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This month, we have the most special guest mom answering our Mom Detective questions: Dr. Shanna Swan, an award-winning environmental and reproductive epidemiologist. For decades, she has been researching the health impacts of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and the ways they interfere with our body’s hormones, especially when it comes to declining sperm count. Her latest effort to spread the word about her critical work is the new must-watch Netflix documentary, The Plastic Detox. The central storyline involves Dr. Swan helping six couples struggling with fertility—but it’s so much more too. She helps them reduce hormone-disrupting chemicals found in the plastics in their daily lives; these chemicals are known to impact reproductive health. You’ll have to watch to find out if it works.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry
In honor of her new film, we asked Dr. Swan three questions from our community members about plastics and health. See her sage responses below.
ELENA IN NEW YORK ASKS:
I’ve been reading about chemical ingredients that can disrupt hormones in everything from toys to lotions to cleaning products. Everyone is apparently exposed. If my child is already exposed, is this reversible?
DR. SWAN ANSWERS:
That depends a lot on when your child was exposed. If the exposure occurred while you were pregnant, particularly in early pregnancy, the impacts would likely be much more serious, long-term, and not reversible. That’s because when the fetus is developing, especially in early pregnancy, it’s undergoing changes that are determining how that child will develop and grow after birth. So it’s a lifetime impact from that short exposure at a very critical time.
If there was an exposure at another critical period, for example, puberty and, although we haven’t studied it that much, menopause—times when the body is undergoing changes and particularly hormonally related changes—hormonally active chemicals can disrupt that development. So that’s the bad news.
The good news is that the chemicals leave your body very quickly unless they’re what’re called the forever chemicals, the PFAS chemicals. For example, the phthalates that make plastic soft and the bisphenols that make plastic hard, those are actually in the body for a very short time. If somebody’s exposed to phthalates from drinking from a soft water bottle, for example, you can measure that immediately up to a couple of hours. But then it will be metabolized, enter your urine, and be excreted. Even though it’s there for a short time, it does do harm.
But the fact that it’s there for a short time means that it’s not sticking around and doing more and more harm.
As we discussed in The Plastic Detox, these chemicals can have many effects on the body. We focused on one class of effects, which was reproductive. That’s only one system in the body. We found out what people were using, what chemicals were in those that we were concerned about—those that could affect hormones primarily—and gave them alternatives to use that did not contain those chemicals. It’s not rocket science, really. And it’s something that everybody can do if they read about it or see the film. There are a lot of tips. There’s a website they can go to. And I think it’s empowering to know that we can take some control over this. We’re not just guinea pigs in this worldwide experiment that we didn’t ask for. We also can opt out by letting the body remove the exposure and decreasing subsequent exposure.
OLIVIA IN OKLAHOMA ASKS:
I want to reduce exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals, but I can’t overhaul my entire life. Where should I start, and what should I change tomorrow that will be the biggest bang for the effort?
DR. SWAN ANSWERS:
That’s such a great question—one I get a lot and one I think about a lot myself. I would say it depends a little bit on who you are and what stage of life you’re in. If you are worrying about getting pregnant, you might do different things than if you are wanting to lose weight. These chemicals are obesogens; they help us gain and keep weight. These chemicals impact many, many hormonal systems in the body.
You might worry about the chemicals that alter immune function, and a good example of those are the chemicals that are on Teflon pans or your waterproof jacket—the PFAS chemicals. So if you are worried about exposure to Covid or something that’s going around now, consider being careful not to wear anything stain- or water-resistant and only use your cast-iron pans. Higher impact depends quite a bit on who you are and what you’re doing and what’s important to you.
MICHAEL IN OREGON ASKS:
My kids’ pediatrician doesn’t ask about or test for hormone-disrupting chemicals. So how do I know if the changes we are making have worked? Are there tests we can ask for at the doctor?
DR. SWAN ANSWERS:
That would be so great if physicians would take this on, but in fact, most don’t even know about it. This isn’t even taught in medical school, surprisingly. At this point, you don’t have much choice except to [pay for a private test] and collect kids’ urine, and they can say what’s in your bodies. This is another expense. And I have to acknowledge that making these changes can be expensive.
Hopefully, the film will be encouraging. There is a lot of science. The film is a very small study. It has been written up and published in a scientific journal, so it is valid and we hope, if we get funding, for a much larger population. We’ll have 150 couples. It’ll be quite a different order of magnitude, and that may be more convincing.
Ultimately, people have to balance the nuisance and expense of making these changes with the knowledge that they are protecting their health and children’s health. That has been established. It’s a little disruption now and long-term improved health. Reproductive health isn’t only for making babies. People with poor reproductive health, low semen quality, infertility, and so on, actually have a shorter lifespan. It’s a signal—the canary in the coal mine. If a man has a low sperm count or you know a couple can’t get pregnant, there may be a lot of things going on.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry