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Phthalates

| Sat Apr. 18, 2009 3:08 PM PDT

Blue Girl comments on recent research showing that phthalates (substances added to plastics to increase their flexibility, pronounced THAL-ates) may be one of the causes of skyrocketing childhood obesity:

I spent a significant portion of a 24-year career in endocrine research. In the first fifteen years, I did not see a single case of Type II [diabetes] in a juvenile. Toward the end, I routinely taught diabetic education counseling classes that were geared exclusively to groups of teenagers....That is a lot of diabetic kids. And what I can tell you anecdotally is that every single one of the things that have gotten the blame for the epidemic I have observed to exist, so this is a 'big picture' problem if ever there was one.

Diet and exercise can not be discounted, we have always had chubby kids who didn't eat a proper diet or get enough exercise, but very few were considered obese, and literally none of them were diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a disorder of the endocrine system....But we can't overlook the revolution in food packaging over the last thirty years or so, either. When I was a kid, in the 60s and 70s, soda pop (which wasn't made from corn syrup back then) came in aluminum cans or glass bottles, not in plastic; and meat came in butcher paper, not polystyrene trays and plastic wrap.

Childhood obesity is far higher than it used to be, but it's not brand new: there have always been kids who were sedentary and ate lots of crappy food. But 30 years ago, these kids just got flabby, they didn't get diabetes. Today they do, and it's possible that phthalates may play a role in this. More research, please.

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Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here.

Comments

Thanks Kevin!

Submitted by Blue Girl on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 3:50 PM PDT.

As always.:)

Differential Diagnosis

Submitted by Godless Heathen on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 4:48 PM PDT.

A man walks into his doctor's office with both arms lopped off at the shoulders and the massive blood loss you'd expect to accompany such a condition. His doctor looks him up and down and says "Have you been getting enough iron in your diet? You look a little anemic"

studies

Submitted by supersaurus (not verified) on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 4:57 PM PDT.

I wandered around in the forest of links and eventually came up with one report that cites a couple of studies that talk directly about the link as causation, not just correlation. due to the stupid css used for previewing I can't tell that the words "one report" above are a link, but they seem to be hot at least in the preview text. just one more little MJ annoyance...

links

Submitted by supersaurus (not verified) on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 4:59 PM PDT.

well, at least the words "one report" are underlined once I actually submitted. would it be too much trouble for the preview to do the same so I don't have to guess what the sanitizer is doing?

Preview

Submitted by Kevin Drum on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 5:42 PM PDT.

Supersaurus: If it makes you feel any better, preview does the same thing to me when I preview blog posts. Just one of the many CSS/code/design problems we're still trying to fix around here. However, if you run your mouse over any links, it should turn into the little hand thingy. That's how you can tell if your link is actually there in preview mode.

And, yeah... Not.

Submitted by Crissa (not verified) on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 6:12 PM PDT.

Yes, there's more plastics. But you know what? My meat never came on butcher paper. My soda always came in plastic coated aluminum or plastic bottles. And while we still had rotary phones and party lines... ...None of my peers had type II diabetes. Admittedly, small sample, only a few hundred kids I knew. However, you know what has changed? Less local foods. More factory farm produced foods. More corn syrup. More chemical fillers in foods - to the point that until I was an adult, you couldn't get sour cream 'ingredients: sour cream' at any of the chain stores. Even while we lose the local grocery store, that's slowly changing, Safeway actually has a non-filler option, plus one or two other brands that are the old fashioned food. Blaming plastics is like blaming vaccines - everyone gets them, they're more common, therefore maybe they have something to do with it! Maybe they do. But it's a strange conclusion to come to when the sugar intake of children has changed drastically from twenty years ago when I entered high school and they were arguing over whether we should be able to sell candy on the school grounds!

Vaccines are safe. Plastics

Submitted by whatever (not verified) on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 7:25 PM PDT.

Vaccines are safe. Plastics are making diabetic man boobed children out of our precious snowflakes. Vaccines are safe and only nutbag religious godbags would say otherwise.

Kevin's just a shill for the

Submitted by felinecannonball on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 7:46 PM PDT.

Kevin's just a shill for the analytical chemistry industry. If they can't measure it by the picogram it's not a problem.

and this has been in the literature for a while...

Submitted by Nat on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 7:50 PM PDT.

http://children.webmd.com/features/smaller-penis-size-and-phthalates

Not looked for, not found

Submitted by natural cynic on Sat Apr. 18, 2009 10:32 PM PDT.

Maybe nobody checked. Type 2 diabetes was thought to be rare in children, adolescents and young adults until fairly recently. It was just not thought to be common enough to be tested, so glucose tolerance tests, assays for hyperinsulinemia and other symptoms of the Metabolic Syndrome were not checked. The few cases that were checked were called MODY - Mature Onset Diabetes in Youth. Then, a few researchers decided to actually look at the children and grandchildren of type 2's and found that impaired glucose tolerance etc. showed up at earlier ages. They may not have been checked for high blood sugar and if they were, they were not checked after fasting so any high sugars may have been attributed to something they just ate. There is no doubt that there is more obesity and much of it is due to eating too much and moving too little. That, along with genetics, may be the whole story or it may be adenovirus 37 or something else ... or plastics.

Another thing about

Submitted by NancyIrving (not verified) on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 1:56 AM PDT.

Another thing about pthalates: A lot of people now do much of their cooking in a microwave, and they mostly use plastic containers and/or plastic wrap to do it. It's well-known that pthalates leach out of plastic more when the plastic is heated.

fat soluble

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 7:17 AM PDT.

You would expect anything fat soluble to accumulate more in fatter individuals. Dioxins, for instance are higher in fatty fish but no one asserts that these species are fat due to dioxins. It seems like a study that was pre-ordained to produce this result.

Correlation vs causation

Submitted by JohnH on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 8:16 AM PDT.

I'm always suspicious when there's a correlation but no causal model. Here the sloppiness of the research seems particularly glaring. They simply looked for evidence of the chemical, which amounts to evidence that the children ate packaged food, which we already knew to be a problem on a scale never seen in the past. They made no effort to see if any kids ate similar food with different packaging. Intuitively, too, the mechanism is hard to picture, and the quantity of leached plastic relative to the quantity of other chemicals in the food (or fats and sugars) isn't stated and seems likely to be small. That doesn't rule out the hypothesis. It just means it barely passes the minimum of even formulating a hypothesis. I'd ignore it, like most of what the media dignifies as health news. The media just doesn't get that science isn't the same thing as the latest study. It's the weight of repeated studies, the explanatory weight of models, and growing consensus.

Phthalates poisoning our

Submitted by sonny (not verified) on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 11:31 AM PDT.

Phthalates poisoning our precious bodily fluids?! You might just get that extra research.

When I was a kid, soda came

Submitted by J Bean (not verified) on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 12:06 PM PDT.

When I was a kid, soda came in 6oz glass bottles or 12oz aluminum cans. It was an occasional treat for dessert. It certainly wasn't served in 32oz buckets or even served on a daily basis. I was driving to work one morning recently and saw a chubby ten year old working on a 20oz breakfast Sprite while he waited for the bus. I suspect the size of the package has more to do with the weight gain than the packing material. You can knock back a lot of calories without noticing if you drink them rather than chew them.

Correlation is not

Submitted by anon (not verified) on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 7:54 PM PDT.

Correlation is not causation. We don't know it's the vastly larger quantities of soda. The phthalates research, well that's science. Good libtard science.

The largely unregulated

Submitted by Jimm (not verified) on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 12:24 PM PDT.

The largely unregulated dumping of chemicals into the environment and human bodies over the past 80 years has truly been a tragedy and enduring environmental and human health concern, and we should finally do something about it. That said, I was unconvinced when initially reading about this study, at least as far as causation, as it immediately occurred to me, "are the fatter kids just accumulating more of this chemical because they have more adipose tissue for it to chill in"? So, sort of micro-bioaccumulation in action, in our kids (and most likely in adults too)? Either way, it still shows this is extremely dangerous to our kids, because the reality is they are fatter these days, so whichever way the causation goes in the two scenarios I've addressed, this is a very serious problem. Of course, there may not be any causation at all, only correlation, but my initial intuition is to doubt that the link being this chemical and obesity isn't causal in some fashion, and I'm actually more skeptical of the notion that this chemical actually causes obesity, when we have so many other more obvious reasons for this obesity phenomenon, which should be a first priority of society to address and fix.

In my research, I have

Submitted by Luther on Sun Apr. 19, 2009 9:56 PM PDT.

In my research, I have discovered that black pepper is a likely cause of all cancers. After interviewing a sample of two patients, both were found to be users of black pepper. An old German guy I knew was really down on saltpeter. A doctor I played tennis with linked organic chlorides and breast cancer. Then again when I was a kid, Cokes came in 8 oz bottles and were used as an occasional treat. Now I see baby bottles full of Pepsi.

...soda pop (which wasn't made from corn syrup back then) came in aluminum cans or glass bottles, not in plastic; and meat came in butcher paper, not polystyrene trays and plastic wrap.

Soda pop still comes in aluminum cans, and many items in glass bottles. Many people who are too lazy to wash dishes (like me) eat off paper plates. Shall we just dismiss aluminum, glass, and paper because we are biased against plastics? There are so many influences in the environment, it is difficult to sort them out.

Model

Submitted by DWN (not verified) on Mon Apr. 20, 2009 5:20 AM PDT.

tagged as:

result

For those that requested a plausible model on phthalates and obesity, look no further than here: http://www.jbc.org/cgi/reprint/282/26/19152 Research is indeed interesting. Not too surprising either, because our fat cells are now known to be part of our endocrine system. DWN

Phthalates - we are excreting them into the environment

Submitted by J. Frank Parnell on Mon Apr. 20, 2009 9:25 AM PDT.

My wife is involved in water quality issues, and discovered the discharge of Seattle water treatments plants is sky high in phthalates. The probable source? Stuff we eat and drink that was packaged in plastic.

The question is whether the dosage is high enough...

Submitted by Stephen Daugherty (not verified) on Mon Apr. 20, 2009 10:27 AM PDT.

...to really cause problems. Ultimately, many substances can cause cancer and problems at high enough doses. The question is whether those amounts are every reached. I'd lay more blame at the feet of the High Fructose Corn Syrup than at those of the Pthalates.

Phthalates

Submitted by seakat on Mon Apr. 20, 2009 4:38 PM PDT.

I'm not very scientific, so was unable to digest much of the article form the PDF file DWN pointed us to. However, one part I did read pointed out that phthalates are also in personal care products - I know they are in ingredients labeled fragrance quite often. Considering the amount of lotions, hair products, deodrants, etc. that we slather & spray on our bodies, I would hazard to guess it's increasing the effects of whatever is ingested via plastics. k.b.

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