Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, Larger Bodies and Eating Disorder Recovery 7
PFAS (per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances)
We moved across the country having bought a home essentially online (photos, FaceTime tours, building inspections and that’s it). It was impossible to see the home in person because Atlantic Canada was keeping its flow of traffic to essential visits and 14-day quarantines in the earlier part of our ongoing pandemic. Given the limited ICU availability in these four provinces, this likely saved many lives at the time.
That first night we were using a crowbar to pull apart a built-in dresser in the bedroom because the off-gassing of scented Tide/Febreze/Bounce that permanently infused the wood itself from years of heavy use of those products for “cleaning” clothes. It was going to mean zero sleep for me. It got hauled out to the shed at the back of the lot.
These laundry and air-freshener scented products ostensibly do not contain PFAS (forever-chemicals) but their persistence in the environment (not to mention their ever-growing use in personal care and household products) makes them pretty unavoidable these days.
“Synthetic scents, primarily derived from petroleum, are of great concern because they are the cheapest, present in abundance, and consequently one of the main contributors to decreasing indoor air quality and increasing personal exposure and potential health risks.”
We’ve made the mistake of believing the advertising that some smells denote “clean” and others denote “dirty,” and that clean is synonymous with safe and protective, and dirty is synonymous with unsafe and diseased. We also aren’t too aware of the fact that most of the products we use today have chemicals originally designed for warfare that were never tested for safe, extended personal use. Massive chemical companies had to shift their focus to keep profits after WW2 and so consumer markets were both created and then exploited to redeploy many chemicals that were being generated in labs to support maiming and killing the enemy.
A couple of articles on the history of it all here and here, if you’re interested.
Obesogens
Obesogens is the term used for the chemicals in our everyday products that appear to trigger the genesis of fat. The current testable theory is that these chemicals manage to reprogram the development of adipocytes (fat cells) in utero.
“Obesogens can also act indirectly by changing basal metabolic rate, shifting energy balance to favor calorie storage, and modulating food intake and metabolism via effects on the brain, pancreas, adipose tissue, liver, gastrointestinal tract, and muscle.”
I believe this somewhat backwards framing as fat is not there to primarily store energy. It is the largest hormone producing organ in our bodies— modulating everything to do with metabolism and immunity, supporting bone and blood formation, cerebral and vascular functions, etc.
It means that fatness as a result of exposure either in utero, in development, or throughout adult life to various obesogens could indicate these chemicals dysregulate both the development and function of fat cells and/or, they harm the entire human system such that the fat organ enlarges in response to needing to provide more intensive metabolic and immune modulation in the face of the damaging assault of these chemicals on the body.
While it’s a bit all over the map, quite literally, when it comes to class and race lines and varying levels of PFAS and toxicants in the body, [3] generally lower socio-economic status and race correlate with higher levels. Variations may occur in those determinants, for example when a town is entirely serviced by a water system contaminated by PFAS (or other persistent toxicants).
“…the studies we reviewed indicated a complex story about how racial and ethnic minority and low-income children may be disproportionately harmed by exposures to neurotoxicants, and this has implications for targeting interventions, policy change, and other necessary investments to eliminate these health disparities.”
Furthermore, fat cells sequester these toxins. It’s possibly one reason why the “lose some weight” mantra to resolve metabolic disequilibrium (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.) doesn’t realize the much-touted morbidity and mortality improvements (‘obesity’ paradox— check out Basic Facts One and Two for details). When you catabolize cells in your body including fat cells (kill them to release energy in the system because you are undereating to lose weight), you release all these toxins into your blood stream along with that energy. [5]
But as with everything in modern research and medicine, oversimplification of complex living systems is the rule, not the exception. I highly doubt the so-called obesity paradox is as straightforward as “keep those nasty chemicals sequestered in fat cells if you want better health and longevity outcomes.” Nothing is truly sequestered in our living systems. Those toxins are not just magically sitting inert in our fat cells but it’s likely true that they are better managed in the fat organ when compared to careening around the vascular system.
Furthermore, the most damaging failure of modern medicine is to frame the size of the fat organ as causing metabolic mayhem when it’s looking much more likely that the fat organ helps to ease the impacts of metabolic mayhem that are occurring for reasons as disparate as light at night, toxins everywhere and viruses and bacteria that we have mistakenly thought are purged from the living system after the acute flu-symptom phase of the arrival of the pathogen in the body.
Our fat works very hard for us in an environment that has introduced a plethora of assaults on the body in the past 400 years with industrialization and, much more intensively since WW2 with the pivot of chemical production to consumer market creation and leverage.
By all means consider lowering exposures to chemicals if you have the privilege to do so. But realistically, it’s the air we breathe and the water we drink for us all. I am not suggesting just giving up, but rather developing a philosophy of gentleness and soft transition. We do what we can, but many things in a complex society are completely out of our control
Final installment of this series on July 18.
Image in Synopsis: Tanaka Juuyoh
Rádis-Baptista G. Do synthetic fragrances in personal care and household products impact indoor air quality and pose health risks?. Journal of xenobiotics. 2023 Mar 1;13(1):121-31.
Heindel JJ, Blumberg B. Environmental obesogens: mechanisms and controversies. Annual review of pharmacology and toxicology. 2019 Jan 6;59(1):89-106.
Park SK, Peng Q, Ding N, Mukherjee B, Harlow S. Determinants of per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in midlife women: Evidence of racial/ethnic and geographic differences in PFAS exposure. Environmental research. 2019 May 18;175:186.
Payne-Sturges DC, Taiwo TK, Ellickson K, Mullen H, Tchangalova N, Anderko L, Chen A, Swanson M. Disparities in toxic chemical exposures and associated neurodevelopmental outcomes: a scoping review and systematic evidence map of the epidemiological literature. Environmental Health Perspectives. 2023 Sep 27;131(9):096001.
Hong NS, Kim KS, Lee IK, Lind PM, Lind L, Jacobs DR, Lee DH. The association between obesity and mortality in the elderly differs by serum concentrations of persistent organic pollutants: a possible explanation for the obesity paradox. International journal of obesity. 2012 Sep;36(9):1170-5.
