A remarkably underreported story here in the US, and indeed in most advanced economies, is the increasing presence of pharmaceuticals in our water supplies. No, this is not some grand conspiracy to dumb us down or make us passive (please remove the tinfoil helmet’s, y’all) . . . it’s what happens when we overprescribe drugs in dosages larger than can be completely taken up by our bodies. These drugs are expelled in our waste, and enter the surrounding ecosystem. This scares the hell out of me, and is almost enough to make me buy bottled water . . . and then I remember that bottled water is likely coming from a similarly contaminated source and has all sorts of horrific impacts on the environment.
NPR is running another story that references this issue today – a story about shrimp on measurable amounts of Prozac (which they are taking up from their surrounding environments). The story focuses on the impact of the Prozac on the shrimp, which head for light and therefore become more vulnerable to predators. What I find boggling is that the story stops there.
There is a huge implication here – WE EAT THOSE SHRIMP. And chemicals like fluoxetine concentrate as they move up the food chain – which means that when we eat shrimp on miniscule amounts of Prozac, we are dosing ourselves with Prozac. Eat enough shrimp, and you can get a dose that actually affects you. And this is not the only edible animal or plant taking up pharmaceutical chemicals from the environment – lots of them do. Just as mercury becomes a problem as it moves up the food chain, so too these chemicals become a problem – we are approaching a situation where it will be difficult to eat without getting an unprescribed dose of pharmaceutical. This cannot be good for us.
And people wonder why puberty is coming earlier and earlier for girls in our society. There is a reason my daughter drinks organic milk . . .
The point here is that the environment is not a bottomless sink into which we can dump things like chemicals and expect that we will never see them again. Yes, most people know this – yet we, as a society, seem surprised every time a new type of chemical surfaces in our food or water. We spend a lot of time and energy hollering about things like deforestation in the developing world, while we chew up our own environment in much more subtle ways that might be much more difficult to reverse . . . perhaps we need to get our own house in order before commenting on the behavior of others.
darn maybe I could save money on my prescription and just eat shrimp oh wait no the shrimp would cost more, but would taste better.
oh wait the shrimp has also got lots of petrochemicals in it …. Time to go vegan and just grow my own veggies, but there is probably something wrong with the soil as well. maybe humans will evolve to live with all these chemicals.
It used to be with a certain amount of horror that I used to hear adults complain of “chemicals” in their food and drink. How could it be, at the start of the 21st century, that we didn’t have the basic scientific knowledge that pretty much everything around us was made of chemicals? That we ourselves were chemistry in action?
But I got used to it. A somewhat less well-known bit of scientific knowledge, that I think would also be of benefit, concerns the existence of ‘natural pesticides’.
Plants, unlike animals, cannot run away, so if they want to avoid being eaten, they must use other methods. All plants produce a wide range of exotic chemicals designed to interfere with the biochemistry of herbivores – toxins, irritants, insecticides, bactericides, fungicides. When we say a particular plant is disease resistant, what it usually means is that it is producing some especially nasty and effective pesticide. We *know* that sampling plants at random is a bad idea – but even food plants that are ‘safe to eat’ still have them, and while they are (usually) safe enough in the short-term, nobody knows quite what their chronic long-term effects might be.
And most of these chemicals are completely unknown, and untested. Moreover, they can change invisibly, through either natural or artificial evolution. Attack by pests (which is more common without artificial pesticides) can even turn a normally safe food plant deadly, as it ramps up the poison factory to fight off the attack. And more than 99.99% of the pesticides you eat (by weight) are these natural ones.
So going vegan might not be the best idea in the world, if you want to avoid eating ‘chemicals’.
See here for a list of some of the frighteningly-named polysyllabic monstrosities to be found in coffee, lettuce, cabbage, beans, basil, etc.
http://www.pnas.org/content/87/19/7777.full.pdf
3-methysulfinylpropyl isothiocyanate. Does that sound like the sort of thing you want to read on the ingredients list on the back of the packet in some supermarket? But sellers of cabbage can get away without mentioning it – and thus we continue to believe that home-grown vegetables ‘don’t contain chemicals’.
The natural world is mostly toxic.
And the other wonderful thing about science is the way the sensitivity of chemical analysis keeps on getting better. We can detect parts per billion of all sorts of stuff. So when an article says “measurable amounts”, it isn’t always clear what that means.
I also note that the article mentioned a brain parasite that triggers the same behaviour in shrimp, so they get eaten and it can infect something else. But that wasn’t the bit that worried you, the bit that you noticed.
You live in a world that has mind-controlling parasites living in your food, and you’re worried by traces of Prozac?! What’s up with that?
No offence intended, mind. It’s just the modern world, isn’t it?
Good point on our sensitivity of analysis – what people need to do, in these studies, is tell us at what levels these drugs start to matter to humans. Sure, I’d like to avoid any exposure to Prozac, thanks, but at 1 ppb I am not all that worried. That said, I am worried about the introduction of pharma into the water in ways that are poorly understood and reported – via human excretion (overprescription) or the dumping of unused meds down the drain/toilet). Of course no water supply will ever be completely pristine, but I am worried about the long-term effects of putting people on unprescribed doses of psychoactive drugs – all, of course, with the caveat that the “measurable amounts” actually matter. Though I have a friend who did a lot of consulting for the EPA, and who tells me that I would be horrified by the amounts of stuff in various water supplies. Horrified, but not surprised.
I think my distinction between the mind-controlling parasites and natural pesticides versus our ever-expanding pharmacological contribution to nature is one of evolution and adaptation – and I fully acknowledge this may be naive. Simply put, unless someone can tell me these parasites and pesticides are quite new, and occurring in ways never seen before (which you might be making a case for), I tend to believe that human beings have probably been dealing with these sorts of things for some time, and that evolution has been a part of that process. That said, when we start to screw with existing ecosystems, we do indeed start throwing existing chemical defenses out of whack, and perhaps we do create something new under the sun. In which case, I should pay a bit more attention . . . but in the end, one has to eat, I suppose. And I have so little patience for vegans. As a colleague of mine once pointed out, there is a fine line between being a vegan and needing to get the food to fill out a waiver before you eat it . . . and I like being on the side of the line that allows me to embrace being more or less atop the food chain.
If the herbivores could adapt to it, it wouldn’t be very useful to the plant. You know how quickly insects adapt to *artificial* pesticides.
Clearly, like the human immune system, it has to keep moving to keep up with the target. But that doesn’t mean the changes would be visible. A carrot is a carrot.
Our tolerance to toxins is fairly general. We have generic repair and healing mechanisms, not ones specific to specific toxins. When poisons get through it is more like having small chinks and holes in a shield that keeps the vast majority of them out.