Posted by Michael Gurian
The new year is here, and we are all starting to live out our resolutions! This is such a great time to be alive, to be forward thinking, and to focus our personal energy toward the good. To that end: I hope you will consider adding a resolution to your list about avoiding environmental neurotoxins this and every year. Part of my inspiration for saying this comes from the joy Gail and I felt in hosting our daughters, Gabrielle (28) and Davita (25), and their significant others, Jack (28) and Ben (32), over the two holidays. We had a LOT of conversations at the dinner table about healthy eating and living, especially because all four are looking at having families in the next decade. We all agreed: few things are more important than the subject of “environmental neurotoxins” and yet that importance is well hidden in our culture today.
A second inspiration came from a new longitudinal study (January 1, 2019): “Association of phthalates, parabens and phenols found in personal care products with pubertal timing in girls and boys.” Kim G Harley, Kimberly P Berger, Katherine Kogut, Kimberly Parra, Robert H Lustig, Louise C Greenspan, Antonia M Calafat, Xiaoyun Ye, Brenda Eskenazi. Human Reproduction, Volume 34, Issue 1, Pages 109–117, https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dey337. If you’ve read any of my psychology and parenting books over the last decade, especially my recent Saving Our Sons or The Minds of Girls, you might remember my sections on these neurotoxins. Especially in the U.S., which does not legislate much regulation of these poisons, there is ample evidence that they negatively affect sperm and egg, creating unwanted mutations in our children in utero, and then, throughout the child’s life-span, increasing likelihood of brain disorders (e.g. depression, ADD/ADHD, autism, anxiety) and physiologic issues (e.g. obesity, low sperm count, early puberty, tendency to violence).
When raising our children, Gail and I moved toward organic food gradually as we could generate the funds to do so. We moved away from plastics and junk food immediately upon learning the research. We studied all our kids’ hygiene products carefully. Could we have done better? Absolutely. Environmental neurotoxins are like a million ants circling around parents and children all the time, and nearly all of them are invisible: just when we think we’ve eradicated one colony, we notice another one just a few feet away. But the news is not all grim because research is robust and available, and each of us can act on it. I hope Saving Our Sons, The Minds of Girls, new clinical studies, and this blog, republished here to help empower your new years resolution, will inspire you to see the battle as winnable! It is very winnable, and it is a sacred battle to fight. Thank you. –Michael Gurian, January 2, 2019
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