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Environmental Factors
The last century was a golden age of chemistry. White-coated scientists working
in laboratories synthesized a continuous stream of novel substances. I know, because
in an earlier part of my professional life, I was one of those scientists. Many
products now in widespread daily use in food, agriculture, health and beauty, and
medicine, and in our offices, factories, and homes never existed before this revolution
in chemistry. As a result, human beings, animals, and even the earth itself,
have been exposed to a wide range of new substances—and none of us keeps a
tally of how many of them we have absorbed over our lifetime, or how much
of them we retain in our bodies. While many of these new chemicals undergo
some kind of testing for safety, typically these safety assessments are done one
at a time. As a result, such assessments fail to evaluate the bodily effects of carrying
multiple toxins simultaneously, nor do they examine how these substances
interact with each other.
The Invisible Burden
Why are the unintended synergies of multiple chemicals interacting in novel
ways potentially problematic To use an analogy, household cleaners containing
bleach are reasonably safe if used correctly. So is a cleaner that contains ammonia.
But what happens if you mix them together Boom! You get chloramine
gas, which, if inhaled, can be corrosive and actually harm your respiratory tract.
Another example comes from studies conducted at Duke University, which
looked at chemicals used to protect Gulf War soldiers. The researchers found
that when the chemicals were used separately, even at three times the normal
doses, the soldiers had no immediate ill effects, but when used in combination,
the chemicals could cause neurological deficits.
In the same way, most scientific studies aren’t designed to look beyond the safety
of a specific ingredient or product on its own. As a result, studies rarely make an
assessment of how a given ingredient will interact with ingredients from other
sources. So when we are told that a given product or ingredient has been “studied,”
we tend to assume that its safety has been assured. However, most often
the safety assessments do not look at the many kinds of interactions that occur
outside of the controlled laboratory environment, in real life. As a result, there
is much that we don’t know about the bodily impact of the sum total of all these
novel ingredients to which we are now exposed.
But our body knows. And our body lets us know that it’s gotten more than it can
handle by creating a health symptom or condition.
The rising rates in the United States of chronic conditions that don’t have a single
apparent cause may be indicators that—over a lifetime—many people are accu-
56 Autism: Pathways to Recovery