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The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-Being
by Nena Baker
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Awards 2009 Gold Nautilus Award
Staff Pick
Listen up, America, because this is a wake-up call. The Body Toxic sheds light on the toxic threats we encounter daily in toys, clothes, cosmetics, cookware, and more. The harmful effects of everyday products on our health are staggering, and Baker's eye-opening report is essential reading.
Recommended by Ted, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews We are running a collective chemical fever that we cannot break. Everyone everywhere now carries a dizzying array of chemical contaminants, the by-products of modern industry and innovation that contribute to a host of developmental deficits and health problems in ways just now being understood. These toxic substances, unknown to our grandparents, accumulate in our fat, bones, blood, and organs as a consequence of womb-to-tomb exposure to industrial substances as common as the products that contain them. Almost everything we encounterfrom soap to soup cans and computers to clothingcontributes to a chemical load unique to each of us. Scientists studying the phenomenon refer to it as “chemical body burden,” and in The Body Toxic, the investigative journalist Nena Baker explores the many factors that have given rise to this conditionfrom manufacturing breakthroughs to policy decisions to political pressure to the demands of popular culture. While chemical advances have helped raise our standard of living, making our lives easier and safer in many ways, there are costs to these conveniences that chemical companies would rather consumers never knew about. Baker draws back the curtain on this untold impact and assesses where we go from here. Review: "This is a chilling look at the questionable safety of nearly everything we store food in, drink from, wear, walk on, rest on and drive. Chemicals used to make everything from water-repellant jackets and flame retardants to unbreakable plastics used for food storage are building up in our bodies and the environment with possible far-reaching consequences, says journalist Baker. She focuses on 'endocrine disruptors' that alter hormone levels, even in fetuses. Individual chapters consider the weed killer atrazine; phthalates found in many cosmetics; and perfluorooctanoic acid, used in nonstick and stain-repellant coatings. Lab studies have linked these chemicals to cancer, diabetes, obesity and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, among other problems. Baker blasts both Democrats and Republicans in Congress for the 'toothless' Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which leaves testing and reporting results to the manufacturer. But the companies rely on skilled public relations firms to attack scientists who raise safety concerns. The current pro-business administration also takes some licks from Baker. Although she offers suggestions for reducing exposure to these chemicals, 'No place — and no one — is immune.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: As we near the end of an administration with the most lax regulatory track record in modern memory, public fear rightly mounts about the safety of everyday chemicals. Journalists Philip and Alice Shabecoff, now grandparents, are fierce and vocal advocates for the nation's children, and their book indicts industry and negligent government regulators for a so-called "toxic assault" on children that they ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) contend "bears the hallmarks of a crime." The authors' contentions are enough to raise the ire of the most blase and scare many parents witless. Chapter five, for instance, entitled "The Scene of the Crime," offers a frightening portrait of the nursery as "arguably the most toxic room in the home." There we find little Johnny and Jennifer breathing volatile organic compounds from the freshly painted walls, and formaldehyde fumes leaching from the pressed wood used in floors and furnishings, as the kids lie on a crib mattress that contains toxic flame retardants and ingest insidious phthalate molecules from their teething rings. Frightening though it may sound, the depiction will strike most readers as overwrought. We want to know: Just how dangerous is the nursery, really? But the Shabecoffs have other plans than to offer a measured answer. Invoking Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" on the very first page of their book, they seem to think that a good, scary polemic — "We're poisoning our kids!" — is what's needed to bring the issue the attention it deserves. They may be right. Certainly, Philip Shabecoff's well-earned reputation as an elder statesman of environmental journalism lends the book credence. The husband in this journalistic team was among the nation's first full-time environmental reporters. After serving as a White House correspondent for the New York Times during Nixon's resignation and the Ford administration, he asked in 1977 to be reassigned to cover emerging environmental issues. For the next 14 years, Shabecoff wrote high-profile stories about everything from acid rain to scientists' then-mostly-unheard-of concerns about global warming. And he inspired scores of journalists like me to make reporting on the environment a central focus of our work. With "Poisoned Profits," the Shabecoffs deserve credit for forcefully urging the issue of our children's environmental health onto the national agenda where it surely belongs. Unfortunately, though, the book's hard-sell tactics ultimately work to its disadvantage. The public has come a long way since Carson's day, and the Shabecoffs' frequent failure to provide context and perspective will lead many skeptics to dismiss their important argument while likely irking even many sympathetic readers. A prime example is the book's overreaching, headline-grabbing contention that "of America's 73 million children, almost 21 million, nearly 1 out of 3, suffer from one chronic disease or another." A look at the data quickly shows that figure — and the Shabecoffs' claim of a "steep upward trend" in the incidence of toxic effects in children — to be overblown. By the authors' own count, more than half of these children (some 12 million) suffer from a constellation of ailments, including the real but notoriously ill-defined and likely over-diagnosed attention deficit disorder, whose link to toxic chemicals is only tenuously established. Hyperbole also creeps into the numbers of even more closely studied environmental effects. They write, for instance, that 310,000 children have had their "bodies and minds ... poisoned with lead," adding that today's kids "carry more than one thousand times more lead in their bones than pre-industrial age children." This may be true, but the book fails to note sufficiently that modern-day U.S. efforts to protect kids from lead have been primarily a "good news" environmental story. Data from the EPA show that the phase-out of leaded gasoline in the 1980s helped reduce airborne lead levels by an order of magnitude. A recent study of lead levels in children under 6 by the Centers for Disease Control similarly found a more than six-fold drop between 1997 and 2006 to the lowest incidence of elevated levels in decades. Don't get me wrong. I believe, as the authors clearly do, that too many American children suffer from lead poisoning and exposure to other toxins. But a book assessing the toxic threat to the nation's children requires a great deal of separating the truly alarming from the potentially worrisome, and on this score the Shabecoffs often shed more heat than light. The book does, however, include a useful appendix with common-sense ideas to minimize toxic exposure at home, from installing a water filter to using sticky doormats that remove potentially toxic particulates from the soles of incoming visitors' shoes. Despite the book's thrust as an expose, some of its best reporting addresses the work of scientists and designers seeking to create safer products. The authors acknowledge the public's receptivity to these emerging efforts, noting for instance that so-called green cleaning products "are now hip" and that organic food "is jumping off the shelves." Alas, these promising signs of change are buried deep within an alarming — and too often alarmist — jeremiad. Less sweeping in its indictment but more balanced in its approach is journalist Nena Baker's "The Body Toxic." "When it comes to toxic exposures, the personal is political," Baker writes. Fittingly, as a point of departure, the author pays $2,000 for a laboratory in Britain to conduct a so-called "body burden analysis" identifying the amounts of toxic substances in her blood. Like that of virtually anyone in the industrialized world, Baker's body contains trace amounts of everything from PCBs to flame retardants. Seeking to make sense of what the levels mean — and what kind of threats they may pose to her health — Baker has written an illuminating, consumer-oriented book that sifts through some of the latest findings about the dangers of everyday chemicals. Unlike "Poisoned Profits," which lumps together anecdotes of corporate wrongdoing, scientific studies and downright red herrings to bolster its case, Baker's readable chapters separately tackle specific toxic threats, such as the widely used herbicide atrazine or the now-notorious bisphenol A, which was (until recently) widely used as a component in plastic water bottles. Throughout "The Body Toxic," Baker gives consumers information to help them make "informed decisions," and she includes a list of a dozen steps she has taken to minimize her exposure to toxic chemicals. Like the Shabecoffs, Baker saves some of her most scathing criticism for the regulatory failures — such as the notoriously weak Toxic Substances and Control Act of 1976 — that have allowed thousands of new chemical compounds on the market without adequate testing. As a result, Americans have for decades been "kept ... in the dark about the toxicity of everyday substances." Despite differences in tone and emphasis, both books pair solid reporting with an urgent message: Chemical makers and regulators must clean up their act in light of mounting evidence of untoward health effects from many widely used chemical contaminants. Seth Shulman is the author of "Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration" and, most recently, "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret." Reviewed by Seth Shulman, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)About the Author Nena Baker is a former staff writer for The Arizona Republic and The Oregonian. Her award-winning investigation of Nike's Indonesian factories led to numerous improvements for workers. www.thebodytoxic.com
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780865477070
- Subtitle:
- How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-Being
- Author:
- Baker, Nena
- Publisher:
- North Point Press
- Subject:
- General science
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Toxicology
- Subject:
- Environmental toxicology
- Subject:
- Philosophy & Aspects
- Edition Description:
- Trade Cloth
- Publication Date:
- August 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- 3 Appendixes/Notes/Index
- Pages:
- 277
- Dimensions:
- 8.20x5.70x1.00 in. .90 lbs.
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