiors.
Since analytical technology is so precise nowadays, scientists can detect compounds in the air (as well as in water and even in our blood and tissues) down to parts per trillion, and less. So it should come as no surprise that phthalates, flame retardants, and a wide spectrum of other chemicals -- synthetic and natural -- can be found in indoor air, including inside cars. The same truth holds for testing our bodies: our blood, our tissues, even breast milk, contain numerous chemicals, some of which could be toxic -- at high levels. Just finding a chemical inside us does not mean it's toxic in small doses -- the CDC has made this statement very clearly, and every toxicologist who knows his stuff will agree: it's the dose, or exposure level, that makes the poison -- not its mere presence.
Men's Health magazine should not be scamming its readers into joining the anti-chemical crusade or manipulating parents about hypothetical risks to children. We have plenty of real health threats -- smoking, drugs, STDs, MRSA -- to be concerned about. I wonder how often the magazine warns parents about the dangers of not getting their kids vaccinated, for instance?
Gilbert Ross, M.D., is Executive and Medical Director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).