A Fifty Year Chemical Reaction

Feb 22, 2022

This is part 2 of Rule 4: Culture is Downstream from Chemistry

So, what has happened in our chemical and electromagnetic environments since 1970 or so? Here are some of the things I have noticed over the years, not all of them are necessarily bad:

Houses have become much more airtight starting with the Energy Crisis of the 1970s.
Glued together wood (plywood, chipboard, particle board) has replaced diagonal tongue and groove lumber for subfloors and inner walls.
Hardwood floors gave way to carpeting for a while, but hardwood floors seem to be making a comeback.
Plastic has replaced glass jars and bottles for condiments and beverages.
Most cans have a plastic lining. (According to my memory, cans looked like metal inside when I was young. Whether they had a clear plastic coating or they used more tin back in the day would be a useful research project.)
Microwave ovens have become commonplace. This led to TV dinners packaged in plastic instead of foil.
Metal pipes have given way to plastic.
Vinyl, vinyl, everywhere: siding, floors, pipes, etc.
No-till farming has replaced the plow on many farms. This requires a great deal more herbicides.
DDT was banned – and replaced with other insecticides.
Lead was removed from gasoline. Exotic oxygenators were added. (Gasoline smells worse than it used to. Maybe my nose is getting pickier.)
Phosphates were removed from laundry detergent. (Phosphates, like carbon dioxide, are natural and necessary to life in the right concentration. To make detergents work without phosphates required adding more exotic chemicals.)
Parents were told to put sunscreen on their children whenever they go outside for a while. (When I was a kid, sunscreen was just for boating and the beach.)
Oil based paints have been largely replaced with water based paints.
Pastures have given way to meat factories. Corn and soybeans have replaced grass.
Watery American beer has given way to craft beers, heavy on the hops. (Hops are estrogenic.)
Ethinylestradiol, a synthetic long lived artificial estrogen, is widely used for birth control pills.
The number of childhood vaccinations has gone up enormously.
Corded phones have been replaced by cordless phones and now cell phones.
Television broadcast went to 24 hours/day. (Stations used to shut down late at night, after playing the Star Spangled Banner.)
Preschool has become much more common. (The public schools did not provide kindergarten in my area when I was a child in the 1960s.) And the amount of academic instruction pushed on preschoolers has increased enormously.
The amount of school recess has declined, or so I hear.
Video games and fear of criminals have reduced the amount of childhood outdoor time.
Megavitamins and other supplements went mainstream.
Out of season and exotic produce became more available.
People don’t smoke as much, especially around children.

The list above is incomplete and somewhat subjective. Add to it as you see fit. (And you can subtract as well any trends where my personal observations don’t match the national stats.) To be completely scientific we would need to roll back everything for at least a sizable portion of the population, and then after several years compare their autism stats with those are still on the experimental chemical (and other) changes that we have imposed most of the population currently.

But we cannot afford a complete rollback, and some of the changes listed above are probably for the better. (Do we really want to bring back leaded gasoline?) So, in the following subsections I will speculate on what the best candidates for a rollback are. I will take special note on which rollbacks are likely to fix problems other than autism.

Important notice: These speculations will resemble medical advice. Do not take as such! I am neither a medical doctor, chiropractor, massage therapist, or crystal healer. Odds are pretty good that my chakras are out of whack. I’m not even legally qualified to create a menu for a school lunch. All I am is someone who has read a bunch of health books/articles, and performed some personal experiments. Also, I have a passing acquaintance with statistics and the scientific method, having a rusty doctorate in physics.

Estrogen Mimics

Estrogen mimics are increased by a large number of the changes in the list above. More plastic means more plasticizers. (But some plastics are worse than others.) No-till agriculture requires a huge increase in herbicides, including atrazine which is an endocrine disruptor. We’re dumping over 70 millions of pounds of the stuff in the general environment each year. Then there’s that non biodegradable synthetic estrogen used for birth control which isn’t removed by our wastewater or water treatment plants. Finally, we have natural estrogens and estrogen-like compounds from milk from pregnant cattle, hoppy beers, and soy foods.

For those concerned about America’s loss of manliness, cracking down on estrogen mimics is a given. The remaining question is “how?” In particular, how do we cut down the estrogenics without giving bureaucrats and tort lawyers too much power? I’ll throw out some ideas to get the discussion started.

Levy excise taxes on toxins in general. The government needs to tax something; why not tax things that are bad? This is an old idea, going back to liquor taxes in George Washington’s day. The beauty of such taxes is that they reduce overall quantities of toxins without mass quantities of paperwork. Chemicals are generally produced in bulk, and it’s hard to hide a chemical plant. Furthermore, higher prices don’t preclude using the toxic chemicals where you really need them. Today, farmers save on fuel by spreading herbicides instead of plowing. Maybe they are getting the wrong economic incentives…
Develop better ways of fighting weeds. Plowing does disrupt the soil. Are there better ways of preparing the soil? And how about low lying growing ground covers between the corn rows? Or robot mowers? Or giving able-bodied welfare recipients something useful to do?
How about improvements in wastewater treatment to get the birth control hormones out of our rivers? Is this possible? Or, conversely, is it possible to replace ethinylestradiol with something more biodegradable? Would bio-identical estrogens work? Are we using this dangerous synthetic just because it’s patentable? (I’m just asking. I’m WAY out of my league here.)
How about food packaging alternatives? Would a tax on plastic work to bring back glass jars? Would it make much difference? And how about bringing back paper bags while we are at it. Cannabis activists (including yours truly) were claiming for years that you can get more paper per acre with hemp than with trees. So how about some hemp based grocery bags?

P.S. Do a google search of “estrogen autism” (without the quotes). I get over 11 million hits, and the first few pages look pretty real. We might be able to solve the gurlimanification problem and the autism epidemic in one fell swoop.

Maybe. Let’s look at some other possibilities just to be sure.

Volatile Organic Chemicals

Sniffing glue is bad for your health. It might even cause more neurological damage than watching MSNBC. So what happens when we use glued together wood chips for lumber, glued together fibers for carpeting, and use them in buildings made ever more airtight in the quest to save energy?

We become a nation of glue sniffers.

OK. OK. So the concentrations of chemicals are much lower than for those who huff. But the duration can be months or even years. And with a tightly sealed house you can renew your toxin load with the weird chemicals in new clothes, air “fresheners”, household cleaners, shampoos, skin lotions, and even mold.

The science isn’t settled here, but I’d rather be safe than stinky. I live in a leaky old house which is made of real wood, use unscented cleaners or cleaners scented with real herbs, and open windows whenever possible. I even keep a window cracked when it is quite unpleasant outside. Squeezing that last bit of energy efficiency is penny wise, pound reckless in my opinion. (Energy efficiency won’t stop global warming. That requires alternative energy. More on this later.)

Here are some possible action items:

Update building codes to allow leakier buildings, or even mandate an air exchanger for home HVAC systems.
Require labeling of what constitutes the “fragrance” in household products.
Update sewer treatment plants so they can take out the phosphates. Then put phosphates back into laundry detergents and dishwasher powders – and take the more exotic chemicals out. One possibility for removing phosphates would be to use the conventionally treated wastewater to feed algae or cattails to make biofuels. The leftovers could then be used for fertilizer.
Market low VOC carpeting, rugs, furniture, etc. There are business opportunities here...

Inflammation Enhancers

There is another set of childhood onset ailments on the rise that has less political implication, but can be unpleasant to downright tragic: an increase in allergies. Schools are having to ban peanuts and other potential allergens because they have students who can die upon exposure unless medication is speedily administered. I never heard of such things when I was growing up. Peanut butter was a staple food for children back then. Also, asthma appears to have risen [link] – even though we’ve cracked down on exposing children to second hand smoke. Maybe low dose tobacco is beneficial. Maybe the diagnostic criteria have changed too much to make a proper comparison and the rise is an illusion. Or maybe there is something else going on. I see several possible candidates in the list above.

For starters, all that sunscreen slathering and staying inside is reducing children’s Vitamin D levels. The amount of Vitamin D in fortified foods and children’s multivitamins is a small fraction of what humans create when exposed to direct sunlight. That’s because the RDA was set to prevent rickets, not mimic natural production. However, scientists are finding many benefits to boosting Vitamin D levels up towards what we would maintain if exposed to sunlight, and the signal is strong enough that even mainstream medical doctors are testing for Vitamin D levels and prescribing multi thousand IU doses as needed. One of those benefits is inflammation reduction, including asthma. I personally have an extended family member who went from crippling adult onset asthma to nearly cured just from getting her Vitamin D levels up to the recommended range.

There have also been major changes in the fats we eat. We deep fry in seed oils instead of lard or tallow, and thanks to the fast food and junk food industries the nation as a whole eats a lot of deep fat fried food these days. (To be fair, where I come from the deep fat frying goes back to colonial times, so deep fat frying per se is not a new thing.)

Perhaps more importantly, the types of fat eaten by our meat animals has changed. Leaves, grass, and algae all contain the omega 3 oil, alpha linolenic acid. Seeds, particularly corn, have the omega 6 oil linoleic acid as the predominant polyunsaturate. Our grazing animals eat mainly grass and leaves when left out in the pasture. (They do get some grass and weed seeds in the process.) Likewise, free range chickens eat bugs which have eaten leaves and thus get omega 3 oils in their diet. Salmon get omega 3 from smaller creatures which eat the algae floating in the sea.

Back in the 1970s, when food prices were climbing (along with everything else), the Nixon administration changed our farm support system dramatically. Farmers were guaranteed a price for corn no matter how big the surplus. Instead of paying farmers not to plant, or buying up the surplus to throw it out, the government simply gave farmers the difference between the target price and the market price. The market price went down, and it became cheaper to feed cattle corn for most of their lives instead of leaving them in the pasture to mow grass. The new feedlot system is cruel enough to make PETA seem reasonable. And eating these unhealthy animals may be making us unhealthy.

For starters the balance in polyunsaturated oils has shifted away from omega 3 to omega 6 oils. Meat animals upconvert the omega 6 linoleic acid up to arachidonic acid, which for humans is a precursor to several inflammatory messaging molecules. Back when they got more omega 3 oils, they produced more of the heart healthy EPA and brain healthy DHA. Thanks to the Nixon Administration’s farm policy changes, meat animals – and farm raised fish – are getting lots of calories from corn, which has a fair amount of omega 6 linoleic acid and very little (if any) omega 3 alpha linolenic acid.

Hit the healthy diet section of your local bookstore and you can find scads of books with the details. Barry Sears alone has a couple dozen or so books on the theme, most of which have the word “Zone” in the title. The theme is particularly popular with the modern low carb and Paleo crowd. I’d recommend Inflammation Nation by Floyd Chilton, as Chilton is a university researcher and the book emphasizes avoiding bad meats over pushing supplements. (But even this book has some bugs and cringe worthy diet book cliches. I suspect some ghost writing. Stay skeptical, my friends.)

(One quick tip: if you do opt to experiment with grass fed beef, turn down the heat. Omega 3 oils turn into varnish at high temperatures. This is rumored to be unhealthy. What I can legally say outright is that varnish tastes bad. And you don’t need to sear meat to keep the juices in.)

And then there are the vaccines. Vaccines are supposed to provoke some inflammation. Traditional vaccines contain dead or weakened viruses/bacteria along with irritants to make the immune system take notice. What happens if if the immune system also notices some other molecules at the same time as the irritation – such as a difficult to digest protein in a nut or seed? Could we be creating food allergies when we pump infants and toddlers with a wide variety of vaccines?

This is speculation, not theory. But the explosion in food allergies does correspond to the explosion in early childhood vaccines. It makes me worry, and I am not alone.

And now we come to the vaccine-autism connection. The explosion in autism also overlaps the explosion in early childhood vaccines.

If there is a vaccine-autism connection, I suspect it has to do with autoimmunity. I am quite skeptical of the thimerosol hypothesis (the mercury compound thimerosol is used as a preservative in many vaccines) because thimerosol use is not novel. Tincture of thimerosol was sold over the counter as merthiolate and was the standard topical antiseptic when I was a kid. Mercury as medicine goes back many centuries. In terms of mercury exposure, things have gotten better, not worse, over the past half century. So let’s turn back to the subject of autoimmunity.

Many experts say the problem is that we are too clean. Young children need to spend time making mud pies, seeding their guts with a wide variety of bacteria, and training their immune systems to recognize friendly vs. unfriendly bacteria. They have a point, and it ties into reduced recess and keeping kids indoors in general. But I think there is more going on; there are plenty of people with pets and poor hand washing habits who have kids with autoimmune problems. And as for gut bacteria, there are other factors besides playing in dirt. Animals in feedlots have very different bacterial compositions than animals in pastures, thanks to unnatural diets. And feedlots resort to feeding antibiotics to cattle to offset the effects of their grain heavy diets.

And there is one other factor that might be affecting our gut bacteria: the herbicide glyphosate. Glyphosate targets a metabolic pathway that’s not found in vertebrates, but it is found in fungi and bacteria (as well as plants). Some of those bacteria are supposed to be living in our guts.

When I type “autism gut bacteria” (without the quotes) into Google I get over eleven million hits. When I type “gut bacteria glyphosate” I get over 200,000 hits. Hmmmm. Maybe we should add glyphosate to the list of herbicides to tax. At the very least we should discourage using glyphosate near harvest time to make wheat “ripen” early.

And now for the possible action items.

Make recess great again. When I was in middle school we had 2-3 recess periods per day. Some days we had PE class in addition to recess. And yes, during the summer the very white should take precautions against peak sun exposure. Europe is surprisingly far north compared to the United States. Seattle, Washington is over a degree south of Paris, France. Chicago is at the same latitude as Rome! Raleigh, North Carolina is at the same latitude as northern Morocco.
Change the farm subsidy program so that we don’t overdo it with the corn. Make pastures great again. It’s more humane for the meat animals, it’s better for the soil, and it’s better for wildlife. And maybe it’s better for humans.
For animals that aren’t pastured, consider adding some omega-3 rich feeds. How about hemp seed? It’s high in both protein and omega-3 oils. Dope advocates have been pushing hemp for this purpose for years. Hemp farming is now legal in most states. It’s time for the hippies and libertarians to pony up.
Add glyphosate to the list of toxins to be taxed. Glyphosate is extremely useful, so I hesitate to outlaw it. But maybe we should go back to plowing – with some perennial covered buffer strips to avoid losing soil, perhaps. And maybe we should use the far northern Great Plains for raising bison vs. using glyphosate to shrink the growing season for wheat.

Other Stimuli

In the spirit of science and fair play, note that some of the changes that have happened over the past half century are not chemical. We might be causing psychological damage by pushing academics too early, or by exposing the very young to video games and other electronic gadgets. Maybe kids aren’t getting enough unsupervised play with other kids. Or maybe the “Everyone’s a Winner” approach to organized children’s sports is producing the Snowflakes.

C. S. Lewis featured a Snowflake character in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Self righteous petulant whiners who expect other people to make everything right are not a new phenomenon. Lewis blamed upbringing mainly, but also note that the character’s parents were vegetarians. Eustace Scrubb was a soy boy!

With that being said, I note that Eustace Scrubb sulked and whined. He didn’t throw the tantrums we are seeing too much of today. So I still think it’s the chemicals. The number of incidences and the nature of the tantrums tell me there is something more than upbringing or ideology.

A Final Note to Small Government Conservatives and Libertarians

Yes, I am advocating for significant government action, and action before the science is completely settled at that. This is annoying, but necessary. Like it or not, the chemical industry has been performing a massive experiment on humanity without proper permission or controls. This is even more unethical than using government to fund a Lawrence Welk museum.

But do note that am not advocating for socialism! I am advocating for the government to perform its proper role as referee. When government owns businesses or gets too involved in public-private partnerships, we have a situation similar to the Guild of Referees fielding its own team – major conflict of interest.

If we don’t have a fix for the Snowflake problem, we won’t have a functioning republic much longer. Kiss what remaining freedom we have goodbye.

And if we don’t improve public health significantly, we are going to end up with socialized or single payer healthcare in the near future. A free market in healthcare requires a society where most people can afford to pay their doctor.

Rules for Reactionaries

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