In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Dr. Bruce Lanphear, professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University and principal investigator for a study examining fetal and early childhood exposure to chemicals prevalent in the environment that harm the nervous system.
Lanphear’s research experience spans multiple areas: lead poisoning prevention, asthma, tobacco smoke exposure, and the measurement of lead and allergens in housing.
Cook and Lanphear discuss the science behind neurotoxic chemicals, specifically looking at fluoride in the U.S. water system. They explore the idea of “safety thresholds” for toxic chemicals and industry interests behind this issue. Together they tackle the question “Does the dose make the poison?”
They also discuss the significant health harms caused by toxic chemicals such as lead and pesticides, and Lanphear shares personal stories about seeing the toll exposure took on his loved ones. They reflect on the current state of regulatory toxicology and how to modernize the approach to toxic exposure. Lanphear shares his ideas about lowering personal exposure to these chemicals, such as cooking at home and avoiding plastics.
Ken: Hi there, Ken Cook here, and I'm having another episode. I tend to have them pretty regularly, and today's episode is brought on by a common critique we receive here at EWG.
You know, the expression sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Well, I can't tell you the last time a stick or stone broke my bones.
It was probably a mountain biking accident. But I will share some names that people have used about EWG that have tried to hurt us like fear mongering or alarmist and politically affiliated. Those are some of my favorites. Also, my real personal favorite is that there are no scientists at EWG or that we practice junk science.
Despite all of the PhDs and Masters of Science staff, we have the fact that we regularly publish peer reviewed scientific articles in scientific journals. Nevermind. The charges are out there because people don't like what we say oftentimes about toxic chemicals in your health. Well, we take a lot of pride in sharing science with all of you to help you feel confident about the products you purchase for yourselves and for your families.
So here on the show we also prioritize introducing you to scientists that we work with. Admire love scientists with no affiliation to EWG. Mind you. And a common topic I speak to these scientists about is the concept of the dose makes the poison because oftentimes industry claims a chemical dose is safe.
Just because it's at a very low level, parts per billion or parts per trillion, and it turns out sometimes it is safe legally until it's not. And Dr. Bruce Lanphear, my guest today is a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, where he is currently the principal investigator for a study examining fetal and early childhood exposures to toxic substances.
And Bruce is exactly the kind of guy who has also faced these allegations of the dose makes the poison, and you're alarming people about a part per trillion or part per billion unnecessarily. You're just fearmongering. But Bruce has the science to back up the fact that low doses do cause harm in some circumstances.
Dose depends on timing dose, depends on the individual dose, depends on a lot of things. Beyond just the amount of a substance. Bruce is someone I've admired for a long time. He's taught me so much. He's been a source of inspiration for a lot of what we've tried to do in public health and environmental protection at EWG.
He is himself a first rate scientist who's built a reputation in the field of environmental health as one of the leading proponents of being very thoughtful and careful. Science based and how we approach children's exposure to environmental toxics of all kinds. We're talking about lead, mercury, fluoride in water.
Bruce Lanphear has been one of the leading scientists for decades looking into the neurological harm these chemicals can cause. So Bruce. Thank you for joining us today.
Bruce: Thank you, Ken. It's great to be here with you.
Ken: Tell us a little bit about the investigation that you're currently the principal investigator on, because it's directly related to what we're going to talk about today.
Bruce: Do you mean fluoride? Yeah. Well, fluoride's fascinating. It's, it's something that so many of us, whether you're a dentist or a physician or a parent have long held dear that this is something that we can do as a population strategy to protect kids from tooth decay. And then beginning about 20 years ago, some questions started to arise from some first toxicologic studies and then a meta-analysis of studies from China and Iran, and then more recently, a series of prospective studies and all culminating in a meta-analysis that was published in January, 2025.
What these studies show very consistently, not universally, but very consistently, is that as fluoride exposure increases, particularly in utero, we see decrements in children's learning abilities and IQ scores, and this is something that really is causing us to ask questions, real hard questions about some of the things that we've believed in.
Ken: You know, it's funny that you mention it that way because my, uh, former colleague and co-founder of EWG Richard, we, someone I think you know pretty well, Richard's gone on to work on some great climate issues now. But, uh, I remember when he first came up to me at EWG and said, Hey, we should take a look at this fluoride thing.
And I said, well, okay, well let me just get the tinfoil and put it on my head and then you just tell me what, what you think we should do. But he was showing me studies from the National Academies of Science from the nineties, you know, evidence at that time. I think one of the concerns was cancer. I think it has since shifted to neurological concerns.
Yeah. As we've thought about it, my sense is that what we're doing by fluoridating water is we're dealing with a public health failure, which is we haven't gotten kids to brush their teeth and take care of their teeth the right way, and so we're putting it in the water for everyone, whether they have.
They're regular toothbrushes and flossers or not. Right. I get it. I think there's a lot to be said for, um, wanting to make sure that kids that don't have that good dental care, that those good dental practices are protected. But as you say, the emerging science is raising questions about whether or not we shouldn't just really find a better way to apply fluoride directly to teeth as opposed to putting in everyone's drinking water.
What, how do you come down on that, Bruce?
Bruce: Yeah, I, you're absolutely right. I mean, one thing to keep in mind, Ken, is that there are studies that have shown that brushing your teeth with fluoride prevents tooth decay, randomized controlled trials, right? Yeah. So it's inac. We know what works. We don't have those kinds of studies with fluoridation.
In fact. A Cochrane review published in October, 2024 suggested that fluoridation based on studies done after 1975 when fluoride toothpaste became widely used, yeah, may not reduce tooth decay. So we not only have new studies showing that fluoride is neurotoxic, we have other studies by oral health experts who suggest that maybe fluoridation isn't giving us the benefit we thought it was.
Now there's one other piece of the puzzle that will become clear very soon, and that is there was a particular industry that has heavily promoted fluoridation, the sugar industry, and they did it as a way to distract us from the fact that sugar causes tooth decay. So there's all of this evidence coming together, and it's time for dentists and physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics and our public health officials, to pause because of the evidence.
It's too overwhelming to ignore anymore, and it's been challenging. I mean, yeah, you said I studied lead poisoning and low level lead poisoning has been contentious, but nothing like fluoride. We've been attacked. We were accused of scientific fraud. We had to go through an NIH clearance process. And it felt like industry was attacking us, but I couldn't figure out what industry it was.
Well, that started to become clear.
Ken: Interesting. We will see how this unfolds. And of course we have many differences with Kennedy on a lot of the issues that he talks about in the approach he's taken. But on fluoridation, he's, you know, he's brought up a question that's still still relevant and it's hard for the public health community.
And this is, you know, this is a dimension of this. Whole question about health, populism, medical populism, medical freedom, and so forth. It's very difficult to push back at some of the extremes of those ideologies if you have, I would say almost in the worst cases, arrogant position on the part of public health authorities.
That they don't wanna brook any debate or discussion. Uh, that certainly has happened time and again, you've been challenging authority your whole career as a scientist, and we like to think we have been where it's appropriate too, not for the sport of it, but because, you know, hey, we, we think the levels of a certain contaminant and drinking water aren't safe at the levels that EPA says are legal.
We make the distinction. It may be legal, but it ain't safe.
Bruce: Yeah. One of the points you bring up is that we do need a degree of humility about this. I mean, in the end, we're trying to find ways to make sure that the public is protected. Yeah. And we can't hold onto these ancient beliefs if there's new evidence.
And even if you know this tribalism, this partisan issue comes up, we've gotta be able to pause and say, okay, maybe I don't agree with these 10 things, but this one thing perhaps we can agree on. Yeah. I think it's gonna take humility. I think it's gonna take courage because you don't want to be branded as somebody who's anti-science, and that's the real challenge these days.
Yeah. I take it further and that is, who do we trust? Yeah. Right. We historically have been able to trust scientists and physicians that has become more and more difficult. So who do we trust? And that's for all of us, even scientists. We have to say, okay, wait, where is this evidence coming from?
Ken: Yeah. And how do you build your own sensibility for evaluating authority and competing authorities?
Uh, there's a lot of authority behind conspiracy theory. It's all encompassing. It's like a black hole that swallows any fact that doesn't fit. Conspiracies, always find a way to explain it that's consistent with the conspiracy. So that's a very powerful source of authority. It's not the one that I think is healthy to subscribe to.
Right? So what are the alternatives? And to me starting off by saying, Hey, I'm, I may not have this right, or I'm still looking into this, or science changes. Let's all take a deep breath, and listen to one another. Yes. I think that's, that's pretty important.
Now speaking of outdated or outmoded, or science that maybe has extended its, um, its shelf life a little bit or concepts, this notion that constantly comes up, that the dose makes the poison as a way of diminishing low levels of chemicals Yeah. That someone might be exposed to in air or water or vegetables or whatever it might be. We we're constantly being, you know, assailed by the, oh, well, doesn't EWG have any scientists?
Because scientists know. The dose makes the poison. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that phrase and, and where it comes from and how it fits into contemporary toxicology.
Bruce: Yeah. Well, it started out with Paracelsus and certainly when I was being trained in medicine, which isn't big on toxicology, but when I was being trained, there was this idea that, uh, at low levels, at least the toxic chemicals that don't cause cancer, the non carcinogens.
There are these safe levels or thresholds? Well, when you go back and try to find out what the source of that is, it was just a big assumption. There were chemists who were trying to find out how do we make sure that the chemicals in our food are safe? And they started out with the best of intentions.
We're gonna find ways to make sure that these are absolutely safe. After about 10 years, they began to realize that was really hard. They made this monumental decision, a big assumption that at least for non carcinogens, there will be safe levels or thresholds, but that's all it was. It was an assumption.
When I first encountered this with lead, we saw that at the lowest measurable levels, proportionately greater reductions in IQ than at higher levels. It's worse having higher exposure, but we saw greater decrements in the first 10 microgram PE deciliter than we did in the second and third 10 microgram PE deciliter.
So all of a sudden I have to figure out how do I handle this stuff? Yeah. It didn't strike me as right initially, but then we kept seeing it and other people saw it, whether you measured lead in blood or in plasma or in bone. The same picture emerged. And then I was beginning to see that with air pollution, no safe levels beginning at the lowest measurable level, you saw a steep rise in the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
Same thing with lead and cardiovascular disease. Same thing with asbestos and mesothelioma, benzene and leukemia. The same picture emerged. Yeah, there is almost nothing that I've seen. Maybe a suggestion with mercury because the vehicle fish is beneficial. I haven't found any evidence for a threshold with toxic chemicals in human studies.
I can't speak to the animal studies. That's not my area. But what that means is. Because our regulatory system is based on this idea that there are safe levels or thresholds, and the vast majority of people are exposed at these levels to these very widely disseminated chemicals, whether it's asbestos or lead or air pollution.
A lot more death and disability is occurring in these things that we think are at safe levels. It really, to me, it's it's revolutionary. But it's hard to get the EPA and even other scientists to take the time to look at that. I sometimes have talked about it and people either glaze over or EPA staff, they start to, you know, shift uncomfortably in their seat because Yeah, the impact of that is overwhelming to imagine, Hey, what would you do for something like better air pollution when we're all exposed, when there are no safe levels?
It's really daunting to think about.
Ken: Yeah. There's, there's a lot of money on the other side of this conversation, right? Yeah. I know he was a friend and colleague of yours, Herb Needleman. Herb did some of the early studies where he was able to discern the effects of lead on IQI think back in the seventies.
Yeah. Many other scientists have worked in that field.
Bruce: Yeah. But Herb knew it better than most, and I think this is true for, for science in general, that if you study something enough, you begin to intuit what is gonna be found. And Herb knew 20 years before everybody else that there was probably no safe level.
Yeah. Of course. He had to wait for levels of children to come down to be able to, to test that. But he was in our group where we did this pooled analysis and we brought together all the studies. This is really one of the highlights of my career, where we brought these investigators from around the world.
Yeah. And we pooled the data. We even brought in Claire Earnhardt, who had been accusing Herb of, of scientific fraud.
Ken: Yeah. And
Bruce: And they came together around the same table. We kept them at different ends of the table.
Ken: Yeah.
Bruce: Yeah. And Claire, I think, who dismissed this or minimized low level lead poisoning, thought that this was going to vindicate her life's career, but in fact, it did the opposite.
Mm-hmm. It vindicated Herb Edelman's work, and that ultimately led to this remarkable conclusion that there are no safe levels of lead. That was in 2012 Centers for Disease Control in the World Health Organization. And that really, I think is just the beginning because we should be saying the same thing about a whole host of other chemicals now.
Ken: Yeah. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he was pretty savagely attacked. Oh, yeah. By the lead paint industry. I, I think the, when they were putting lead and gasoline, I think they took their shots at 'em. They, the petrochemical industry. And so in the context of regulatory toxicology and regulatory toxicology, I like to tell people I'm not a toxicologist, but I've been on the edge of, um, many of these fights.
Regulatory toxicology is about money. It's about regulating technologies. It's not just a scientific exercise. And when you regulate technologies, you're regulating somebody's financial interests. Yeah. You know, that shapes the debate.
Bruce: Great example, Ken with lead. If you look at how the EPA has promulgated standards for lead and virtually every case, it was more about what they thought was feasible to achieve rather than the best available science.
Yes. And it began with what levels of lead and paint were safe? Well, Julian Chisholm led a committee in 1976 and they didn't have great evidence and this was, you know, fair enough. The way they figured it out, they opened up a bunch of cans of house paint and they tested them and they found that a certain number fell below 600 parts per million.
So that's what they chose to regulate. Yeah, but even when the first big study I did. What are the safe levels of lead and house dust? We said, based on a study I did when I was a postdoc in Rochester, should be below five or 10 microgram per square foot. EPA said it at 40 and at 40 we said one in five kids would be lead poisoned.
30 years later, just this past year, after a series of federal lawsuits did they finally base the standards on the science that we had done 30 years ago. It took that long. Even for something like lead. And of course everybody knows lead's a problem, right? So it's not even this question. Yeah. It it's that long.
Ken: There's so many examples I think of, uh, the Aaron Brockovich chemical Hexavalent Chromium, yeah. Chromium six, right? We still don't have a national standard for it. In the US we have one for total chromium, but not for hexavalent chromium. When we set the standard here in California, they found out that what they considered to be the level that wouldn't hurt you in water, which I think is the least water should do for us, is not hurt us.
When they found that level, they set the legal limit 500 times higher, and that often happens where you're just trying to accommodate. Some potentially regulated entity that will have to struggle. In this case, water utilities might have to find other sources of water in California, not so easy. Might have to filter.
Water can be costly and a lot of these decisions enter into these conversations when it's a regulatory toxicology decision and they are often given much more weight. Then the health effects data that's right in front of us.
Bruce: Yeah. I think one of the things we, we need to begin to change the, the narrative, the way people talk about these chemicals.
I think too often, because the effects in the short term, low level effects anyway are subtle, we tend to minimize or dismiss them. One of the things that many people may not appreciate is that about one in five, perhaps one in four deaths. Around the world are from exposures to toxic chemicals and pollutants.
One in four. And I, I would say most people don't appreciate that. Yeah, I think that's right. The other thing they don't appreciate is how little we actually devote to fixing these problems. So if you take something like HIV/Aids, there's about 1 million deaths every year around the world. Compare that to lead poisoning.
Five and a half million deaths around the world. There's about $8 billion. And, uh, international aid for HIV/Aids and about $15 million. Yeah. Uh, in 2023. Just roulette. Just so we don't appreciate it and we. Don't recognize that these are deaths that could be prevented, and deaths are just the tip of the iceberg.
Right. There's so much underneath that.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's lots of, lots of harm that is caused short of death. You're hospitalized if you're disabled. That's a serious price to pay for environmental exposure. Let's go back if we can, and talk a little bit more about these acceptable levels of chemical exposure.
Bruce: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the themes that's running through my research is to try to identify is there an apparent threshold? And again, we, we don't see those, whether it's PBDEs, that chemical flame retardant, whether it's tobacco, pesticides, we just don't see evidence of, of thresholds. And so you go back and say, well, what are these things called acceptable levels?
And if you go back to that historical and monumental decision, it was basically a certain amount of sickness and death is acceptable so as not to impede economic progress, right? So we're making this trade off, but what we've learned over the past century is that the trade-off is really, really costly.
Yeah. Oftentimes, for example, something like heart attacks, we blame that on sedentary behavior or poor diet. Or smoking. But we've realized that a lot of it is environmental lead we found in 2018 was the leading risk factor for coronary heart disease deaths in the United States. Right. And it's not on anybody's familiar litany of risk factors.
Tobacco, of course, and air pollution are other big ones. Yeah. And this I think, is part of that narrative to begin to understand how interactions, how these chemicals interact. If you look at the lung cancer epidemic over the past century, I think most people would point to tobacco, to cigarettes as the leading cause.
And they are. But if you go back, and this was, this was an exercise I had to do with AI because it's just so complex. But if you go back and look at how tobacco, which sometimes I, we call the great synergizer interacts with arsenic and radon and asbestos. Yeah. Right. Tobacco causes lung cancer, but if it's interacting with these others, you get a magnification in lung cancer.
And if you look at that, what I learned from this exercise is that as much lung cancer resulted from the interaction of tobacco and these other toxic chemicals as resulted from tobacco alone, then you can begin to look at, well, where did the arsenic come from? And in the thirties and forties and a bit into the fifties, lead.
Arsenic was used in tobacco fields, so you were actually getting not only the nicotine and all the other pollutants of smoke from the cigarette, you were also getting lead and arsenic, essentially magnifying the impact of those devices to cause lung cancer. And then you find out, well, where did the arsenic come from?
It was a waste product from the Tacoma smelter. I just learned that from Maureen Sullivan. There's this rich, rich history of uncovering these mysteries. Yeah. About why we died and we're gonna continue because we haven't regulated these chemicals sufficiently to have more stories like this in the future.
Ken: Yeah, no question. So say a little bit about how this fits in these regulatory battles. I mean, we'll put out a, a, a study and someone online will say, well, there's just very low amount amounts of hexavalent chromium in water, or arsenic in water, and the dose makes the poison, and that's too low of a dose to matter, but in the regulatory context.
Industries, embrace that aggressively and make the case that there is an acceptable level. We can't be too extreme. There's no such thing as zero risk, and the dose makes the poison. All of these phrases seem to come together as a justification for allowing these exposures, most of which are involuntary.
And over time, arguably the pesticides have gotten safer better, but that's because bad ones have been forced off the market. What has been your experience when those arguments come together? The dose makes the poison. Well, what's a dose for whom? What level when does it hit? There's all these qualifications.
Just on the question of when a specific dose and how a specific dose and to whom a specific dose is poisoned. Yeah.
Bruce: But as I said, I don't think we found evidence of any thresholds for at least all of the toxic chemicals I've studied. I think every one of those examples you used is basically about ways to minimize, uh, the problem.
And what it suggests to me is that we are still living in this. Idea of better living through chemistry. I mean, DuPont doesn't use that slogan anymore, but we are still living in that world. Yeah. And each of those things that you described to minimize the impact of toxic chemicals is part of that message, is part of that idea of better living through chemistry.
I think perhaps one of the most important tools to appreciate how that's flawed, that thinking is flawed is to look at what we call population attributable fractions. So to understand that even at very small doses or with very small increases in risk, if you have these exposures that are widespread, they can cause more disease than something that's very risky but only exposes a few people.
One of my favorite examples is looking at heart attacks. So take something like cocaine and air pollution. So if you've used cocaine in the past 24 hours, you're about 23 times more likely to have a heart attack. That's huge, right? Yeah. Very few things are that risky.
Absolutely. In contrast with that, take air pollution. Well, air pollution will increase your risk by about 10%. That's not much. But if you look at the number of people who die from cocaine and heart attacks, it's less than 1% air pollution, it's nearly 10%. Why? Because everybody's exposed. So small risks spread across large populations will dwarf or overshadow those big risks in small numbers of people.
And that's a basic principle that should drive our regulatory system, but it doesn't.
Ken: That makes all the sense in the world. And you know, it's certainly been our experience as we've gone into these regulatory debates with a room full of industry experts, lawyers, scientists, and so forth 'cause they have the money to hire all of them.
And they have every reason to hire them, to keep chemicals on the market, to keep chemicals on the market at a level that's profitable for them and so forth versus the public health community, the environmental NGOs, a handful that really work on this issue, and it is a kind of a handful. It's not a huge group of scientists in the public interest community working on this as you look out at the future, Bruce, you've been at this for, for a long time and you've just made so many contributions.
If you were to sort of rewrite the regulatory toxicology playbook, how would you change the guiding principles away from? The dose makes the poison and there's acceptable levels and and so forth. I'll arrogate to you these God-like powers, at least during a podcast, but for the time being, let's assume you're able to do that.
What does that look like? I think I wanna live in that world, but describe it anyway. Yeah.
Bruce: Well, I think one thing I would adopt the recommendation of the 2009 National Academy of Science on Risk, and they said, unless there is an evidence of a threshold, you should assume that there isn't. Right. Yeah, that would change a lot.
I think the second thing is to acknowledge that even at low levels, you can cause tremendous harm at the population level. I think the third thing is that we need to acknowledge that one in five, perhaps one in four deaths around the world. An untold amount of disease results from these toxic chemicals and pollution.
The terrible, tragic thing is we're doing this to ourselves, and then we're acting like we can solve these problems by creating expensive synthetic drugs, or even starting to change our genetic structure as a way to treat people who have these chronic conditions that are caused by the things that we put into the environment.
So all of this, it seems to me, speaks to how we need to change the narrative. And I think one of the things that I'm especially excited about is how do we begin to tell the story differently? How do we begin to work with authors? I had the honor of being a conversation partner with Carolyn Fraser, who wrote a book called Murder Lands.
Carolyn is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and Murder Lands was making this connection. Between smelters and leaded gasoline. Yeah. And the rise of serial killers. Now, that's something most scientists wouldn't dare bring up. Right. But as an artist, she did. And I think we need that kind of work coming from, uh, the writers and the artists as well as the scientists, because until the public recognizes the impact, the full impact of these toxic chemicals and pollutants.
I don't think we're going to move in the direction we need to. It's not enough for the scientists to agree. We need a community uprising and maybe, maybe this is just one of the silver linings of what's going on because we are seeing people yeah, from the right and the left. Who are concerned about these chemicals, and I think they've been dismissed for too long.
Ken: We've observed the same thing in recent years with food additives and to some degree with pesticides. We'll see what happens when it gets into the political realm and a decision actually has to be made, and that's when the chemical industry typically flexes its muscles, and unfortunately in our country anyway, the flex has been most effective with republicans.
I'm hoping this is beginning to change and maybe Kennedy's going to have some beneficial impact on the, all of that for all the quibbles and arguments we have with him. You know, I asked you the question of what regulatory toxicology would look like. I asked a kind of a variation of that with Linda Burnbaum.
I had her on the podcast a while back, and I know she's someone you know well and, uh, like you, a sort of a, a legend, a giant in the field of environmental health. And I asked her what she thought was one of the biggest revelations during her time as a scientist working first at EPA, then running NIEHS.
And she pointed to endocrine disrupting chemicals. And I don't think it's an accident. First of all, she, she said we, you know, we discovered that belatedly 'cause we were focused on the bigger issues, the coarser issues maybe is a way to put it like cancer or neurological harm, where it's, you know, it's, it's easier, maybe easier to identify it.
And there's a health endpoint that's regulated, whereas with endocrine disruption, you can have endocrine disruption all day long, doesn't necessarily trigger regulation. And so it was delayed in terms of recognition by the regulatory community. I reminded her that the Endocrine Society, if you look at their website, they say some very profound and powerful things, and we're talking about a community that works in the parts per trillion.
Yeah. If I asked you what have been the revelations in your career that um, have, have kind of stuck with you and maybe you think, oh, I wish I'd known that when I was a, a young scientist in my late twenties that have belatedly come to. A more common understanding in environmental health. Yeah.
Bruce: Well, one of the things that I already brought up was that there are no apparent thresholds, and I think what Linda talked about with endocrine disrupting chemicals was sort of saying the same thing in a different way.
Yeah. It's forcing us to recognize that even down at levels of parts per trillion parts per billion. That we can see these adverse consequences. One of the ways that fluoride may, uh, ultimately be found to reduce children's intellectual abilities is because it seems to disrupt the thyroid. And thyroid of course, is critical for brain development.
I, so I think that is absolutely one of the, the key things, the, the revolutionary ways of thinking about this. I think the other one is that many of the chronic diseases. From cancer to heart disease to Parkinson's are the result of widespread exposures to these toxic chemicals. My dad in 2007 called me and said, I have LS.
And of course I wanted to know, well, why him? And about 10% of a LS is genetic, and we had no family history. So I kind of pushed that aside based on my review of the literature at the time, I found three things, head trauma, lead exposure, and pesticide exposure. Well, he had head trauma from a scooter accident when he was a 45-year-old man in Kenya, so check, lead exposure.
He grew up above a chauffeur service in Watford, Rhode Island. Uh, he was born in 1935. They catered to very wealthy clientele. He had leaded gasoline that he was exposed to. Of course, they moved to the family farm when he was five, which was downwind from the Squam Golf course. He worked at the, at the golf course when he was 16, 17, and then he became a horticulturist and worked with herbicides as a, as a scientist.
Check, check, check.
Ken: Yeah.
Bruce: So now one of the challenges, as you know, is I can't connect any one of those exposures and say that absolutely caused my dad's a LS. But I can say that my dad had a LS in part. That is, he was at higher risk because of head trauma, pesticide exposure, lead exposure. And he was at greater risk because, 'cause he had all three, not just one.
Yeah. And I think once we've seen this become play out, I can now go through, because I think about it this way, I can tell you that my wife had a miscarriage in part because drinking lead from a contaminated fountain in the hospital, that my dad had LS in part because of these things. Most of us can do that if we looked at why our friends, family, loved ones die.
Right. It's, it's all around us. Yeah. Every one of us, even if we can't pinpoint it, have been affected in profound ways by these toxic chemicals and pollutants. They're killing us and when we, yeah. are sick when we're dying. We said I'd give anything to feel better, to be better. Well, we have a choice. Not in what happened then, but what happens tomorrow?
Yeah.
Ken: So you, you're probably situated like I am, where people hesitate asking you to dinner or, or, or, or, or offering you a glass of water or whatever it might be. You know, there's these, these, well, I see it on their faces, like, does he think I'm trying to poison him? You know, there's is a zaniness about it because it's ubiquitous in our lives, these exposures.
But give me a couple of tips or hacks that you pass along to people you know to help them not go crazy or be paralyzed by all of this information. But feel like they're taking charge, that things that are actionable, that, that make them feel like, okay, I'm, I'm still gonna experience some exposures that I can't control, but here are some things I can do so that you get invited to dinner.
Right.
Bruce: Well, and, and that to me brings up, I think the most important thing that we can do and even enjoyable. And that is cook your own food at home, cook from scratch. Yeah, and do it with your friends and loved ones. Bring them over a little early so they're part of it. We have, over the past 20 years, done a number of things in our kitchen.
We've gotten rid of, I'd say 90, 95% of plastics. And yeah, we rarely, well, I don't, I can't remember the last time we opened up a can for food that, you know, might contain Bissol la and so I think probably one of the most important things is, and, and enjoyable things, is cook from scratch, learn to enjoy cooking.
In your kitchen, avoid those plastic foods and avoid heavily processed foods. You don't need pesticides or cigarette smoke around your home. Avoid those. I think, you know, some pretty simple things that you can do. Yeah, and then once you've done that, you still have to pay attention to what new information's coming out there.
But once you've done those kinds of things, you just sort of let it go. And if you go to a restaurant and you don't know if the food's organic or it's okay, you do what you can and then you go about your life. And I would say, you know, more and more people are interested in hearing about this stuff. They wanna know how they can avoid plastics.
I mean, it's starting to be fashionable to think about these things. Maybe I'll be invited to dinner more often. I dunno.
Ken: Well, you're always, you're always invited to dinner with me, my friend. And, uh, that's for sure. And, uh, I've so, so enjoyed knowing you over the years and, and watching your amazing contributions and work, hard work to tell a different story about toxicology.
The one I think we need to hear, which is. Yeah. Um, the dose makes the poison, but a lot of other things make the dose, the timing, who you are, yeah. Where you are in life, um, what else you've been exposed to. And from my standpoint, uh, Paracelsus, may he rest in peace back in the 1540s. You know, we have a lot to look forward to at modernizing how we approach these exposures now, and a lot of work to do.
But, uh, you, you've been an important guide to all of us for how to figure that out. Well, again,
Bruce: I have a lot of confidence that because of your work and what EWG does that we're gonna get there. It, it's gonna take us longer than we'd like, but we're gonna get there, I'm sure.
Ken: And it's not so hard. Uh, Bill Reilly, former EPA administrator was on the show a while back and he said something about energy that I think applies also to.
Our topic of toxic exposures in everyday life, which he said, you know, maybe we made it sound too difficult. The energy transition. You know, the cars are great if they run on batteries. Uh, you can put solar on your roof and uh, you can get by. It's not like we're asking people to go back and live in a cave.
Um, we're talking about the possibility of new thinking for how to organize the economy new, thinking about technologies that provide for human wellbeing. Without the toxics, it doesn't have to maybe be so overwhelmingly difficult as industry says. I remember when PCBs were first identified, Monsanto said, well, yeah, if you get rid of PCBs, then we won't have electricity.
Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with your view of the future. The one caveat I would say is that. We need to start thinking today about how we're gonna deal, for example, with the critical metal industry in a different way, and we need to do it at the beginning of this huge revolution. Now, maybe we're a few years behind, but we know that these critical metals and, and extracting them can cause tremendous problems in the environment.
I still have a lot of optimism, as you said, that shifting into this new world, uh, can solve a lot of the problems, but we've gotta go in with our eyes wide open to what we have learned from the past.
Ken: Yeah. And eyes wide open and. A good dose of humility.
Bruce: Absolutely.
Ken: Brother, thank you so much for spending so much time with me.
You've been very generous. And don't forget who's the president of your fan club. Never forget that,
Bruce: Ken. I look forward to spending more time with you.
Ken: Big thanks to Dr. Bruce Lanphear for joining us today, and thank all of you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links.
For a deeper dive into today's discussion, make sure to follow our show on Instagram. At Ken Cook's podcast, and if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head over to ewg.org or check out the ewg Instagram account at Environmental Working Group. If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along.
The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Row and Mary Kelly and our show's theme music is Courtesy of Moby. Thank you Moby, and thanks again to all of you for listening.