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by Cameron Smith
If you think that by drinking bottled water you'll be protected from chemical contaminants in tap water, think again, because you couldn't be more wrong.
You breathe in far more contaminants from tap water than you would normally get from drinking it. For instance, in a ten-minute shower, you ingest the same amount of contaminants as you would by drinking 2.25 litres of tap water.
As Sandra Steingraber points out in Having Faith, An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood (Perseus Publishing, 2001, $39.50), the moment you turn on a tap, flush the toilet, or start a washing machine, contaminants are released into the air you breathe. A dishwasher, she says, is the most efficient appliance in a household for releasing contaminants into the air.
The contaminants are volatile, and the damnable thing is, we can't get rid of the worst of them: the PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), dioxins, furans, DDT, and other kinds of organochlorines. They're here to stay far into the future. They have long lifespans before they degrade to harmless levels.
Like water, they evaporate in warm weather, travel with the breezes, then condense and fall to earth when temperatures cool. So, they hop-skip around the globe, landing in lakes and rivers, and thereby finding their way into tap water.
They also land on grass and plants, and thus end up in the meat, vegetables, grains, fish, and dairy products we eat. Once in our bodies, they lodge and accumulate in fat, and then they get passed on to babies who reside at the pinnacle of the world's food chain.
As fetuses, they take their nourishment from their mothers' blood, and as babies, from their mothers' breast milk. In so doing, they receive contaminants that have been collected and passed all the way up the food chain.
The tragic result for fetuses is that the developing brain is where fat is collected. This can lead to birth defects, the most horrible being anencephaly — being born without a brain. But research indicates that, even when there appear to be no physical defects, it can also lead to reduced learning and memory abilities.
The tragic result after birth is that the brains of babies continue developing and continue storing contaminant-laced fat. Brains double their weight in the first year after birth.
Steingraber notes that 60 per cent of the fat in breast milk comes from deposits accumulated in mothers' bodies. Only 30 per cent comes from their daily diets. The remaining 10 per cent is manufactured in their mammary glands.
The dilemma for mothers, therefore, is whether to breast feed their babies. Steingraber breast fed her baby for two years, even though breast-fed babies have contaminant levels 10 to 15 times higher than babies fed on formulas.
There are many benefits to breast feeding, she says. Breast-fed babies who, for whatever reason, don't demonstrate ill effects from higher contaminant levels, have IQ scores three to five points higher than babies fed on formulas. They also develop vision and motor skills earlier, and have fewer emotional and behavioural problems.
As well, they have a better chance at survival. According to Steingraber, 4,000 formula-fed babies die every year in the United States each year from infectious diseases that would have been avoided had the babies been breast fed and received immune cells and antibodies from their mothers.
It's a dilemma that won't be going away, because the contaminants are so long-lived. There are a couple of things we can do, however. One is to understand how contaminants are able to interfere with our well-being, and Steingraber's book is an excellent source of information. She is a biologist on the staff at Cornell University. Another it to eat lower on the food chain. In any event, we should prevent the creation of additional contaminants. And the way to do that is to ban any chemical that accumulates in body fat until there is one-hundred-per-cent proof that it is safe.
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