detox diet plan

My Quest To Analyze Every Man-Made Chemical In My Body

 Arianne Cohen

My test results may be the most confusing things I've ever received in the mail. I expected to rip them open and find a variant of the routine bloodwork I get from my doctor, complete with a little thumbs-up icon next to good cholesterol results. Instead, over four months I received six individual spreadsheets that said things like "2,3,7,8-TCDD UN 3373 L12090-1 WG27842 30.8g (wet) pg/g (wet weight basis) <.0065 spiked matrix WG27842-102 % Recov 78.3." Gibberish to me.

My interpretation team was made up of three experts: McCally, Buckley, and Leo Trasande, director of the Mt. Sinai Center for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research in New York and a lead investigator on the federally funded National Children's Study, which will ultimately set benchmarks for toxic exposures among our most chemical-sensitive population.

I started by calling Trasande. When I read him the first incomprehensible line from my results, he laughed. "I don't know what that means," he said. "Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is nasty stuff. But I would need to also see the benchmarks." I found the latest NHANES benchmarks and called him back. After going through the rest of the results with my panel, we arrived at a verdict: I am full of chemicals.

My levels of dioxins and furans, older chlorinated chemicals that are usually released into the air by manufacturing and garbage incineration, are above population averages. Industrial releases have decreased 80 percent since the 1980s, yet I'm still full of them because dioxin exposure is the gift that keeps on giving. The body stores dioxin in fat cells and occasionally releases it into the blood, recirculating the same chemicals throughout the body. These have been linked to reproductive disorders, cancer and other maladies.

My levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—the result of incomplete combustion, these are commonly emitted by stoves and charred meat—are typical for the population. Some of these chemicals are classified by the EPA as probable carcinogens, and they can stay in the body for 25 years, but scientists still don't understand how potency and length of exposure relate to illness.

I'm carrying above-typical levels of residue from nonstick coatings like Teflon, specifically one called PFOA that is associated with cancer. "Preliminary studies suggest that even low-level exposures can be problematic," Trasande says.

I'm loaded with nitrate. "This is principally from processed foods, and there's a cancer risk associated," Buckley says.

I also have typical levels of exposure to plastics and plasticizers like phthalates, which add flexibility to soft plastics and vinyl and stability to creams and washes. "They're ubiquitous," McCally says. Phthalates are linked to reproductive disorders, and it's unclear what exposure level could be considered safe.

Lastly, my levels of the notorious bisphenol-A, or BPA, an estrogenic compound found in plastic and plastered all over the news for the past two years, are typical. BPA has entered my system every time I've ever taken a swig from a water bottle—which I did a lot of as a teenager, training five hours a day as a swimmer.

The overall takeaway is not soothing. "The core message is that we are all exposed to a wide array of chemicals in the environment, as you have been," Trasande says. "And what little we know suggests cause for concern. And equally concerning is what we don't know."

As I spent days decoding spreadsheets, one uplifting fact became clear: I tested notably clear of the majority of pesticides, fungicides and metals that I would most likely ingest outdoors. In fact, with the exception of the dioxins and furans that I and the rest of the country picked up decades ago, I was probably exposed to most of the chemicals in my body indoors—which means more of this is under my control than I thought.

"It doesn't take a lot of something released indoors to cause exposure," says Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California at Berkeley, who taught me the Rule of 1,000: Anything released indoors is about 1,000 times as likely to be inhaled as something released outdoors.